This episode is dedicated to a walk down the secretive streets of Kandy.   

Proper guidebooks to Kandy lay out in fine anatomical detail, the history, economy, and topography of the place, its sites and services listed in useful and functioning order. Sadly, this book does not do that. It is an improper guide, the documentation of a personal quest (sometimes, struggle) to understand a little of what really makes Kandy, Kandy; and what is most especially worth seeing: and why.

Kandy’s inimitable reputation belies the fact that the city is barely 500 years old, an adolescent in Sri Lankan terms, given that the country’s recorded history goes back with stylish ease for at least 2,500 years. Not that anyone dares tell Kandyites this particular fact. Kandy regards itself – and to be fair, is greatly regarded by much of the rest of the country – as Sri Lanka’s true and real soul. Its heart.

This characteristic is not something acquired merely because it houses the island’s most precious possession – the tooth of Lord Buddha. It is also due to the city’s record in having withstood wave after wave of colonial invasions. Kandy was the last island kingdom to fall to foreigners. By the time of its formal capture, in 1815, it had already resisted and survived over 300 years of colonial rule that had engulfed the rest of the island. For over 3 centuries, the kingdom held firm. In doing so, it was able to foster, protect, and develop the distinctive Singhala culture that had once permeated the entire island. It kept the light burning. 

But it was ever a culture under threat. From the arrival of the first European soldiers, administrators, priests, businessmen and planters in 1505, the country’s priorities changed radically. Everything became secondary to making money – first from cinnamon and other spices; then from coffee and tea.

No one has yet attempted to put a value on the goods shipped by the colonists from the island – but given that 90% of the world’s cinnamon came from here, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that the money Sri Lanka generated for its occupiers was big. Very big. And, and the author of a recent book on crooks and thieves remarked: “all money corrupts, and big money corrupts bigly.”

As the rest of the country was turned into a cinnamon-producing farm, Kandy stood out, a Sinhalese citadel, offering its shelter to the rest of the country for all but the 133 years that it was occupied by the British. This, more than anything else, is what makes Kandy so very important across the island. In a multicultural country still working on how best to present itself, this particular legacy is enduringly important.

It is, all the same, a city that demands your full attention, if you are ever to get beneath its interminable congestion; edifices inspired by recent Soviet style planning decisions; and traffic plans that could be bettered by donkeys. As stressed pedestrians pirouette on impossibly narrow pavements, cars hoot past on wide roads, once shaded by mara trees – before health and safety got to work. If ever there is a city weeping for love and attention; for common sense and courteous urban planning, it is Kandy. It is a city that has fallen victim to the grim concerns of business, bureaucrats, traffic warlords; and the unfulfilled promises of passing politicians.

Nor is it mecca for hardened shoppers. This most addictive of modern hobbies may have replaced religion in most other countries, but here, in this most religious of cities, it takes a back seat. Niche boutiques are few - though there is no shortage of shops stocked with the essentials. An old bazaar, the Kandy Bazaar, sells everything from bananas to bags, batiks to bangles. Kandy City Centre, a ten-storey mall built to an almost inoffensive architectural style in the centre of the city offers a more sophisticated range of items. Bucking the trend is Waruna’s Antique Shop, a cavernous Aladdin’s Cave of marvellous, discoveries, its shelves and drawers stuffed full of ancient flags and wood carvings, paintings, jewellery, and curios. 

And then there is the very Sir Lanka approach to specialised products. Every so often as you travel the island you hit upon a village dedicated to the obsessive production of just one item. There is one that only does large ceramic pots. Another is lined with cane weavers. One, more perilously, is devoted to the creation of fireworks. Down south is one for moonstones; another for masks. And in Pilimathalawa, next to Kandy, is one dedicated to brass and copper. The ribbon village of shops and workshops keeps alive an expertise goes back to the kings of Kandy, for whom they turned out bowls and ornaments, religious objects, and body decoration. Three hundred years later the craftsman remain, melting and moulding, designing, and decorating, stamping, and sealing, engraving, and polishing. 

A surer path to satisfaction is to park your purse and cravings for new clothes, shoes, phone accessories or mass manufactured ornaments and head for Kandy’s Royal Bar & Hotel. This old walawwa is typical of many of the buildings that haunt the city’s tiny, crowded streets, betraying with hints of bashful sorrow, the still remaining traces of striking 17th, 18th, and 19th century vernacular architecture. 

Walauwas – or mansions are they are called in the West – abound in the city, as Kandyan nobles set up their family residences as close to the royal palace as possible. Proximity is power - but after the king was deposed this particular force lost its draw; and their city address became of diminishing importance.

The city’s greatest walauwe is now The Queen’s Hotel. It was first turned into a mansion for the British Governors, before transcending into the hotel equivalent of an aging maiden aunt, chasing an elusive restoration as an improvised Jane Austen bride might a suitor. It’s unequalled site, on a corner overlooking both temple, lake, and palace, makes you want to go round and round the block just to take it all in properly.

