resplendent lanka

This place isn't like southeast asia - it feels different. Curry particulate tickles the nose and men are plump and shouting. The trains are packed. A standing-room sweat filled rectangular prism chugging through somewhere warm with picture frame windows ever changing.

These are the guards of the buddha's tooth. From under the bodhi tree in northern india, it has been passed, smuggled, hammered, bombed, crushed, concealed in hair, diffused, drowned, swept by currents, and re-calcified, according to legend.

This is not your ordinary worship. This is aggressive spirituality. On just any old Saturday, Buddhists from Sri Lanka and afar ply their way into the upper hall of the Temple of the Tooth in order to get a glimpse, through a monk silhouetted doorway, of the gleaming, gilded tomb, in which the tooth is said to be.

 

A landscape reimagined - clipped bonsai tree tea plants set fluorescent green fire to the hillsides. Three species are present - tea, tea, and tea. Actually, the tea is interspersed with select leguminous tree species for nitrogen fixing. Upon some of the trees pepper is grown. What was once incredibly biodiverse upland moist forest was systematically cleared for the tea-time fancy of England and other such western crumpet-dipping folk. Sri Lanka has little more than 20% primary forest cover.

 

 

Small Hindi woman dot the hillsides, stooped and swiftly picking newly sprouted leaves, dropping them into the burlap on their back. Their families have often have been working on these plantations for generations.

 

Schools out - tea plantation in all directions. These kids are probably returning to the group housing for them and their parents, who both work on the plantation.

 

Pointing the way to the nearest anything.

 

Concentric ceylon crop circles 

 

 

Coming from relatively infrastructure-less French-colonial Laos, the British clearly had a different idea of colonialism. They left an incredibly intact infrastructure of railroads and roads, even university campuses. Rail travel is still quite popular (and cheap) for Sri Lankans today - complete with peanut and fried shrimp vendors roaming the cars and impromptu tambourine and back-of-the-seat percussion 

 

The beaches of the south coast were miraculous. Long stretches of perfectly tilted sand. Palm trees observe, as always, arching their unkept heads to peer onto the towel of a sun-crisped lounger or into the bucket of a returning fisherman.   

 

This was the coast of Sri Lanka hit hard by the 2004 Tsunami. Stories of carnage are commonplace. The water receded in the moments leading up to the wave - fisherman ran out to collect flapping, beached, fish. And then the waves came, reaching the second story of some of the beach side houses. These three generations sat watching the sunset on their little patch of beach, around the corner from the surfers and honeymooners.

 

A Hindi god at 6 feet tall

 

Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim religions all coexist in this island nation. This is an intricately carved ornamental entrance to a Hindu temple in Columbo.