Walked to the National Museum only to find it closed. Not for the day, but for at least a year due to renovation works. We're not having a lot of luck with Sri Lankan museums!
Never mind, a quick purchase of comestibles from the local bakery and we are on our way by tuk-tuk to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Peradeniya, about 10km outside Kandy.
Almost 150 acres of superbly manicured gardens on a lovely sunny day. Highlights were the palm avenues, including one of coco-de-mer with its huge fruits, a brilliantly comprehensive collection of cycads (and near relatives the zamias and encephalartos). There were giant bamboo stands higher than many trees, and trees that looked as though they had black flapping leaves until you realised that they had been colonised by thousands of giant fruit bats.
The spectacular palm avenues must have been each a quarter of a mile long. Three wide pathways lined by hundreds of equally spaced Royal palms, Cabbage palms or Palmyra palms. In addition there were enormous specimens of Kauri trees from New Zealand, and other exotics from all over the tropics.
We arrived about 11am and had wandered around most of the collections by 4pm. The gardens themselves were started by Kandian kings in the 18th century, but vastly extended by the British as they sought to find which exotic plants from other parts of the empire could be commercially successful for settlers in Ceylon.
Back to Kandy by tuk-tuk. An altogether faster journey than by car, mostly because we drove on the wrong side of the road past much of the traffic jam. Tuk-tuks do that.
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