Nalanda

There's a temple you can visit on your way to the next town from Matale.  It's called Nalanda (say NAWlanda).  It doesn't merit staying over night in Matale, because you can reach it from there if you take a bus.

It's located near a reservoir, and it's a nice place to spend an afternoon.

You have to go the last couple of kilometers on foot--they say it's 1 km, but you and me know better.  You get to pass through some truly lovely real-estate.

Then the road dead-ends into the temple:

It's near a reservoir.

Views of the temple.  It's supposed to have depictions of sex acts on it, but I didn't see anything resembling that.

The statue inside.

It's an active temple, so you still have to take off your shoes and stuff.

A lovely chameleon.  Green today.

Matale

Matale (pronounced Motta Lee) is a small town north of Kandy.  They have some cool temples you can check out for a small fee if you're foreign.  I don't know why I bothered staying there for 2 days since you could do the whole thing in one hour in the afternoon.  Presumably because I didn't feel like hauling all my luggage with me, lol.

It's within walking distance of the Matale (2 km or so), so I walked there.

Here's the photos:

A small remembrance.

A couple of shots of the entry way.

Inside the temple--a reclining Buddha.

Detail work from one of the archways inside the temple.

A view of the grounds.

Supposed to be a vision of Hell for the unrepentant.

Seemed more like a torture museum.

I couldn't resist another shot.

Hilltop Buddha.

A view from the temple on top of the rocks.

I forget what this is about.

Design painted meticulously on the rocky ceiling and walls of the temple.

King Norodom of Cambodia apparently helped make this temple possible.

Pretty cool.

You can also visit "Spice Gardens", which are basically gardens where they grow spice plants--cinnamon trees, citronella, tamarind plants, red and green pineapples, coconuts, jasmine, etc.  They'll lecture you about each thing, then try to get you to buy pricey goods.  Luckily, I was so broke I wasn't tempted to buy anything, but it was an interesting place to visit nonetheless.

Spice Gardens abound in this area, but the one I visited was located about one kilometer past the temple.

You can also stop by A&C restaurant which is between Matale and the temple.  I actually stopped in to ask directions to the temple, and ate a fruit salad since (in my usual careless style) I had forgotten to eat lunch.  

I loved their bathroom signs.  

Esala Perahera

So I said I came to Kandy to see the Esala Perahera display.  The processions last for 10 days, with the greatest one on the 10th day.  Although I was in Kandy for 5 days, I didn't bother with the earlier processions...it just seemed like too much of a hassle with people pooling on the streets around midday for a procession that would begin around 8 pm.  But dammit, I was going to see the LAST day.

The problem is that you have to pay upwards of $40 to get a good seat.  Being a wage-earner in a Least Developed Country, that pretty much puts it out of my daily budget.  I stuck a 2000-rupee note in my pocket (which is like $15) and negotiated.  

After hours of intense negotiations, I found a seat.  Not an ideal seat, because of the bars that block the lower-half of the procession, but a seat along the front rows of the procession.  It was better than standing on someone's rooftop and straining to see over the edge of the gables at the tops of elephant heads ten floors below, anyway.

First of all, people come by breakdancing with fire.  

It's possibly the coolest part of the procession.

Breakdancing with fire wheels.

And throwing it in the air.

I rest my case.

The best seats in the house!

There are about 90 elephants in the procession.

This is one of them.

Some are big ones, and some are lil babies.

Another elephant!

More elephants!!

The crowd looks on.

(Incidentally, this is why it was so hard to get places during the day).

This is the moment the whole crowd was waiting for.

The elephant is carrying something that may be the Buddha's tooth.

(Worth noting that the tooth is kept in a box in a temple during the day, and no one's allowed to see it.)

Everyone stood up when these elephants came past, to pay respects.

After that, the brainwaves scattered and minds wandered.

No one spoke, but you could feel the tensions had broken.

The rest of the procession was much the same as the first half.

More elephants!

You can't see clearly from this photo, but these are peacock dancers, and possibly the only female dancers in the parade.

Anyway, the procession lasted about 3 hours.  I didn't bother to hang around till the last dancers by, since everyone else was slipping away, and I wasn't eager to get stuck in the mass exodus.

Esala Perahera is an ancient custom, so it was a real privilege to be able to witness it as a foreigner, even if I had to pay for it.  Eh, the price was right.  Here's Wikipedia in case you're interested in the nitty-gritty:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esala_Perahera

Peridenya Botanical Gardens

Kandy has a Botanical Garden which is also a UNESCO world heritage site.  It's on the outskirts of town, and you can visit it with a taxi.  Or, if you're poor like me, you can take a bus to Peridenya.  It's nicer when you go early and there aren't a million tourists swarming all over the place.

