There might be more Sri Lanka pictures later, but for now, as per Dad's request, some updated ones of the garden!

Here's the whole thing. In front are the strawberries; then the line of tall, bushy things are parsnips; behing them (from left to right) are broccoli (invisible in this picture), rhubarb, cabbage, and (tallest of all) collard greens; then the grass-like things are leeks; then where it looks like there's nothing, those are our pitiful peppers (Peter Piper picked a peck of pitiful peppers) (actually, they're starting to grow for real now); then three types of tomatos, almost all collapsed on the ground because we haven't gotten around to buying stakes yet; then a bountiful row of lettuce, and finally (also invisible) some spinach. We planted some sweet corn in some unused spaces (just kidding--but places where they might maybe have room) a few days ago, and, though you can't see them, there are small raspberry plants along the right and a few weed purslanes that we decided to keep scattered around. Not bad for a tiny plot!



It is now a verifiable fact that we have multiple real tomatoes (not quite ready yet, though...)



And after finally finding a way to foil the birds, then giving them the wrong kind of fertilizer, we finally have the strawberries back on track.



Finally, we have some green beans planted along our side fence and some herbs up against the house. Very exciting all around!

Speaking of around:

We're back from major trip #2 of 3 for the summer! We had a great time at Claire's graduation (congratulations, Claire!) and with Sara's family (in the likely event you're heading through Rodney, Ontario, check out the flower bed outside the donut shop--Sara and I planted it). We got back to some happy cats and an amazing garden that I could hardly believe: our parsnips had greens close to 2 feet tall, our cabbage was maybe two and a half wide, our tomatoes shot up a foot or two and grew flowers, and we are overflowing with lettuce. (We'll have to give some of it away. Any takers?) Only our peppers look about as paltry as they did before--hope they take off soon.

But in the meantime I want to share a few more pictures from Sri Lanka. There were a few places we went that were so amazing I want to give them each their own post. I'll keep text to a minimum, and try to let the pictures speak for themselves.

Our first full day there, we got up at 2 AM and climbed Adam's Peak. Thanks to the new time zone and the previous night's exhaustion, we felt pretty good, even so early and without breakfast.

Here is the entrance to the trail (seen, obviously, much later than 2 AM, after our descent), much of which was lined with stalls selling everything from tea to chickpeas to plastic flowers to pictures of the Buddha in soft light. Some were open all night, and we had a nice, comforting cup of tea on the way up.



A pretty plant, surrounded by the steam from a nearby waterfall.



A dog from our guest house, who somehow found us a few hundred feet into the trail and climbed the entire 3000 feet elevation gain with us. (At 2 AM on a bushy trail in a new country, we felt a little safer for his presence.)



The view of the top from partway up. The entire trail is lit by these little glowing lights during pilgrimage season. You can imagine that the photo doesn't capture the magic of this view.



[I'll upload some videos here when I have the time!]

A view down the trail as light begins to dawn. You can see a stupa (dagoba) at the lower level.



At the top.




Heading down.



And to come full circle, the view of the top in the light.

In a previous post, I mentioned that Western tourists in Sri Lanka are almost universally better off than those that live there, and so it's hard to blame them for the fact that almost every interaction we had was clearly supposed to involve money. But that's obviously not a comfortable situation. Our most difficult experience was here:




This is Sigiriya, one of the ancient cities of Sri Lanka. We decided to visit it at the last minute on our second to last day in the country, so we already had experience visiting other tourist sites, but this was by far the most touristy of them all. The entrance fee was a whopping $25, compared to $10 for entrance to an overpriced temple that claims to be the "cradle of Buddhism" and houses a purported tooth of the Buddha. Even before we got to the ticket counter, a man had joined us and started showing us around, and we knew from previous experience that if we didn't say anything, he would guide us through the entire several hours' visit before either asking for a tip or standing around awkwardly until we offered one. We didn't mind so much giving him the money, though we were near our budget for the day, but we preferred to go through the ruins at our own pace.

This proved not so easy. When we told the would-be guide that we'd prefer to go alone, he argued with us: we don't know the place, we will miss all sorts of things, not everything is in the guidebook, you can't go in without a guide (clearly not true), they will check to make sure you have a guide. We ended up feeling a bit rude, but did manage to insist, only to have him follow us at a distance for a few meters before approaching us again and starting to point out features that we had presumably been missing. We managed to finally convince him that we were serious only after feeling rude once again.

