Day 223 Kandy - Dalhousie

Fortunately the night in Kandy was much cooler than down on the coast. Nevertheless our bodyclock mess and all the jungle noises around did not give us too much sleep in the night. After breakfast with the family and some waiting time for a tuktuk we went down to the royal botanical garden - a surprisingly expensive affair: more than 7€ per (foreign) person. It was pretty nice though and if the plants would not have justified the price, the free roaming monkeys and Mini squirrels did. We had a siesta in the grass under a coconut tree after which Ben picked us up for a tuk tuk ride into Kandy. We got off at an old royal palace where a funny museum keeper showed us around explaining the exhibits in less than half understandable English. On the way to the tooth temple Anne was brave and ordered a wood apple juice at a juice stall - it is a strange brown woody fruit with a taste that reminds me somehow of Quitte. After searching for a while we decided to skip the tooth temple after seeing the price tag. We knew that you cannot see Buddha's tooth anyway and we did not have too much time until when we thought our train would leave. So we went for lunch with Ben (huge, cheap, vegetarian curry) and rushed to the train station - only to find out that our train is not leaving at 4pm but at 5pm. Also here everything was far more relaxed than what I know from India. We could easily find seats and the ride started as the rain began to fall. Wooohoooo, train rides in Sri Lanka are wonderful: views of the lush jungle and the green hills are drifting by, people want to know your whereabouts, some guys are playing music (that is: drumming on the metal train doors) and sing along. The ride took longer than expected so outside slowly the night set in. We even managed to kind of break a window when trying to close it because it got a bit chilly. Fortunately some of the guys on the train also wanted to climb Adam's peak, once the train had arrived we could just follow them to the bus. The busride was a very very very shaky affair of about 2 hours. Really very very shaky ! Thus we arrived around 10pm in Dalhousie thoroughly shaken and once we had settled in a hotel room we could look forward to about 3 hours of sleep - tomorrow the alarm is set to before 2am!