Savouring Sri Lanka: Kandy Tripping 3

The last I told you was of us visiting the small cottage industry where elephant poo is made into paper. After an awesome visit to the elephant orphanage and the paper factory, we moved on with our journey.

One the things that strikes your mind whenever you hear Sri Lanka is definitely its spices. I had heard of them and when R mentioned that he will be taking us to a spice garden we got pretty excited. Visiting a farm or factory or just about any enterprise is just so exciting. I have come to realize that this is something I enjoy a lot. So much so, that everytime we travel or consider travel, I look out for small social enterprises or a speciality fruit farm. I wouldn’t be lying if I said that, more often than not, there always is something of this sort to go gape at.

Travels are full of unexpected stuff. You can’t really complain coz’ that is what makes them so appealing. Well, in this case, we just kind of bumped into an unexpected spice garden that had nothing of interest. A poor guided tour by someone who claimed to be an Ayurvedic doctor was not something we looked forward to. I clicked umpteen pictures of this tour in the hope that it will turn interesting but alas!

You know that the spice garden is not really a garden when someone points to a bottle of jasmine “extract” (we wouldn’t know if it was an extract or essence) and says, “This is jasmine.”

You also know that this is not a spice garden when in the end, they just set up a small shop of all the oils and offer a free “sample massage”. Alright, alright, I did get the free sample done but honestly, we were quite dejected. We do try our best to see every little experience as fun and in this case, we just ended up making fun of the whole visit to a garden that wasn’t.

K pulled R’s leg and said that this was a funny trip. We were pretty hell bent on visiting an actual spice garden and so, R being the sweet chap agreed to take us to a bigger and better place. Once again we got pretty enthusiastic at the prospect of seeing a garden but tried to keep our expectations in check.

It is amazing how sometimes, first impressions can be so wrong. Sometimes you meet highly talkative and extremely confident people who claim to know pretty much every thing there is to a subject and then you meet really humble people who greet you with a smile, make you feel welcome, call themselves a student and amaze you with the way they handle the whole process. And this is the feeling we walked out with after the second spice garden tour. We met one of the most humble and also learned guides here.

That’s him with the vanilla pods.

This young guide quizzed us, spoke to us animatedly, teased  our knowledge of medicinal herbs, put our olfactory senses to test by asking us to smell an extract and name the source and kept us super entertained!

We saw different types of ginger, nutmeg, jackfruits, vanilla, peppercorns, banana plantations (red bananas, robust bananas and what not!), eucalyptus trees, a couple of mango tree, mint etc etc. Now, this felt like a  garden.

Sometimes you know stuff subconsciously. I mean, most of us are aware of the fact that many herbs are medicinal and that there are plants where every part has an application. Then there are ambrosial flowers that have your soul waft in the divinity. Yet, when you see all of it at once, you are awed.

We truly felt like having visited a spice garden. The mixture of all the best smells in the world was tantalizing and we felt heady at certain parts of the walk. One could just be in the biggest dilemna trying to decide what he/she wanted to follow – the refreshing mint or the heavenly cinnamon. I felt like I was the mistress of spices and fantasized myself prescribing the various magical spices to those who came to me with desires and troubles unspoken of but felt.

They did run a small educational class thingy after the trip where they spoke of the benefits of different extracts and their use (I have a copy of it) and then encouraged us to ask questions. We had a very good time looking at the various medicinal herbs and thoroughly enjoyed the learning. By the end of it all, we were taken to their own shop where these extracts are sold for reasonable sum of money. We did not think a lot before buying anything because this was a Govt. aided nursery and run by Ayurvedic doctors. We got a few bottles of vanilla extract that we later shared with our parents and some red banana extract. Even though we were interested in the various tailam for K’s grandma, they were not available in below 75 ml bottles (that are flight friendly) and so had to sadly give them a go.

Recently, both our parents called us to say that they liked the vanilla extract and it lends a great original taste when used in halwa and kheer. So yay! Not that much can go wrong with vanilla anyways.

Having had a very good tour, we were both extremely hungry. R seemed to have been very hungry as well because he was waiting for us  and the minute he spotted us, he gestured “Shall we eat?” eagerly, relieved to see that we were out at last. It was almost 3 P.M. While R drove us down to the restaurant, we spent all our energy talking about Sri Lankan food and sports. Very soon we found ourselves getting out the car and walking into a totally quiet restaurant with absolutely nobody around. R said that it was well past lunchtime. Now, that got us worried about the availability of food but we soon saw a central area that had an all-vegetarian buffet just waiting for us to devour.

The restaurant overlooked an open green space and we just went and made ourselves comfortable.

R told us that their speciality as a raw mango curry. Now imagine someone talking of a tangy dish when you are already drooling for food! We kind of helped ourselves to big heaps of pretty much everything.

And that, my dear buddies, is a piece of heaven.

For the next few minutes, nobody spoke. No plans were made. Only om-nom-nom-nom-mmmmm and crunch seemed to be the sound in the cool, sweet  air.

P.S. Coming up next is a visit to a cottage tea industry and tea estate

Road trip to Kuantan (Pahanga) – Day 1

Ah my dear folks,

So, I am on a high. All that road trip and some amazing sights left me just content and happy. No, seriously, why haven’t I done more of such long road trips?

The nothingness of the expanse makes you feel amazing, seriously. You don’t always need picturesque sights. No, not always. To drive along fields and random greenery is so stimulating.

Before I start digressing too much, let me regale you with our 3 day trip to Kuantan in Malaysia by car. So, the lucky chaps were O, L, K and K (K and K would be my better half and me). It would be unjust to not tell you a li’l about O and L considering we have been doing these trips for a while now over long weekends and we have been like family.