At that point, we had to run the gauntlet of people selling stuff: books on the history of the site, carved elephants, water, etc. A little side trip to see the so-called "Cobra-hood Cave" was cut short when we saw a man standing near it, entertaining some tourists with a large snake wrapped around him.



Just as we were starting to get some pretty good views, yet another man took it upon himself to start helping and guiding us. When we told him that we didn't need a guide, he explained that he wasn't a guide, but rather a "tourist facilitator," showing us his title on his badge. Not needing facilitation, we managed to get past him only to find another ticket counter: apparently, we would need to show our tickets yet again, for no apparent reason. This would simply be annoying bureaucracy, were it not for the fact that our tickets had somehow disappeared by this point.

I could describe our negotiations with the guard, the apparent schadenfreude of the tourist facilitator, who came up behind us and smiled a lot the whole time, and our frustration, but suffice it to say that another tour guide came through during the negotiations and essentially hinted that we pay a bribe, which we proceeded to do. (It wasn't entirely clear, but it seemed that the tourist facilitator and the new tour guide also wanted bribes, which we didn't pay.) Then on the way down, we needed to ask for directions several times; each time, regardless of the simplicity of the directions, the person we asked would see a money-making opportunity: "Oh yes, come with me." "No, we can find it, just which way?" "No no, I show you, only 100 rupees."

This trip to an otherwise incredible site was also marred by intense heat and untrustworthy stairs with dizzying drop-offs, but the elements above are emblematic of the uncomfortableness we sometimes felt as rich tourists in a poor country.

As I mentioned, this was the worst day for this sort of thing, and most of our other activities were much more satisfying. Many of the other cultural sites we visited were interesting not just for the history but for the way that history was blended with modern practice. The Buddha sticking out of the jungle in the above picture from Sigiriya had been completed in the past couple of years, and such massive, modern, concrete Buddhas were pretty common. At temples we visited, the distinction between secular and sacred functions that you see in western cathedrals was essentially absent: whereas in most European cathedrals you can take tours that tell you all about history, art, architecture, and social context, often treating the religious oddities of other ages with humor, it was clear that the religious traditions in temples such as the Temple of the Tooth were more continuous. Much of the architecture, for example, had been either restored or even built in the past 100 to 200 years, often in a style that we would find Romantic and old-fashioned.





The hall with the golden Buddha pictured above had highly romanticized paintings around the room depicting the progress of the tooth relic. Incidentally, these paintings all proudly proclaimed that they were sponsored by the Bank of Ceylon. They also demonstrated the particularly Sri Lankan use of English. One sign described the "hair-apparent" to the throne, while another pointed out that the English returned the tooth to the Sri Lankans with all due "plomp and splendour." A school we passed promised, ominously, that they had "better lerners." It's easy to make fun of people who misuse such an "easy" language, but of course if we all had a little more plomp in our lives, the world might be a better place.

Actually, most people's English was not all that bad: most people could speak at least a few words, though they often had trouble understanding us, perhaps because they were more used to Australian and British accents. Nearly everyone we talked to for more than 2 seconds asked us where we were from, which was a little bit strange: I'm not sure why this was so curious to everyone. Very often greetings would go something like, "good morning where you from?" or "good morning your country?" Most seemed to find Canada, the US, or both to be satisfactory answers.

These conversations were particularly common as we ascended Adam's Peak, where interactions had less reason to be commercial (most of our fellow hikers were Sri Lankan Buddhists, on pilgrimage). Our experiences on this mountain also gave us a picture of religious views in Sri Lanka, which were a bit hard to figure out. At the top, the sunrise service was going on, and the praying faithful, when they looked at us, seemed disapproving of our rather secular enjoyment of the view, despite our attempts to be respectful and quiet.




(More pictures of this spectacular place in a future post.)

At the same time, two Buddhist monks were also not participating in the service, and also left halfway through, snapping pictures left and right. We walked with them for some of the way down and seemed to get a little more respect and a few more smiles simply by association. (The monks themselves were very friendly: one of them mentioned a Miley Cyrus song that apparently was an apt description of our punished knees at that point in the descent.)



