Last day in Kandy

Christine's birthday today and she opened many cards. Today is not so much of a sightseeing day, more a shopping day.

We walked around the rather new and still not fully populated air conditioned City Centre shopping mall, then down the road to the fully populated if less sophisticated traditional market.

On the way to elevenses I purchased 100g of white tea, ending up with a surprisingly large volume of tea as it weighs very little. Afterwards we wrote postcards then went on a foray to find the post office to buy stamps.

After a swim in the hotel pool, we walked alongside the lake to the Kandian Cultural Centre. Here we watched a program of Kandian dancing culminating in fire walking. All was accompanied by vigorous drumming, flute and conch blowing. The finest dancers costumes reminded me of the tin man from the 'Wizard of Oz'. The best wore hats with pom-poms at the end of long chords, so that they could accentuate their music by tossing their heads and causing the pom-poms to fly into the air above.

Then back to the 'Stag's Head', the rooftop bar at the Casamara, for the traditional beer at sunset. followed by a short walk to 'the Devon' for a final magnificent meal. We had a vegetable biryani, lentil curry, mixed raita and onion pakoda ( a sort of deconstructed bhaji ) all for R1000, about a fiver for the pair of us.

And so to bed, it had been a memorable birthday. Christine had two really good presents as well. The first was a video of Ellen crawling for the first time. The second was that after we had wasted hours yesterday trying to book a night bus in India because they wouldn't accept foreign cards, Giles managed to organise tickets for us with the help of his Indian colleagues.