The lake was like glass and the monitor lizard, squirrels and house dog welcomed us to an early breakfast before we said goodbye to our friends and departed for Kandy. After Colombo there was no motorway and the journey became much slower as we climbed the 500 metres to Kandy on a single lane highway.
The Pinnewala Elephant Orphanage, near Kegalle on the way to Kandy, was originally formed to protect orphaned or abandoned elephants. This laudable aim has been well accomplished, but as it is now one of Sri Lanka’s most popular attractions, the place has all the accoutrements of mass tourism. There are too many tour buses, tour guides, tour groups, clusters of stalls selling hideous ornaments, unwearable hats, plastic windmills and a shop with what must be the largest selection of elephant ephemera on earth – elephant on plates, mugs, ashtrays, hot water bottle covers, placemats, teatowels, T-shirts, clothes with elephants, wooden elephants and for the scatalogically inclined, something called ‘elephant poo paper’.
By the time we had worked out the timing of when the elephants would be where, and how many hundreds of people would be watching the elephants with us, and whether we wanted to watch the elephants going for their daily constitutional or having their lunch or their baths, we realised that we had just missed the chance to do any of these and that we would have to wait a couple of hours or so. We had lunch to fill in the interval, but during this time so many bells were ringing directing the people ahead of us to the various venues, that we both had developed headaches and decided to leave and investigate one of the other elephant homes along the so-called ‘elephant corridor’.
Ten minutes later we were in a small sanctuary for badly treated elephants and were crossing a rustic bridge in a coconut grove, silent but for birds and the mahouts talking to their charges. We and a few others watched them eat part of their daily ration of palm leaves and saw them being washed, indeed Nick even helped to clean one of them. There was no hassle from hustlers and no bells, just elephants.