Many other such buildings hide down other city streets, balconies and verandas, screened windows, and opaque courtyards, squirreled away secretly behind shop hoardings that have yet to be bettered anywhere on the island for their chronic ugliness. Kandy is nothing if not the most secretive of cities. Its wonders reveal themselves best to those who look most. 

“Secrets,” noted James Joyce, “silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.” But Kandy’s many secrets, held by old families in lofty mansions high above the city; in the unspoken concerns of the people who walk its streets, may be weary now – but they are most unwilling to ever be dethroned. Like threads you pick at, they unwind from way, way back - to explain almost everything. Here history is not dead; not even sleeping or dazed. It is instead ever on the lookout.

Before you even get to the city’s colonial tribulations still less its modern day ones, its deeper history is a still more byzantine tale of competing plot lines in which kings, caste, money, and religion complete with such complexity as to make Human Genome Project look like a walk in the park.

Its first line of kings from the Siri Sanga Bo family, wrested the kingdom’s independence from an older Sri Lankan kingdom. But beset by forcible catholic conversions, fever, and internal strife, they petered out, exhausted and baffled, in 1609, barely a hundred years later.

One of Kandy’s greatest and most wonderful secrets is its nature. The city sits in a valley surrounded by 5 main hills, up which, like an indulgent bubble bath, buildings of later regret have begun to creep. But one side of the city remains nicely protected - UdawaththaKele Forest. Once a forest hunting reserve for the kings, it is now a magical 104 hectare protected nature reserve. It is home to 460 plant species; butterflies, snakes, snails, lizards, toads, frogs, insects, monkeys, civet, deer, loris, boars, porcupine, the ruddy mongoose, giant flying squirrels, bandicoots, and bats. But its real draw are its birds. Over 80 species have been recorded here, many endemic, including Layard's parakeet, the yellow-fronted and brown-capped babblers, the Sri Lanka hanging parrot, the three-toed kingfisher, mynas, golden-fronted and blue-winged leafbirds, spotted and emerald doves, Tickell's blue flycatcher, the white-rumped shama, the crimson-fronted barbet, the serpent eagle, and brown fish owl.

Other birds – turtles, cormorants, egrets, pelicans, eagles, owls, herons – can be found swimming away on Kandy Lake. Known as the Sea of Milk, the lake is surround by a dramatic Cloud Wall across much of its three-kilometer circumference and is overhung by huge rain trees. In its eighteen-metre depth lurk whistling and monitor lizards, turtles, and numerous fish including an exotic 9-foot-long alligator Gar – a fish with a crocodilian head, a wide snout, and razor-sharp teeth.

Nature tamed is another aspect of the city. “Will you come to our party to-day, Carrie Wynn? / The party is all ready now to begin; / And you shall be mother, and pour out the tea, / Because you’re the oldest and best of the three.” 

Elizabeth Sill, a Victorian children’s writer, was the first person noted to use the phrase “being mother” when it came to pouring out the tea. It echo is heard in almost every country of the world, pouring, one hopes, Ceylon Tea. But although tea is now synonymous with Kandy, it was something of a late comer to the city’s attributes.

Just outside the city centre is Giragama, a tea factory set amongst several hills of tea which offers Stalinist style tours and presentations. The factory is a short hop from where the very first tea bushes were grown on the island. Tea first arrived here in 1824, with plants smuggled from China to the Royal Botanical Gardens in Peradeniya. Now the island’s dominant culinary export, the crop began life accidentally. Famous though the island it for its remarkable teas, it was first famous for its coffee. In 1845 there were just thirty-seven thousand acres of the crop but by 1878, coffee estates covered two hundred and seventy-five thousand acres.

Tamil labourers arrived (seventy thousand per year at one time) to help the industry grow and in 1867 a railway was built from Kandy to Colombo just to carry coffee. It was, said the papers, a “coffee rush,” but one that benefited many – for a third of the estates were owned by native Sri Lankans. Investors flooded in and by 1860, Sri Lanka was one of the three largest coffee-producing countries in the world.

But in 1869, just as it seemed as if the coffee boom would go on and on, the crop was hit by a killer disease - Hemileia vastatrix, "coffee rust” or “Devastating Emily” as it was known by the planters. It took time to spread – but within thirty years there were barely eleven thousand acres of the plant left. The industry was wiped out. That the country did not follow suit is thanks to a Scot named James Taylor and his experiments with tea. He emigrated to the island in 1852 to plant coffee and spotted early the effects of coffee rust. On his Loolecondera Estate in Kandy he immediately started to experiment with tea until, from plant to teacup, he had mastered all the necessary techniques and processes necessary to succeed with this new crop.

