Rainbow wood!

Day two of our tour to Kandy and we awoke to the most perfect dawn over the city. The Mahaweli Reach Hotel is amazing – really pretty and set just back from the Mahaweli river, a beautiful hotel with chipmunks chasing each other across the lawn and views like this:

Today’s pace would be less frenetic we were told, so Anton drove us to see local arts and crafts first.

Batik is a process where paraffin wax is applied to drawings made on cotton, before then being dyed several different colours. Where the wax has been applied, no dyes take, so applying wax after different colours have been applied can achieve different effects. It was interesting and looked very labour intensive, but by now Suz and I weren’t that interested in buying any large expensive pieces.

The next craft though was amazing to watch. Local craftsmen carving wood into any number of things. A vast amount of their time was spent carving wood for the tourist trade (masks and such) but there were craftsmen there carving large pieces on commission which was fascinating.

They use a number of different woods to carve from, some of which are native to Sri Lanka, one of which is the miracle known here as ‘rainbow wood’. Our guide took shavings from a small piece of this wood and added hot water to it – instant red! If you reduce this you can use it as red paint. But then he carried on! If you dunk a piece of iron in it – instant black paint! If you took this and added a squeeze of fresh lime it turned an instant yellow! If you then added chalk you got instant purple! It was amazing! We don’t get out much…

After purchasing a couple of bits and pieces from here, we moved on, our next port of call being the Royal Botanical Gardens, which was very nice to spend a couple of hours wandering through groves of different palms, bamboos and pines that you didn’t know about. As with almost every botanical garden I’ve been to, this one had the large querulous seed pods hanging from almost every tall tree, other wise known as ‘fruit bats’, and they constantly bicker. Still, a really nice place to walk:

After this we were ready to head back to our resort, a good three and a half hours of mental travel through insane traffic! Good job I wasn’t driving or it would have been days! Anton did a really good job though, and even stopped twice for us to sample the promised red banana and then the king coconut.

When we got back to Ranweli, we were both ready to collapse and sleep for a week! Fortunately the resort has a lovely pool with sun loungers around it…