One more cultural element was consistent with other tropical countries: houses are much smaller, and there's much more emphasis on being outside. Stores were often open to the air, despite the rains that descended most afternoons, and lines of stalls selling everything from fresh fruit to backpacks to pictures of the Buddha lined everything from the path up Adam's Peak:




to streets:



to bus stops:



You might think, "what a wonderful way to get into a truly Sri Lankan life, shopping with simple store-owners who sell locally-grown produce." But nothing is as simple as at seems. One of our most shocking moments came when we bought an orange to see how much better Sri Lankan oranges were than the ones we get at home. Only to find, when we went to eat it:



Sunkist, USA!

Travel was one of our more stressful items in Sri Lanka. Here I tried to capture the craziness of a bus station:



Buses parked all over the place, no central offices or signs to help, people and buses mixing in all places at pretty close distances; but honestly, this is just the smaller, less crazy part of this bus terminal, one of three in the city of Kandy.

Buses were always crowded, hot, run-down and slow, but also on schedule, common, and very cheap. Our longest bus ride was from Badulla to Kandy:



Google says the 100-km trip should take an hour and a half. Our bus took 4 hours (right on schedule) and cost less than $3.50 for the two of us.

Our next and final trip, from Kandy to Negombo (near the airport), was 110 km, took 3 hours, and cost about a dollar each.



We took a day trip from Kandy to near Dambulla (directly north of Kandy on the above maps) and were lucky enough to catch air-conditioned, private buses. As such, that (shorter) trip was pretty steep: about $5 one way and $4 the other.

But this was all at the end of the trip. At the beginning, we were planning on taking trains. We had heard that they were slower, but less crowded (at least in first class), more comfortable, and more picturesque, while being only slightly more expensive than buses. This was all true. Here are some pictures we took from the train.




(Dagobas and statues of the Buddha were every couple of miles all along the roads and tracks, as well as all over cities.)




(You can barely see, in the distance, people walking the tracks; there were people doing this all over, because 1) sometimes the train tracks were simply the shortest way between two places and 2) sidewalks were slim to nonexistent, and the train tracks are probably safer than the crowded roads.)

But trains were also completely unreliable. Our first train broke down after about 5 hours (it was supposed to take 6 and a half, and we were only a little over halfway). At our Ella guest house, another couple staying there mentioned that their train was held up for a few hours because a giant tree had fallen over the tracks, and all the men got out and laboriously removed it. The next time we tried to take a train, when we arrived at the station we were told it wouldn't arrive for at least another three hours, and probably not even then. When I offered to buy tickets anyway, the bored, disinterested bureaucrat in charge of the station hemmed and hawed, went back to his work for a minute or two, and finally asked me what I could possibly want to do with the tickets. We ended up taking a taxi.

Taxis were much more expensive, though not, as in the US, prohibitively expensive for long distances. The going rate was 50 Rupees (about 45 cents) per kilometer. Of course, not knowing distances, we couldn't really judge prices, and we ended up getting dramatically ripped off at least once (the driver claimed the ride was 180 km; according to Google, which I checked yesterday, it is actually only 100, and there's a shorter route). Not only that, but taxis tended to be very old, run-down vans without a/c or, more importantly, working seat belts. On the plus side, nobody drove very fast, not because there were police out--we saw only one police car on a road, and it was in a city--but because in the Hill Country, the roads look like this:



(You can't tell from the key, but the foot paths are the dotted lines; all the wavy, solid lines are roads.)

Roads don't blast through parts of mountains, or go over bridges; they just follow their contours. This meant that the highest speed we ever attained in a vehicle was probably about 45 mph. Drivers would gun the engine as fast as they could down the straightaways, then slow down dramatically into the curves. Needless to say, this lurching back and forth between different speeds did little to increase our appreciation of taxis, especially since we were nearly always sucking in the dust and exhaust of the large Tata, Lanka Ashok Leyland and Isuzu trucks that dominated the roads. (There were only a couple of "normal" sedans, almost exclusively new Toyotas; motorcycles seemed to be the preferred mode of personal transportation.)

Within cities, a cheaper version of taxis existed: tuk-tuks.




