Kandy is a funny old place – we have struggled to come up with a catchy title to this blog but have failed which just about sums it up for us. The ancient capital of Sri Lanka, situated in beautiful hills with a lake. Thousands of year of Buddha’s history and where the Brits took over Sri Lanka, and famous for housing a temple dedicated to bit of Buddah’s tooth snatched from his funeral pyre….. Despite all this promise, this is the first place on this trip that had under delivered.
The town is ugly, shuts down completely at 8 pm (like we mean completely – not even a tat shop), no restaurant scene. Horrors of horrors, we have been forced into KFC and Pizza Hut. Please bear in mind that our chef at Tea Trails had spent 14 years refining his art in Paris so Kandy really was a soufflé that failed to rise!
Our Grand Dame Hotel, built in the 1830’s, fantastic location overlooking the lake, was all white and frou frou. £25 per night got us onto the Royal Floor – big wide corridors, wooden floors but they neglected to inform us that the rooms were already occupied by other guests - king size cockroaches. So we have a shitty hotel, nowhere to eat and a scruffy town – people keep coming here – there must be something we have missed. So waking up in a positive frame of mind, we went to search for enlightenment at the Temple of the Tooth – which to be fair, we liked – both the ambience and the veneration of this old relic. We made sure we got there for puja which involved a lot of drumming, monks to-ing and fro-ing and the opening of the shrine door for ten minutes. We were able to shuffle past and see the small silver miniature stupa containing the famous tooth fragment. We were surrounded by parents with tiny babies bringing them to the temple – we decided this was when they cut their first tooth! The temple grounds were pretty and held a number of smaller temples and the odd elephant used for the various temple processions – the biggest of which is in August each year.
With the temple done and ticked our decision was do we stay or do we go? Apathy resulted in us staying so we had an afternoon of leisure. But this was after exploring the local markets – same same and no different really. Ant walked around the lake and had a massage, Gill relaxed with the cockroaches in her room (having of course insisted on several fumigations that morning!)
There was however, one highlight that we had yet to attend to – Kandy’s most eclectic hotel. Helga’s Folly, hidden in the hills, is like Marmite apparently - you either love it or hate it. We had heard lot from fellow travellers so we hop in a tuk tuk to take a look and sample the most expensive bloody Mary’s in Kandy. It is packed to the gills with photos and memorabilia of the rich and famous who have hobnobbed with Helga and her parents. She is a child of the 60’s who hasn’t grown up – the Stereophonics have written a song about her after staying there called Madame Helga’s. The hotel is a mix of Miss Havisham meets Mary Quant, meets junk shop meets Art Gallery! She advises the influence in Bauhaus…. She is high Brit camp and appeared before us in a kimono, Deidre Barlow specs and a cut glass accent. She greeted us with “I am sure I have seen you before”. Ant’s very fast response of “it depends on which magazines you read” knocked her off course for a while, and as we left you could see her trying to work out if it was Tatler, Hello! or Horse and Hound.
No blog would be complete without its alcohol story. Kandy is no different. Due to its religious significance alcohol is severely restricted and we have found ourselves gravitating to the town’s only watering hole – “The Pub” where we sit and write this blog listening to Bruce Springsteen on the terrace overlooking Kandy High Street. Quite a good place to watch the world go by, but on balance, for us, Kandy just didn’t really work.
The town is ugly, shuts down completely at 8 pm (like we mean completely – not even a tat shop), no restaurant scene. Horrors of horrors, we have been forced into KFC and Pizza Hut. Please bear in mind that our chef at Tea Trails had spent 14 years refining his art in Paris so Kandy really was a soufflé that failed to rise!
Our Grand Dame Hotel, built in the 1830’s, fantastic location overlooking the lake, was all white and frou frou. £25 per night got us onto the Royal Floor – big wide corridors, wooden floors but they neglected to inform us that the rooms were already occupied by other guests - king size cockroaches. So we have a shitty hotel, nowhere to eat and a scruffy town – people keep coming here – there must be something we have missed. So waking up in a positive frame of mind, we went to search for enlightenment at the Temple of the Tooth – which to be fair, we liked – both the ambience and the veneration of this old relic. We made sure we got there for puja which involved a lot of drumming, monks to-ing and fro-ing and the opening of the shrine door for ten minutes. We were able to shuffle past and see the small silver miniature stupa containing the famous tooth fragment. We were surrounded by parents with tiny babies bringing them to the temple – we decided this was when they cut their first tooth! The temple grounds were pretty and held a number of smaller temples and the odd elephant used for the various temple processions – the biggest of which is in August each year.
With the temple done and ticked our decision was do we stay or do we go? Apathy resulted in us staying so we had an afternoon of leisure. But this was after exploring the local markets – same same and no different really. Ant walked around the lake and had a massage, Gill relaxed with the cockroaches in her room (having of course insisted on several fumigations that morning!)
There was however, one highlight that we had yet to attend to – Kandy’s most eclectic hotel. Helga’s Folly, hidden in the hills, is like Marmite apparently - you either love it or hate it. We had heard lot from fellow travellers so we hop in a tuk tuk to take a look and sample the most expensive bloody Mary’s in Kandy. It is packed to the gills with photos and memorabilia of the rich and famous who have hobnobbed with Helga and her parents. She is a child of the 60’s who hasn’t grown up – the Stereophonics have written a song about her after staying there called Madame Helga’s. The hotel is a mix of Miss Havisham meets Mary Quant, meets junk shop meets Art Gallery! She advises the influence in Bauhaus…. She is high Brit camp and appeared before us in a kimono, Deidre Barlow specs and a cut glass accent. She greeted us with “I am sure I have seen you before”. Ant’s very fast response of “it depends on which magazines you read” knocked her off course for a while, and as we left you could see her trying to work out if it was Tatler, Hello! or Horse and Hound.
No blog would be complete without its alcohol story. Kandy is no different. Due to its religious significance alcohol is severely restricted and we have found ourselves gravitating to the town’s only watering hole – “The Pub” where we sit and write this blog listening to Bruce Springsteen on the terrace overlooking Kandy High Street. Quite a good place to watch the world go by, but on balance, for us, Kandy just didn’t really work.