In 1875 Taylor managed to send the first shipment of Ceylon tea to the London Tea Auction. Despairing coffee-planters, sat at Taylor’s feet to learn tea production. Within about twenty years the export of tea increased from around eighty tons to almost twenty-three thousand tons in 1890. Tea had caught on. The few estates that made up the eleven hundred acres of planted tea back in 1875 had, by 1890, grown to two hundred and twenty thousand acres. Today, the country is the home of the cuppa. Its climate is perfect for the plant and its modern history is in part moulded by it. Tea accounts for almost two percent of total GDP and employs directly or indirectly, over a million people.

Terrain, climate, light, and wind shape quite different brews. The varied regions of the island make distinctively different teas – just as the different parts of France or Spain make such dissimilar wines. The most subtle tea is said to be come from Nuwara Eilya. Here at six thousand feet the climate is rugged, bracing, cold enough for frost, and best able to foster teas that are golden-hued with a delicate, fragrant bouquet. 

A more balanced flavour comes at four to six thousand feet from the Uva region. Here the bushes are caressed by both the NE & SW monsoons; and a drying Cachan ocean wind that closes the leaves, forcing a high balance of flavour. It is aromatic, mellow, and smooth. A very tangy flavoured tea comes from Uda Pussellawa, at five to six thousand feet, a thinly populated region, famed for rare plants & leopards, and bombed by the NE Monsoon to give a strong dark pungent tea with a hint of rose.

From Dimbulla, at three to five thousand feet, comes a tea with a very clean taste. The region is drenched by the SW monsoon – which means crisp days, wet nights, and a complex terrain that makes a reddish tea, most famous as English Breakfast Tea. Kandy, the first home of tea, is noted for its most classic of tea flavours. Here the tea plantations are typically at two to four thousand feet, to inspire a bright, light, and coppery tea with good strength, flavour, and body.

 A more caramel flavour is found at a little over sea level - Sabaragamuwa, home to sapphires and humid rainforest. The region is hit by the SW monsoon which makes for a robustly flavoured dark yellow-brown tea. The last and lowest lying tea region is Ruhuna which runs from the coast to the Sinharaja Rain Forest. The region is shielded from monsoons and has a soil that promotes rapid long, beautiful leaves that turn intensely black and make strong, full-flavoured dark teas.

Tasting all this delicious tea that emanating from so many different parts of the island is more than a little distracting – for the greatest irony in the country’s tale of tea is just how secretive its real origins have since become. Loolecondera, the estate where it all started, still exists just outside Kandy, surrounded by hills of tea – but it is almost entirely inaccessible. Determined tea adventurers with reliable 4 wheel drives can just about make it up to the estate. But like so much in Kandy, it hides in plain sight. It is perhaps a human inevitably that anything given half a chance to become a secret, will become so – though perhaps this is truer in Kandy than elsewhere.

The only secret Kandy cannot really hide lies just outside the city centre: the Perediniya Royal Botanical Gardens. Here, glorious, drunken avenues of Cook's Pines, Palmyra Palms, Double Coconuts, Cabbage Palms, and Royal Palms lead off into shady dells. The garden was refashioned in 1821; and is today one of the finest, if not the finest, botanical garden in Asia; the modern garden set up by Alexander Moon for the receipt and experimentation of plants introduced for c...

Welcome to an episode of Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast, brought to you by The Ceylon Press.

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Tiny mammals are the subject of this podcast – the search for Sri Lanka’s smallest and most overlooked mammals.

But first a health warning – for fans of Hi, Hallo or Hola, this is not a story of Sri Lanka’s mammalian celebrities, its kings and queens, or its most photographed princelings. 

Rather, it is a tour of the island’s plebs: its most ordinary of mammals, the ones lost in the scramble to see elephants and monkeys, deer, leopards, wild boar, buffalo, even bears.  These telegenic superstars were once enriched by yet more glamorous species, but of these little remains but memories etched on fossilized rocks. The island’s lions became extinct 38,000 years ago, if not more. Its tigers, hippos, and rhinos vanished ever further back.  But what remains is more than sufficient - Asiatic elephants and Trump-like toque macaques; leopards, sloth bear, boars, buffalos and barking, hog, spotted, and sambar deer.

 This podcast is dedicated to those mammals that live far below the radar. Some are rhinestone-common, others rarer than Burmese rubies. So comprehensively overlooked, they have become the island’s lost mammals: the Cinderella quadrupeds that bipeds rarely notice.

And endangered though so many of them are, they remain, like all Sri Lanka’s land mammals, a breeding ground for argument. 

The disputes start with attempts to settle the actual number of land mammals on the island. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, one hundred and three mammals, endemic or otherwise, are found across Sri Lanka – but that number is a red rag to the tens of thousands of scientists with a passion for post 1700 CE Linnaean taxonomy. Some argue for more, others for less.

