Pinnawela is the site of an elephant orphanage. We were there in time to watch them all bathe in the river and it was really amazing. After you watch them for a little while, you can really see that they all have very distinct personalities. One “bad boy” elephant was brought to the river but was segregated from the others. Every time his handler started to wander off, the elephant would reach out with his trunk and curl it around his arm or leg to keep him from leaving. I’ll attach several pictures to the blog, it’s an incredible place.
From Pinnawela we went to Kandy for the Perahera. The Perahera is a procession of elephants, dancers and drummers from the five Buddhist temples in the town. I could describe it here, but you’re better off following the link. Here are a couple of pictures:
We stayed at the Thilanka Hotel in Kandy. It’s a lovely place where the terrace doors are clearly marked with signs that say: “Beware of Monkeys; KEEP ALL DOORS LOCKED” Well, of course they didn’t mean us! I was sharing a double room with my friend Kyle and in our infinite wisdom, we decided we would be okay cracking the door because we had it on good authority that the monkeys don’t ever go out at night… Note to self: If you stay up talking with your friends until 2:00 in the morning, the monkeys may not be awake when you go to bed; but chances are, they will be up and around well before you are.
At almost exactly 7:00 a.m. I heard a huge crash, woke up and thought to myself, {What the heck is Kyle doing up at this hour and why is he making so much noise?} When I opened my eyes, all I saw was the back of Kyle’s head…and he was obviously still asleep…uh oh. When I sat up to suss out the noise, there were six monkeys in our room in various stages of robbing us blind! They were all staring at me, they then turned to the monkey sitting on the television. Apparently he had made the huge noise by throwing my camera on the floor…D’oh, you woke her up you knucklehead! Did you know that monkeys like film? Well one of these guys had dumped out a box of 35mm film rolls into Kyle’s knapsack; pulled the film out of one of the canisters and was chewing on it. His buddy was digging around in the knapsack to find another when I turned to Kyle and said, “Kyle, Kyle…Kyle, wake up… there are monkeys in our room.” He sat up, stared at the monkeys; reached for his glasses; put them on; took them off to examine them (clearly fearing that I had painted monkeys on them during the night) put them back on and then burst out laughing. We were just sitting in bed laughing at them when the ringleader decided that a strategic withdrawl was in order. He did however, still want some film, so he dragged the knapsack to the sliding doors and tried desperately to pull the lengthwise knapsack through a nine inch opening. They’ve got the opposable thumb thing going on but that higher reasoning stuff remains elusive. At the prospect of losing his knapsack, Kyle sprang into action. Making shooing noises and motions, he slowly walked toward the monkeys until they filed out of the room (turning around occasionally to give us malicious looks) forever earning Kyle the nickname “monkey-fighter”. They went to the next terrace over which happened to be the room Chris and Dani were sharing. It was also where we had left several empty beer bottles and a glass. Did you know that monkeys like beer? One of them sniffed the glass; ran his hand all over the inside; licked off his hand and threw the glass over his shoulder to the ground several floors below. All the beer bottles were then smashed and the insides of the glass licked clean. It’s official, monkeys are not very good house guests. Miraculously, my camera was still working and we took several pictures (once they were safely out on the terrace with the door locked). We were laughing so hard, I couldn’t go back to sleep. I went down to breakfast and giggled through two cups of tea and the morning paper. I will never forget it.
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