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Our Indian Airlines flight from Kuala Lumpur landed in Chennai, a city of 5 million people in southern India, formerly known as Madras. The plane was still slowing down as nearly every Indian in the plane stood up, opened up their overhead compartments, took out their oversized hand luggage and then just stood there, crammed in the aisle, while the plane was taxiing to the gate! Patience must not be their strong point.

The Trouble in Paradise

Odv
2006-04-15 18:40:16

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two guys were pushing us to go to a show, it was all pretty friendly, but we told them that we were not going today but tomorrow as we already had other plans. Probably realizing that they were not going to make a commission off us they started a whole rant about how all Dutch people are the "same", it was rather offensive and certainly did not endear us to Sri Lankans.

Kandy was not as impressive as it was made out to be, the lake is not that great, the air in the center is very polluted, the Temple of the Tooth is alright but then we have seen so many temples.

We choose to go to the less commercial Kandyan dance show at the YMBA, making sure that no annoying, pushy and potentially offensive tout would get any commission off us. The show was quite a nice way to spend some time, it ended with a fire walk.

In the nearby botanical gardens, there are lots of different plants but the most interesting thing may be all the bats that are hanging in the trees at the northern side of the park. As we were walking through the park looking at the bats, some guy comes up to us and starts "showing" them to us (I mean what does he think we are looking at), then takes a stick and starts to scare the bats "for us". We told the idiot the stop immediately but when we left he still had the guts to hold up his hand asking for money for his "services". We left his hand empty.

In Sigiriya, in the cultural triangle north of Kandy, we were first confronted with the official discrimination against foreigners by the government of Sri Lanka. We had to pay 100, yes really one hundred, times more than Sri Lankans to visit the site. Certainly does not make you feel welcome in the country. Maintenance and restoration of the site is done with foreign money, which means that we are actually paying twice for the site with Sri Lankans just freeloading on us.

At 20 USD per historic and natural site, we had chosen what is by certain accounts the most ...