A much more relevant question is how many mammals are there likely to be in 2050. For survival is, of course, the critical question. As Darwin meant to say: “It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive, but those who can best manage change.”  

And change is demanding profoundly impossible things of the country’s diminishing mammals.

Over a third of the total on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s list face such threats to their existence that they are more than likely to become extinct. 

Twenty-one species face so existential a threat that they are judged to be endangered. These include such iconic mammals as the Sri Lankan elephant, leopard and two of its most celebrated monkeys. 

Nine others are teetering on the edge of becoming extinct in the wild - including the sloth bear and golden palm civet. Six more, including the otter and the tufted Gray langur, are likely to become so vulnerable as to join these nine. 

That leaves just over half of Sri Lanka’s land mammals that are judged to be of least concern – including 13 shrews, mice, rats and 30 bats, and leaving what is left to own up to so little data as to be unclassifiable. 

“Sometimes,” said Seneca, “even to live is an act of courage,” a sentiment of particular relevance to the philosopher who had been ordered to kill himself by Nero but made such a hash of it that it took several attempts and many hours to accomplish. But suicide is a peculiarly human undertaking. For Sri Lanka’s land mammals, their march to the precipice of oblivion is one prompted not by them but by human actions - poaching, deforestation, urbanization, pollution and climate change.

What you see today, however ordinary, is likely to be obliterated, tomorrow. Which makes their observation now such a privilege and a thrill – be it of a bat or rat, cat or shrew. 

Size, contrary to all rumours, really does not matter. Once you engage with any creature every bit as entitled to share your scrap of earth, you move from a human-centric view of life to something more universal; and with this perhaps, the conclusion that neither of you has a greater right to have things just your way. “The world,” noted Eden Philpotts, “is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

Bats, oddly enough, are the best place for an emergent Sri Lankan zoologist to start their observations, for Sri Lanka is bat country, its incredible range of environments supporting 30 of the world’s fourteen hundred bat species. 

But of the many bats and bat families that live here, keep your exacting eye focused on the appearance of just one. Should the Sri Lankan woolly bat fly across your binocular lens, you are among the blessed, for it is the country’s only endemic bat. 

This tiny creature, barely 50 milometers from head to tail, was first described by tea planter W.W.A. Phillips in 1932. One of Sri Lanka’s most notable early naturalists, Phillips was famous for paying villagers 5 cents for every live snake they brought to his house.  His observations of the tiny woolly bat are as true today as they were back in the 1930s.  They enjoy sleeping in curled up banana fronds.  They have a preference for hills between five hundred to a thousand metres high.  And as the decades have clocked by, fewer and fewer have been sighted.

Endeminicness aside, it is hard to exclude from any Sri Lankan bat list the common flying -fox bat - the megabats of the bat world. With a wingspan of 1.5 metres and a weight of some 1.6 kilos, they effortlessly live up to their name. 

Nocturnal, fruit eating and curiously infecund (producing perhaps just one pup per year), they are an unmistakable part of any skyline – especially around city parks where they gather at dusk to hang off trees, discussing the day’s events with aristocratic nonchalance. Although unlikely to turn suddenly into airborne artillery, they are best kept at a distance, harbouring as they do such a wealth of diseases as to make biological warfare warriors jealous.

Even more understated than bats are mice. The island is home to some 7 mouse species - but look out for just 3; and send for champagne and chocolate eclairs from the Boulangerie Utopie in Paris should you ever be so fortunate to see one of them. They are of course tricky things to spot – being so tiny. But harder still, for these particular 3 are (almost) rarer than unicorns.

All three are endemic - Mayor’s spiny mouse; the exceptional Sri Lankan spiny mouse; and the almost equally rare Ceylon highland long-tailed tree mouse. 

The Ceylon highland long-tailed tree mouse was discovered in 1929 by the Dutch tea planter Adriaan Constant Tutein-Nolthenius.  Little more than 21 centimetres in length, nose to tail, it is found in Sri Lanka’s hill country where it lives in trees, venturing out only by night, a timid and reticent nightclubber, never likely to dance shirtless. 

The Sri Lankan spiny mouse barely reaches 18 centimetres from nose to tail. Its reddish grey back and sides morph into white underparts, with huge gorgeous smooth scooped-out ears that stand like parasols above large dark eyes. It is a mouse to fall in love with. 

Mayor’s spiny mouse inhabits the smaller end of the mouse spectrum and comes in two variants, one which inhabits the hill country and one of whic...

Very Close Encounters are the subject of this guide - a travelogue fixed on those attractions, adventures and activities that lie easily within a 10-15 miles journey from Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel.   

Kipling believed that to understand a country you had to smell it. Especially the perfumes of its past. Yet the past is documented in so many different ways - in books, or architecture; in music or even food. In Sri Lanka, it is the temples that best hold its story. 