These vehicles, essentially a motorbike with a cab and two back wheels, were absolutely everywhere in huge numbers. Certainly our cutest mode of transport. But even they had their downsides: we were offered rides by seemingly every tuk-tuk driver in every city we went to, and driving at night or in the rain felt a bit like a scary, more dangerous roller-coaster because the side views were entirely blocked by a black cloth.

But hey, what's a honeymoon without a little stress to throw the better times into relief?

It's hard to encapsulate most parts of our Sri Lanka trip into blog posts. But one that unified much of it, and one of the main reasons we considered Sri Lanka in the first place, was tea.





We spent almost all of our time in the central Hill Country, so we were never very far from tea plantations, and much of the surrounding countryside looked like the picture below. In fact, one of our guest houses' surroundings even looked like this: they grew their own tea, and we had it at breakfast!



Hillsides, some incredibly steep, were all covered in little tea bushes and the occasional shade tree, sometimes full of tea pickers. The picture of tea pickers at work is one of the "classic" pictures associated with this area of Asia (a quick google search for "tea pluckers Sri Lanka" will turn up many examples), but we didn't take any. This is largely because, in a vacation that was permeated with an awareness of how comparatively rich and fortunate we are, it seemed inappropriate to enjoy the picturesqueness of a task that was clearly hard, hot, and underpaid, at the safe distance of a photograph.

Once, passing some pickers on a hike through a tea plantation, they urged us to take a photo, so we did so, only to be immediately asked for money in return. This seemed at once perfectly fair (they certainly needed the money) and uncomfortably futile (a few extra dollars on one day was unlikely to help them much in the long term), and we passed up such opportunities in the future.



This tension cropped up also in the two tea factories we visited. One clearly didn't have a lot of tourists, but the other was full of white people taking tours. Both places, of course, were full of Sri Lankans (mostly Tamils, though from a different Tamil ethnic group from the LTTE) working hard at repetitive and sometimes extremely hot jobs. Of course, there are plenty of white people who work hard at factories in somewhat similar conditions, but the pay is better, and the power structure is less unfortunately defined (Tamils work, Sinhalese supervise, white people come and enjoy the scenery).

Nevertheless, it was fascinating to tour the factories, and at least somewhat satisfying to know that money spent there was going to the factory (however they chose to distribute it), without a significant portion going to the fancy companies in the US and elsewhere that inevitably sell tea at a markup as a "specialty product." We saw tea being dried on long mesh trays...



...rolled and crushed (no pictures), fermented...



...heated at high temperatures (again, no pictures), and sorted in all sorts of ways into grades and types, by color, flower and stem content, size, etc.




We also enjoyed many wonderful cups of tea.



And we appreciated getting to know some of the characteristics of tea grown in Sri Lanka at different altitudes: high grows slowly and is more aromatic, less dark and rich; low grows very quickly and is (perhaps overly) hearty and claims to be particularly useful when you have bad water; and middle is, as you'd expect, a combination. We brought back nearly 2 kg of tea, from all of the major tea-growing regions of Sri Lanka, as well as some more specialty teas: Earl Grey, green, and even a very expensive "Gold Tips" variety that only uses the bud of the plant. (We tried that this morning, and it is stupendous.)

Anyone near Bloomington in the next year or so is welcome to stop by for a cup!

We're going to Sri Lanka tomorrow! It's really exciting, but we are (I am) getting nervous about lots of things--more than 24 hours of travel will certainly take its toll, we don't know how easy it will be to get gluten-free food, and the weather is supposed to be hot and rainy for the foreseeable future. But we've decided we're going to have fun no matter what! Or, at least, it will be an adventure!

In the meantime, there's lots to look forward to when we get back. There are several plants that will probably be ready to be harvested already by that point.

The rhubarb, which, as you'll recall, was cut down drastically for pie purposes less than two weeks ago, is almost ready again even now:



Two collard greens should be pretty full by the time we return:



We already have some strawberries over a centimeter long and growing:



And though the plants with the biggest ones don't all have very many, plants such as this one suggest that, with patience, we'll have no shortage of strawberries:



Farther off, but even more exciting, are raspberries:



Least exciting, perhaps, but still photogenic, are the salad greens:




And, of course, we can always look forward to our return to these two bundles of sweetness: