Mon 11/01/10 22:28

The next morning would be the last morning in Wellawaya. We still needed to get some stuff for the orphanage, but we had decided to head to Kandy for the remainder of our time in Sri Lanka. Originally we were to help two orphanages, but it turned out that one of them was closed during the holiday season. I still don’t understand that, but that’s what we were told. I always thought that an orphanage is where children live, and you can’t really “close” your house…

So we went and made one more trip to the orphanage to drop off some slippers and school supplies before heading out. The drive was about 8 hours through roads that wound their way through the hills and mountains of inner Sri Lanka. The scenery was beautiful to say the least. There were parts where off in the distance you could see waterfalls, and in one part we went through a high concentration of tea plantations. There is something that looks kind of cool, and in some ways kind of sad, to see hills covered with bushes that are all the same. We stopped a few times, usually to take photos, but we did stop for lunch at a roadside diner and saw some monkeys making their way across some power lines. What keeps coming to me when I think about Sri Lanka is how green it is there. There is bright green, dark green, and every shade in between. We got into Kandy about 8… I think and decided to stay at this really cool old hotel. I don’t really know the history of it, but it seems to be built in the late 19th or early 20th century. Just walking down the hall you could feel like in its day it was something really special. The image that keeps coming to me is the Titanic. No, not that it was going to sink, but it had lots of natural wood, huge open areas, extremely long hallways, and one of those elevators that you have to close the door yourself. Great place!