The island’s temples are far more than just places of worship. Read them right and you read the real record of the land. They are garrulous witnesses to its kings and wars, its festivals and customs, everything in fact that reflects back the country’s life for over two thousand years. 

Fortunately, two of its greatest medieval temples lie near at hand, together with a Buddhist temple that looks Hindu; a Hindu temple built by the last Buddhist king; a temple equally favoured by both religions; a Victorian church that’s escaped from the home counties - and the holiest Buddhist site on the island. 

Equally close is a mountain range beloved of trekkers; and one named for gnomes adorned by a vast statue; a lake beloved by cormorants and pelicans; a forest sanctuary for birds – and probably the best botanical garden in Aisa. In between these places are lands of a different sort – tea plantations; a farm famed for mushrooms; melancholy cemeteries and a battlefield where colonial ambitions met a bloody end.

Close by is the island’s greatest surviving royal palace; frescos that tell tales centuries old; a rock pierced by a road; and an antique version of the Nine Arch Bridge. And for oniomanias there is a shop and museum dedicated to tea; a village dedicated to copper and brass and an antique shop that never ends.

But let’s start with a song. 

All good days begin with a rousing hymn and this one starts with “All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small, All things wise and wonderful, The Lord God made them all.”  So goes Mrs Cecil Alexander's anthem in “Hymns for Little Children,” published in that most revolutionary of years – 1848. 

But it is her second verse that calls most to twitchers and eager ornithologists. “Each little bird that sings,” it goes: “he made their glowing colours, He made their tiny wings.”  It is a tune worth humming as you drive to UdawaththaKele Forest, 12 miles away from The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel and perched just above Kandy’s Temple of The Tooth. It is one of the country’s loveliest bird forests: remote, wild – but accessible.

All creatures great and small live in its 104 hectares, along with orchids and ferns, four hundred and sixty plant species; butterflies, snakes, snails, lizards, toads, frogs, insects, monkeys, civet, deer, loris, boars, porcupine, the ruddy mongoose, giant flying squirrels, bandicoots, and bats.

But it is of course the birds that draw most of all. Over eighty species have been recorded, many endemic, including Layard's parakeet, the yellow-fronted and brown-capped babblers, the Sri Lanka hanging parrot, the three-toed kingfisher, mynas, golden-fronted and blue-winged leafbirds, spotted and emerald doves, Tickell's blue flycatcher, the white-rumped shama, the crimson-fronted barbet, the serpent eagle, and brown fish owl.

Appropriately, for a trip inspired by a hymn to animals, just beneath the forest lies the Church of St Paul, built in 1846, two years before Mrs Cecil Alexander's hymn was published. 

Over succeeding decades, the church’s terracotta bricks - now weathered to a red-ochre hue – would have echoed with the tuneful musical notation added to her hymn by William Monk. Monk’s great other hymn was “Abide with Me” – and that is precisely what this most home counties of Anglican churches has done. It has withstood more than the most expected tests of time.

Just two years after its completion it weathered the shattering 1848 Matale Rebellion – and then all the succeeding wars and insurrections that beset the island, protected by vast gates of wrought iron fabricated far away in Edwardian England. Inside the dimly lit church is a majestic pipe organ donated by Muslim businessmen from Bradford, a silver-gilt communion set gifted by the King of England – and a blazing 1874 stained glass window of the Crucifixion, the Ascension, the Angel in the Tomb, and the Nativity, the gift of a planter’s widow.

Outside, beyond its residual beam is Kandy Lake, and its prospect of a bracing walk. Known as the Sea of Milk, the lake is surround by a dramatic Cloud Wall across much of its three-kilometer circumference and is overhung by huge rain trees. Across its eighteen-metre depth lurk whistling ducks and monitor lizards, turtles, cormorants, egrets, pelicans, eagles, owls, herons, and numerous fish including an exotic and savage 9-foot-long alligator Gar – a fish with a crocodilian head, a wide snout, and razor-sharp teeth.

A circuit of the lake starting at The Temple Of The Tooth itself takes you all the way round to the Temple’s back entrance where lies, most conveniently, Slightly Chilled, a hilltop bar slavishly dedicated to snacks and cold beers.

Here also, just beside the temple’s back door, lies the entrance to the British Garrison Cemetery, created in 1817 - two years after the formal annexation of Kandy. It is home to almost two hundred souls, laid out like crazy paving, including John Robertson the last European to be killed by a wild elephant in Ceylon; William Robert Lyte, grandson of the author of "Abide with Me;” and the colonial ruler, Sir John D’Oyly whose penchant for sarongs and beards made him the country’s first foreign hippie.

