kandy

We arrived in Colombo in the afternoon and jumped directly into a car to go to Kandy, the second largest city in Sri Lanka and the center of Sri Lanka's mountain jungle empire. While the rest of the island was busy being taken over by the Portuguese in the late 1500s, the remote and easily-defended mountain fortress of Senkadagala remained fiercely independent. The Dutch also failed to subdue the city and, through much of the age of empire, Kandy (as the city began to be known) remained stubbornly Sinhalese. Apparently, their final line of defense in the case of an actually successful invasion was to simply burn the entire city to the ground an run into the woods until the Portuguese or the Dutch went away. It seems to have worked, because they did it five times between 1594 and 1765.

The British did finally come into power there 1815, only because of infighting between the corrupt Sinhalese king, Sri Wikrama Rajasinha, and his people. Fed up with the despotism of their king, the Kandian people signed a treaty with the British just to get help in disposing of him. However, two years later, they decided that they didn't like the British too much either and they revolted. Because Kandy was an important stronghold, the Brits brought in massive forces from their Indian armies and beat the Kandians back into submission. Then they built roads and infrastructure and we all know how that story of empire building ends. Or doesn't ever end, as the case may be . . .

So we drove for about three and a half or four hours from the airport to our sort of funny and mostly crappy hotel in Kandy. The city is beautiful, and I was delighted to be in the mountains where it's cold and the air is clean and there are green things and . . . what's that stuff called? . . . oh yeah - WATER.

thank you, beth, for showing me that picture.
please show me the next one.