Kandy: Moving into the mountains

I got up early and took a tuktuk to the bus station. It is ridiculously easy to find a tuktuk in Colombo, just step out the door and raise your arm and one instantly picks you up. The bus from Colombo’s Pettah Private Bus Station to Kandy costs $2.50 for the three hour ride. For that price you get a smaller, air conditioned bus, as opposed to an old, crowded British Leyland one. You pay the conductor on board, a man who spent much of the journey hanging out the open door to flag down additional passengers as we worked our way through the city’s outer suburbs. He had the focused energy of someone on a commission. The bus was full within twenty minutes.

The conductor jumped on and off looking for more passengers

Three hours, mostly climbing. Kandy sits at around 500 meters elevation in the central highlands, and the road winds up through rubber plantations and rice paddies before the landscape shifts to tea and the city appears in the hills around a small lake. I had developed a slight cold somewhere between Mumbai and Colombo, which made the scenery feel both beautiful and slightly out of reach, the way good things sometimes do when you’re not quite well enough to fully enjoy them.

Kandy was the last capital of the Kandyan Kingdom, which resisted Portuguese and Dutch colonization for the better part of two centuries before finally falling to the British in 1815. That independent history gives the city a particular weight, and the Temple of the Tooth Relic, Sri Dalada Maligawa, stands at its center as both a religious site and a symbol of Kandyan sovereignty. The temple has stood since the 16th century and houses what is held to be a tooth of the Buddha, brought to Sri Lanka in the 4th century AD concealed in the hair of a princess. Buddhist pilgrims come from across Asia to visit it. In the evenings the puja ceremony fills the air with drums and horns, and the sound carries across the lake.

My guest house was White Lodge. It sits about 60 meters above the main road just outside the city center, which I discovered on the walk down to lunch and confirmed on the walk back up. With a cold and in midday heat, 60 meters of elevation feels considerably more than it sounds. The guest house itself was quiet and cool, with a view over the surrounding hills, and the owner was the kind of host who anticipates things without being asked.

At the bottom of the hill I found a restaurant and had fried noodles with seafood and a Ceylon coffee. I had been considering a tuktuk tour of the city, but the combination of travel fatigue and a stuffy nose settled the question without much argument. Rest is also a way of seeing a place, or at least of being in it without fighting it.

In the evening I went back down for dinner at a local restaurant on the main road, a place that managed to be fairly smart without charging for the ambience: fish and chips and a chocolate cake dessert for about $6 all in.

Kandy operates at a different scale from Colombo. Everything is closer together, the pace is slower, and the lake at the center gives the city an unusual calm for its size.

Back up the hill. The body has its own itinerary sometimes, and it was telling me clearly that I needed some rest before the early rise tomorrow.

A day in Kandy — the practical stuff

The bus from Colombo is the right choice — Pettah Private Bus Station, $2.50 for three hours. The conductor collects fares on board; no ticket needed in advance. The air-conditioned option costs marginally more than the old British Leyland buses and is worth it on a three-hour climb into the hills.
The Temple of the Tooth is the reason Kandy matters — Sri Dalada Maligawa has housed a tooth relic of the Buddha since the 16th century. Entry is around LKR 1,500 (~$5); cover shoulders and knees. The evening puja ceremony is the right time to visit — drums and horns fill the complex and carry across the lake. Arrive 15 minutes before the ceremony to get a good position.
The lake is the city’s natural orientation point — flat, central, and walkable. A circuit takes about 30 minutes at an easy pace. Most of what’s worth seeing in Kandy is within ten minutes of the water.
Dinner on the main road runs about $6 all in — the restaurants near the center serve proper meals without charging tourist prices. Kandy is generally better value than Colombo for eating out.

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A day in Kandy — the practical stuff

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