A visiting Englishman wrote that “a stranger visiting this spot would be charmed at the magnificent scenery which surrounds it. In this lonely spot lie many hundreds of kindly Scots, who cut off in the very prime and vigour of their manhood, sleep the sleep which knows no waking, under the rank weeds and wiry grasses which cover their neglected graves. Many a sad tale of hardship, agony, and pain, could the tenants of these nameless graves tell, were they permitted to speak.”

In equal sorrow - if not the same disorder - lie two hundred of the eighty-five million victims of World War Two, intombed in perfect order at the flawlessly maintained Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery. Ceylon escaped much of the horrors of that conflict but rather eccentrically found itself the location of Southeast Asia Command, set up in Kandy under Lord Mountbatten to be in overall charge of Allied operations. Far from the real battlefield, Queen Victoria’s great grandson, found plenty of time to invent cocktails at the nearby Queens Hotel where he is still occasionally remembered.

The hotel, once the Walauwa mansion of the British Governors, is now the hotel equivalent of an aging maiden aunt, chasing an elusive restoration as an improvised Jane Austen bride might a suitor. It’s bar, where somnambulance has evolved into a competitive sport, is the ideal spot to collapse in after a visit to the Kandy’s greatest and most overwhelming sites – the palace of its last kings and The Temple of The Tooth. 

These two places, though part of the same complex, are easily mixed up, a confusion that makes clear the unremitting opacity of the line between religion and state has always existed in the country.

&nbs...

Pretty Close Encounters is a travelogue fixed on those attractions and activities that lie easily within a fifteen-to-thirty-mile journey from Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel.  

Almost two dozen strange and wonderous things lie within this radius, including the rumoured 5th century BCE tomb of the island’s first queen, the lost masterpiece of one of the world’s great carvers; the nemesistic battle field of a Portuguese king; some of the best mountain ranges for trekking; a bird sanctuary; a controversial orphanage for elephants; a temple cherished by the country’s first all-island king; the forest retreat of reclusive monks; the hidey-holes of a freedom fighting king famed for his boomerang resilience; the village of a latter day Robin Hood with Oscar-Award winning looks; the home of the bible of Buddhism; and an eccentric vertiginous jungle tower.

But to get the level of things, we start 8,734 km from The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel at Kensington Palace’s Presence Chamber. Here, where English monarchs received foreign ambassadors, is a fireplace of limewood carvings and cherubs by Grinling Gibbons. 

No wood sculpturers are the equal of this Michelangelo of woodcarving, who immortalised Restoration England and his patron, Charles II with his “unequalled ability to transform solid, unyielding wood and stone into something truly ethereal. 

None - expect one practicing at a similar time in the middle of Sri Lanka - Delmada Devendra Mulachari. 

Mulachari is renowned for many things but the rarest by far is Embekke Devale, a 16 miles drive from The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. A medieval masterpiece, the temple has withstood wars, weather and most especially the interminable conflict waged by the Portuguese and Dutch on the island’s last kingdom – in nearby Kandy. 

By the 1750s it was in a sorry state, its dilapidated walls noted by the rising young artist, Mulachari who lived nearby, his family, one of a number of Singhala artists from the South, having come north to seek work.

Wood carver, sculptor, architect, artist, - Mulachari worked for the last three kings of Kandy; and most especially King Kirthi Sri Rajasinha whose 35-year reign - to 1782 – was preoccupied by restoring many of the hundreds of Buddhist temples destroyed in the colonial wars. In this the king was greatly helped by Mulachari., who built for him the Audience Hall and the Octagon in the Temple of the Tooth, and the Cloud Wall that surrounds its lake.

Travellers, whether local or foreign, with a temple in mind, head with unfailing sureness to The Temple of the Tooth, and not Embekke Devale. But although just fifteen kilometres apart, the two temples are worlds apart in artistry. 

The Temple of the Tooth has a stolid, almost bourgeois respectability. By compassion, at Embekke Devale, you enter instead a magical world in which formality occupies but the smallest of parts. 

In every section, in every place, are the surviving 500 statues of the great artist, each a masterpiece in of itself. Exquisitely carved models of entwined swans and ropes, mothers breast feeding children, double headed eagles, soldiers, horses, wrestlers and elephants – all validate why this temple is famed across Asia for its world class carvings.  

But there is more. Fantasy intervenes. Erupting from a vein is a figure of a women; a bird takes on human attributes, a slight of hand revels that an elephant is a bull; another, that is a lion.

Sixteen miles in the opposite direction you encounter Pinnewala Elephant Orphanage. Founded back in 1975, it is a very popular tourist attraction, but it has increasingly looked out of place in a modern world more respectful of animal welfare, especially that of wild animals.

A report by Born Free, the wildlife charity which opposes the exploitation of wild animals in captivity, has cast a shadow across the claims made by the Orphanage. The charity’s report takes issue with the very term “orphanage,” explaining that their “breeding of more animals for the purpose of being kept in zoos, or sent to private collections or temples, clearly does not satisfy” the implication that their animals have been rescued. Its profit motivation, they claim, undermines their mission. They also take issue with the centre’s level of animal welfare. 

