Sri Lanka - Day 1 Kandy

It seems that all our trips start out with a little bump.

​We took the flight out of Cairo to Colombo last Sunday. Kuwait Airways. What a nightmare! We had a two hour delay in Kuwait, which is not too bad, except that they didn’t really tell us why there was a delay or when it would end. Which was frustrating. And their entertainment is not really entertaining. And their seats are uncomfortable. Kuwait Airways. Yea, not looking forward for getting on them again.

​​Anyway, we arrive in Colombo around 6 a.m. and get into a taxi to Kandy, our first stop. It takes around 3 hours to reach Kandy while we doze on and off. At Kandy, the taxi driver has difficulty finding our hotel and after several phone calls and asking people for directions, we finally get there. We’re greeted by the owner and… he tells us there’s no water and he’s booked us somewhere else. Back into the minivan we go and for another hour drive around to our new hotel. Which is exactly that. New and unfinished. Workers were going in and out, banging and moving things. The hotel was alright, but not particularly clean or worth the money. But we had little choice. We took the room and crashed for a few hours.

​Woke up in the afternoon and headed out to check out the city. We walked around the lake, and sat down at The Muslim Hotel for some food. It’s a very local place, service was slow but good. I really was expecting Indian food, but although slightly similar, it really isn’t Indian. We had chicken samosas, chicken kottu (which is chicken mixed with this fried pastry and veggies) and vegetable filled pancake (I can’t remember the name right now).

After lunch, we headed to the main tourist attraction, The Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, where supposedly an actual tooth from Buddha is kept. The temple has a very Thai vibe to it with some interesting statues and paintings depicting the story behind the tooth. Unfortunately we were so tired that it was hard to really appreciate everything and take our time.

A few hours later, we had dinner (which was unimpressive) and went back to get some much needed sleep.