Ok so there was a reshuffling of events, and the visit to pinewalla was moved until hopefully sometime this week, and our Trip to Trincomale was moved to the weekend just gone (hense the extended silence on the blog). Before I start on Trinco, a couple of things happened between my last blog and Trinco which I think people might want to hear (and I certainly want to remember, this blog being primarily my diary of events in Sri Lanka)
You cant come to Sri Lanka without buying some tea... It just cant be done; after our dissapointment at Pedros in Newara Eliya we thought about trying to purchase some tea closer to home (well Kandy). We decided that the tea plantation that we visited on our 3 temples route was a good place to try and get reasonable priced tea, without paying the tea dealers cut - and obviously getting tea directly from the factory is pretty dam awesome. We started off walking towards the factory when all of a sudden we came accross a building with the standard, kind of flat-pack tea factory appearence. We had a closer look and discovered an abandonned, degrading factory, with the original machinery slowly rusting in the buildings shell.
Unexpectadly a figure emerged from behind the machinery claiming that he owned the factory and that we should come and have a look around. Now, at this point all kinds of alarm bells were chiming... probably rightly so, but we still decided to go into the crumbling factory to speak to the mysterious shaddow man - he was wearing a shirt... he has to be legitimate, right? It turns out he was the owner of a 150 hectare tea estate near Matale, and had just purchased the factory as the gvt. was no longer allowing the construction of new factories. In two months he hoped to process his leaves at this factory instead of selling them on for processing. Here is where our lie began... we told him we were interested in importing large quantities of Tea into the UK, to which his ears pricked up, and he offered to send us free samples of his tea for market research (receipt pending).
With this fantastic lie in tow, we moved on to the functional factory, and sat in the factory office talking to the manager about the prospect of import. He was talking in terms of containers per month, reduced rates for orders of over 48,000kg, at which point we changed tact to samples for market research and got 4 250g samples (2g is enough for a cup of tea) for 500 rupees, 3 pounds. We did the standard procedure of exchanging email addresses and left the factory highly satisfied with our acheivement, and in awe of our improv. acting abilities :)
The next day, and final day before Trinco went relatively standardly until the early evening when we went into Kandy, and discovered behind the tooth temple lay a British Garrison Cemetary. Myself, Ben, and the french girl who we saved from overpriced hotel tyranny (Sophie) were the only three visiters to that Cemetary all day, although it was to me more impressive than many of the temples we have visited. It was renovated from its vandelised state for a visit from Prince Charles in 1998, which sadly could not happen due to the bomb outside the temple of the tooth in that year. However, it was beutifully preserved, save the foot (/hoof?) prints of wild boar which have sullied some of the graves. Being shown around the site by its sole, unpaid proprietor was an experience in its own right, and hearing of the lives of the people in the graves, including the young man killed "by elephant" was incredible, and overshaddowed even the baby elephants visible from the corner of the site.
We were more than happy, for once, to donate money to the continued maintenance of the grounds.
From then we relaxed over dinner, and watched a film, before packing for the trip to Trincomale, a place that was devestated by the 2004 tsunami, and until 2008 was out of bounds to tourists due to the civil war - It does however have an awesome beach :) x
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