Their chaining of male elephants wounds the legs and the use of a spiked shark hook as a training tool is simply cruel. Why anyway, they ask, should elephants be trained at all?

One recent tourist was to blog that “I passed numerous elephants chained in solitary confinement. Now, I can’t claim to understand elephant behavioural patterns fully but the fact they were shaking back and for and only doing repetitive movements disturbed me. They also looked like they were in deep distress.”

Notwithstanding the amazing sight of scores of elephants bathing collectively in the river at set times of the day, many tourists opt instead to see elephants in their wild setting – in Minneriya, for example, a wildlife park near Dambulla. Though a longer drive, it offers grand sights that are still more unforgettable.

Six miles away is the small Kurulu Kele Bird Sanctuary which, despite its proximity to Kegalle, nevertheless is famed for the sheer abundance of different species that live in its forest. A 25 mile drive from here takes you into trekking country. 

Protected by a necklace of high mountains - Alagalla Mountains, Bible Rock, Uthuwankanda, Devanagala, Ambuluwawa, the Knuckles and Hanthana - and surrounded by dense jungle ideal for guerrilla warfare, the Kandyan kingdom’s natural defences helped it withstand repeated invasions. 

The Alagalla Mountains, twenty miles from The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and to the west of Kandy is an especial trekkers’ paradise, offering its visitors a range of hard core or easy treks, the easiest being a hint of a path that begins at Pilimathalawa and ends at Pottapitiya. Its more off-road adventures including climbing, rock scaling, and navigating through forests. 

Its wide range of dry evergreen, montane, and sub-montane forests are home to many species of fauna and flora, including wild boar, monkeys here, squirrel, anteaters, porcupine, monitor lizard, tortoise – but it is especially noted for its 50 recoded bird species which include Sri Lankan junglefowls, Layard’s parakeets, and yellow-fronted barbets.

A little over 15 miles from Alagalla is Bible Rock itself, a stunning example of a Table Mountain. Over 5,500 feet high, its curious open book shape inspired early Victorian missionaries to give it its canonical name, though 300 years earlier it performed a vital task as a look out post for the Kandyan kings, eager to spot the latest colonial invasions, especially those of the Portuguese. A classic series of bonfires, running mountain to mountain, starting here and ending close to Kandy was the trusted warning signal that was used, just like the famous Armada Fire Beacons in England in 1588. Steep though the climb is, it doesn’t take long to get to the top – and one of the best views in the country.

3

A DEADLY WAR

Some four miles away from Alagalla is the little town of Balana. Of the many attempts made to invade Kandy from 1574 to 1815, nine were to prove almost, but not quite, overwhelming. In 1574,...

Welcome to an episode of Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast.   Close Enough Encounters is the subject of this podcast – a travel guide to those attractions, adventures and activities that lie within a 30–65-mile journey from Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel.

The Encounter Sri Lanka Tour Planner, the subject of this podcast, is a how-to planning guide to help you decide which other places to visit, depending on where exactly you most want to be.

Welcome to an episode of Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast, brought to you by The Ceylon Press.

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The search for Sri Lanka’s larger overlooked mammals is the subject of this podcast.

Large – but not enormous, for this range of mid-sized mammals lies at the very heart of Sri Lanka’s overlooked mammal population as naturalists rush to spot elephants and leopards.

Amongst the most unheeded of the island’s creatures are its otters, hares and anteaters. 

Famously family oriented and playful, the Ceylon otter is shy to the point of near invisibility. Not that this deterred their most famous fan, Henry Williamson, author of “Tarka the Otter” - “What is this life, if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?” he asked with a rhetorical flourish. Covered in dark brown fur and about a metre long, the Ceylon otter weighs in at 8 kilos and dines on fish. It is scrupulously hygienic, with specific areas of the otter domicile earmarked as otter loos – this despite the fact that their poo is said to give off a scent not unlike that of jasmine tea. 

Curiously, Sri Lanka lacks rabbits – but it does have a hare. Just the one. And an endemic one too. The Ceylon black-naped Hare is a mere 50 centimetres head to body tail and distinguished by a black patch on the back of its neck and huge scooped ears, large and lovely as salad servers.

But more remarkable yet, with its dexterous overlapping and generously rounded scales, is the scaly anteater, a unique cross between an architectural marvel, a tank, and a chain-mail-clad Viking warrior. 

Measuring some 6 feet nose to tail, it makes its home in rainforest and grassland. It is a dedicated burrower, digging out burrows designed for sleeping, others for eating, and no doubt yoga, film-watching and partying too.  It follows a strict diet – eating just ants and termites, or, at a push, beetles, its long sticky tongue an evolutionary triumph that is capable of digging into the deepest of insect nests.   