So, that is Kuantan along the east coast.

O is a Spanish guy who was my better half’s batchmate during MBA. So, they both hit off very well and we are now family. O loves to travel much to the delight of my better half who looooves to travel as well and now me (all of my earlier travels were within India for either research conferences or small family vacations) and so all this is refreshingly new for me. He also loves food much to the delight of my better half and now me. So, you know how it is. We pretty much share our love for travel, food, new cultures and sight-seeing. You get the drift.

Meet L. L is a Malay lady who is also O’s fiance. She works as a para legal professional. She loves travelling as well. She also loves food much to my comfort because I need a lady with good appetite to divert attention from my plate coz’ I eat a lot. So, we have been friends owing to our better halves and have found quite a few things we both enjoy doing – for e.g. books and travel. Now, THAT is a LOT, right?

And then, there is K and K. We both were like kids during the travel but lets not dwell too much on that for now.

The last time we travelled was to Penang (I’ll write about it as well sometime soon) during Chinese New Year for 4 days and we’d been a riot ! So, we were reallllly looking forward to this trip mainly coz’ I have never heard of this place before, it was my first long road trip, the company and mostly because I hadn’t heard of Kuantan being a very big tourist spot except for few beaches.

 

What with Google churning out such images, I knew there’d be like lot of beaches.

 I’m not a very beach person if the beach is the commercial types (if you know what I mean) not coz’ I don’t like people but because I can’t appreciate all the beauty in the same way as I could if it were to be less crowded. But I am open to recreation anywhere so I really didn’t have any complaints.

After some smart packing (now, that’s a first for me coz’ I usually pack the entire wardrobe and as soon as you open my tightly packed bag there will be a mini-market inside) and some hustle bustle because we had to leave directly from work on thursday afternoon, we left for office with 2 backpacks and one Nikon DSLR.

Fast forward to afternoon. I met up with my better half at his workplace where O works as well. And L joined in too. We were waiting for O to join us at the lobby of Marina Bay Sands Skypark. At the lobby, there were some cute Chinese girls playing some really melodious tunes and while I clapped in joy, the other guests looked at me amused wondering which entertainment was better. During this meet-up, I managed to cup my thumb when I dug my hand into the bagpack for some tissues and realized that the tube of a cream had caused the cut. And as though my cut was just what the hotel authorities needed, they started warning the guests not to touch the Italian glass as it could be dangerous and cause deep cuts. Talk of blessing in disguise ! And all this while, I mentally made a note that this wasn’t smart packing and who had I been kidding?! Have I told you all that I am accident prone? At the start of a trip, I either trip down the steps to the bus and land on my bottom or hit my hand against a door or something. Pretty much always, seriously.

So, well, finally O came over and then we left for Johor Bahru which is the nearest Malaysian city to Singapore. We took a cab to the immigration checkpoint. So, we cleared the customs and immigration at S’pore and Malaysia and then left to the place where we picked up our car and whee! We started our journey into Malaysia.

What was supposed to start off at 2:00 P.M. on 5th April started at 4:30 P.M. but we were really way too relieved to repent the loss of time and happy to start the drive and use as much of daylight as posible when we were driving a distance of more than 500 kms.

The journey was a chatty one and we kept talking each others’ head off, sharing tales of Malaysia with L telling us a bit about different places, my better half asking some questions, me watching outside the window hoping for fireflies and O occassionally checking on us with his “you all ok at the back” and joining in the banter when the traffic was less and the road became visible. Well, with long weekends, it does get quite busy what with everyone suddenly wanting to go to Malaysia.

All along the drive, we felt so deliriously happy to see so many trees. Really, Malaysia is so green. We felt so good that the trees were so plush and the land hadn’t been cleared or whatsoever. I even started ranting in my head as to how much of all the global warming and CO2 has been saved by this greenery and became even more optimistic that we all really have hope. Palms, some random shrubs and lots of dense bushes and hills that were totally covered in green – wow ! We never took pictures on our way but we sure took a lot on our way back and I’ll share them in the subsequent parts about my travel.

After a long long drive that included one stop for dinner where I managed to find vegetarian red bean buns and some drink and some rice and some greens (My tummy is often called the Municipal tank), I felt good. So did the rest. O bought some crackers and Red Bull to keep him up for the late night driving that was to ensue and we set off again. Oh, did I mention the yummy Crunch icecreams?

Post-dinner and dessert, the chats became less with K and K dozing off occassionally and then popping their heads up to see if we were at Kuantan and see the GPS to know how far we were. Well, we also listened to some awesome music throughout the journey and it stuck in our heads. We sang and even danced inside our car and we must have managed to invoke the Rain Gods with all this that it started raining heavily. So, we decided to only listen and not sing much so that poor O didn’t have to undergo all this.

Well, after some circling around the same U-turns and shouting in glee everytime we saw Swiss Garden Resort signs coz’ that was where we were staying and we were so overjoyed to know we were nearby, we finally reached the resort. Ah yay ! We did it, we did it !

We parked the car (well, technically O did while we unparked ourselves from our seats) and checked in at 3:00 A.M. on the 6th of April. Absolutely thrilled about unwinding for the long weekend, Kand K cuddled off to sleep.

I leave you with a view from our room.

Don’t forget to check out the sea view. The photo doesn’t do justice because I clicked it coz’ we could feel the fresh air.

p.s. We had an amazing time and loads to share.We made trips to a cottage industry as well. More tales and more photos to follow in subsequent parts