Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage, spice garden, tea factory

Even though the proposed day of strike has been called off, my superintendent gave me the day off today as I had planned it already, happy days! So we set off in the morning, tuk-tukked (new word) to one of the two elephant places around Kandy, Pinnawala. This is the state-owned one where there are more elephants and more to see. At 9:15 they feed the small ones from milk bottles (you can pay to hold the bottle if you want to) then we stroll over to watch the big ones crack sticks and twigs. The one I posed next to flicked off my sunglasses casually with the swoop of an ear... Pictures in the Hungarian post!

Then we walked down to the river, sat down at a restaurant where you can have lunch and drinks and waited for the elephants to start their 2-hour bathing. That was really nice and relaxing to watch them play, a small one kept attacking all the big ones, one of them just lay there for 2 hours quite content and a few small ones just played and squirted water everywhere, went under the water for a few seconds... Good to watch :)

Then we headed to the other elephant place, Millenium where you can ride the elephants and bathe them if you so wish. I did not, so I visited the next door paper factory where paper is made out of elephant poo! Makes a lot of sense really as elephant diet is rich in barks and fibres which makes for good paper. It is disinfected and I confirm that it does not smell of poop, not the least bit, nope, not even a tiny bit. A 3-fingered man showed me around the factory, he gave an excellent speech and introduction to the process however refused to be photographed saying "i'm just an old elephant, madame".

After this the highlight of our trip arrived: spice garden! Oh my god, the sweet, fresh smell of lemon grass, vanilla, cacao, cinnamon, nutmeg...! Amazing. An ayurvedic doctor showed us around, explained what is for what - for insomnia, oily skin, dry skin, earache, hair removal, teeth whitening, joint pain etc. Then he gave us a sheet of recipes for making these mixtures at home and try them out. Two guys then came over and massaged the oil that's good for skin into our happy faces and oil good against joint pain into our happy necks, shoulders and arms. Our guide mentioned it a few hundred times that we MAY donate if we wish to do so and in fairness, they worked hard for it and we donated.
I'd also like to add that our guide delivers the tour in English, German, French, Sinhala and Tamil - 5 languages... And he also knew szegfuszeg / clove in Hungarian because he trained together with Hungarians at the ayurvedic college.

Finally we visited a tea factory, it was very interesting and after the tour they served free tea and sitting in the breezy, spacious hall, windows open, tea cups clinking, I caught a memory of an English colony. A documentary was on in the background, with David Attenborough's calming bariton :)

Great day!