Sadly, these toothless mammalian marvels are teetering on the edge of being critically endangered, not helped by increasing deforestation.  A still greater threat is poaching for their meat and its scales.  Made of keratin, the same protein that forms our own hair and nails, their eye-catching body parts are internationally traded as aphrodisiacs or curios.

A happier story is that of the crested porcupine.  This creature is widespread, at home in most habitats right across Sri Lanka. It is highly territorial. When threatened, their sharp quills will spring up, their teeth will clack loudly and, emitting a most unpleasant smell, they will go on the attack with the unswerving dedication of an infrared homing missile.

Widespread too are the island’s 4 mongoose species. The common Ceylon grey mongoose is the smallest. Shy around people, it is fearless with snakes, its kill strategy focused on tiring the snake by tempting it to make bites it easily avoids. Its thick, grizzled iron-grey fur and neuro-transmitting receptors leave it immune to snake venom; and for anyone living up-country, it is a fine companion to have around. 

Marginally more colourful is the brown mongoose – a species that comes in several iterations, each so marginally different as to be as impossible to tell apart as Herge’s Thomson and Thompson. The highland Ceylon brown mongoose, the Western Ceylon brown mongoose and the Ceylon brown mongoose are, to all but the most scrutinizing scientific eye, practically alike. 

Over 80 centimetres nose to tail with dark brown fur and black legs, and along black enviably tufted tail, they are of breathtaking beauty. Widespread though they are, seeing one is something of a challenge for they are introverted beasts, with a marked preference for deeper cover, dark forests and, like Greta Garbo, a penchant for being left alone.

Also hermit like is the Ceylon ruddy mongoose. A retiring forest dweller, it has grizzled ruddy brown hair, a sleek body and a tail that ends in a flourish of black tufts. 

But the Versace of the mongoose world is the stripe-necked mongoose, sporting an outfit that marks it out as one of the island’s most striking mammals. A dark grey head morphs to reddish brown and grey on its neck before blooming into a heady grizzled covering of bouffant fur that gets redder and longer the further down the body it goes. A pink nose, black legs and a reddish tail that ends in a curved tuft of black hair make up the rest of this most alluring of beasts. 

Two mammals speak of Sri Lanka’s troubled colonial past, the most notable being the diminishing herds of feral donkeys found in Mannar, Talaimannar and Puttalam. 

These are the descendants of equine immigrants that entered the great port of Maathottam near Mannar - once the shipping gateway to the ancient Anuradhapura Kingdom. Arab traders were probably responsible for importing the beasts to carry their cargos inland. 

The species that lives here is said to be a direct descendant of the Nubian African wild ass, now extinct in its native Ethiopia and Sudan. Extinction also faces it in Sri Lanka. There are said to be fewer than 3,000 still alive, though a charity, Bridging Lanka, has stepped in to try and nurse them back to happier times.

As sorry a tale can also be found among the Mannar ponies. Strung out to the west of Jaffna in the Palk Strait is the tiny coral island of Delft, bared fifty square miles and home to less than five thousand people. And five hundred wild ponies. 

Dotted with baobab trees, archaeological marvels from ancient to colonial times, and abundant wildlife, Delft has become the last refuge for the Sri Lankan wild pony, the direct descendant of the ponies exported to the island by the Portuguese and Dutch from Europe and their colonies in the East, to provide basic transportation. Left behind at Independence, and superseded by cars and lorries, they have carved out a fringe existence on the hot dry island, fighting off as best they can dehydration and occasional starvation.

A more contented existence is enjoyed by Sri Lanka’s embarrassment of cats – civets, rusty spotted cats, fishing cats, jungle cats and of course leopards.

Of all of these, the civet is by far the most interesting. 

When life was simple, long ago; and when beige, like black or white, came in just one colour choice, it was thought that the island was home to just one endemic civet. 

But scientists, zookeepers, and wildlife photographers have in the past 15 years worked hard to evaluate this snug assumption. By careful observation, the checking of paw prints, the measurement of bodies and assessment of markings (beige, off-beige or off-off beige), they have instead come to the conclusion – now widely accepted in the scientific community - that the country actually plays host to three endemic civets: the wet zone golden palm civet; the montane forests golden palm civet and the Dry zone palm civet. 

In fact, the debate about numbers is a passionate ongoing one, with some scientists now claiming that a fourth civet also merits separate recognition: the Sri Lankan mountain palm civet, found only in Dickoya, a refinement that makes the various divisions of...

Extinct is the subject of this podcast, a guide to the extinct endemic mammals of Sri Lanka – and those that today are so endangered as to be heading for oblivion.

The Sri Lankan Treehouse is the subject of this podcast, a guide to the exceptional endemic trees only found on this island.