Ayubowan Sri Lanka - Day three and drawing to a close..

Post-breakfast Gerard took us to the insanely huge botanical gardens in Kandy..I mean really really insanely huge...146 acres! Try walking across that! We had about an hour and half to cover it all. Possible? Even Mastercard can't help us with this one!! We pretty much roamed ourself silly around the HUGE gardens filled with the most exquisite flowers and trees that you can find! Some were so small and delicate I felt like they'd just fall to pieces if I touch them while other plants(yes plants!) were so large, I could probably hide in one of them! And then there were the trees! The old stolid behemoths of the natural world, humongous in size, and ever growing, spreading their green wings, providing shade to the creatures beneath them. Benevolent beings, observing all but disturbing none. I was in awe of them. If this was what I felt in a botanical garden, just imagine what it must be like in the real rainforests! I'm gonna go to the Amazons for sure, if it's the last thing I do before the world destroys itself in 2012 :P

Well we barely covered one fourth of it in an hour and half, but in the bargain, saw some of the most beautiful flowers and plants in my life; especially the orchids! Oh my! Each orchid looks like a little being peeping out of it with it's hands joined. I have never seen anything so fascinating in my life! Oh and I finally saw a Pink Orchid too :D So Miss Rane, here's one to you! Creepers, climbers, mahogany, ebony, teak, rubber, vines, leaves!! Oh my! There was just so much to see and so little time....it's true for everything in life I guess...A long long walk and several oohs and aahs later, time was up and the Elephant orphanage beckoned.


Now this orphanage was started by rescuing some of the baby elephants that were abandoned or orphaned due to poachers(damn bastards should be shot at sight!) From the time it was started, it has grown into a great success with so many of the elephants thriving and living a healthy life here. When we reached there, the eli's were having a gala time down at the riverside taking a nice cool bath. After an hour of riverside frolicking they stomped their way across the busy streets into their home. Back at the shelter, the baby elephants were then fed milk through really big bottles that they gulped down in seconds and all of us were like Is he really full or was that just a snack? but then one bottle per baby elephant seemed to be it. I finally got to see the grandmaster of that entire orphanage, the first elephant to be rescued and brought to the centre - A massive ten or twelve foot tall blind tusker! It was so huge I had to crane my neck all the way up to look at it! It was awesome at the same time really sad to see such a magnificent creature so critically disabled that it had to be kept in chains to prevent it from hurting itself or other elephants at the orphanage.

One thing that I did remember to do was to buy poopaper :D Alisha Iyer over at The Eternal Chatter of a Capricious Mind had sent me a very interesting mail when she heard that I was going to Sri Lanka that said there was a shop that sold products made from Elephant dung! How awesome is that! :P So I just HAD to buy something from there. So I got a model elephant and a few notebooks made from elephant dung. And No, they don't stink. Elephants are veggies, so their poop doesn't stink when dry :D
Well, that was it for the day...we skipped an elephant ride since I think each of us has done that at least once before, and we had a long long journey of a few hours ahead to our next destination -

Bentota beach!! Yeehaw!
Sun, surf and sand! Here we come!