Here's my pictures:

Pretty much the scariest suspension bridge you will ever go on.

View from the suspension bridge.

Weird-shaped trees.

More weird-shaped trees!

Some sort of cool water plant.

Really big palm trees 

(if you look at the two figures on the ground, that gives you an idea of the size).

Pretty flowers!  

From the Orchid House.

The pole at the bottom is waist-high.  It shows you how giant this bamboo is.

Pretty much the way a park is supposed to look.

Big Rock Kandy Lake

Yes, the name of the city is "Kandy", just like the delicious foodstuff that little kids love to indulge in.  After flying in and spending the night in Negombo, I took the first bus to Kandy to catch the annual Esala Perahera parade, which takes place over a ten day period.

Unfortunately, pretty much everyone in Sri Lanka came to visit the parade, so I wound up in a guesthouse on the outskirts of town (though when I say "outskirts", I mean a 15 minute walk from the center, lol).  It has a nice view anyway:

Kandy is famous for a large lake on the south side of town which has a lot of waterfoul, komodo dragons, and turtles to look at.  I entertained myself for a day by hanging around the lake and looking at things:

A great bird!

A great fallen tree!

An awesome duck!

A baby water foul.

Komodo dragon?

Turtle!

The lake also has some museums and cultural events nearby, which I skipped over.

Back Again

Where is holyrockthrower today?

Actually, I am back in Sri Lanka.  And I'm going to be here for a few more weeks.

Why? you ask. 

Because I received a very small amount of inheritence money, which I have determined is best spent doing something I have been wanting to do--wander through Sri Lanka and look at stuff. 

I like Sri Lanka.  It's small, it's compact, and you can get across the entire country in just a few hours for only a couple of dollars.  Yet there's such an incredible diversity of wildlife, terrain, and culture that you'd never think it was a country half the size of Ohio.

So, I thought I'd explore while I am still young enough and monied enough to do that.

Anyway, it's become exorbitantly difficult for me to update the blog, seeing that my only means of online communcation was forcibly taken from me several months ago.  It's even harder uploading pictures from a public venue, which often won't work or misfires on me.  Yet, I need somewhere to store the pictures I take, precisely because I DON'T have anywhere else to store my photos anymore.

So, I will be putting up lots of pictures, with maybe a blurb about each.

No Justice, No Peace

It's been about 3 or so weeks since I was attacked and robbed in a park on my way home.

I wish I could say there was some resolution to this, some form of justice, some answer...but that's not the way it is.  This is IRL, not a story, not a dream, not Hollywood.

The police did nothing to help me, no matter the price I offered them.  They claimed the robbers disappeared when they showed up at night, and therefore tracking my laptop was impossible.  They then claimed that because of the upcoming election, their full attention was needed in maintaining civil order.  Not helping me.

I doubt they made any effort at all, to be honest.

I actually tracked the thieves myself, with the aid of a local friend.  I wanted to find out about them, who they were, and what I could do to avenge myself.  Listening to some local security guards, we figured out that they operate every night in the park across my house.  (Is this not an indignity?)

We waited outside at night for them to show up.  I dressed up as bait (30 year old jail bait, lol) to get them to rob me again and capture them.  Instead of the two who assaulted me the last time, we found a gang of at least ten, some of whom were women.  So, we lacked the wherewithal to make any moves.

We followed them to see if they possessed a motorbike, or anything I could possibly destroy in retaliation for my losses.  In doing so, we stumbled across a social ill so large, any action we could take would have resulted in a woefully Phyrric victory.  At best.

There was nothing more we could do.

My entire last five years, so carefully stored, groomed, and maintained were taken from me by a pair of cowards who attacked from behind and punched me lying on the ground.  The only things I ever cared about in life were robbed, erased, and sold for no more than $25 in a second hand electronics shop to fuel the drug addictions of pathetic losers who are better off dead ... and my soul died guttering in the rain like a fallen swordsman.

So, that's my story of crime and punishment.  Apparently, crime DOES pay, and moreover, there's nothing YOU can do about it.  I've learned that the world is a brutal inhospitable place where only the most evil prevail.  Consequently, I've permanently lost respect for a) mankind and b) Cambodia.

For these reasons, I will be taking a leave of absence very shortly.  There is nothing for me to do here anymore except be bitter and useless.  I'm out.

Things Not to Tell a Robbery Victim

Some guy, a coworker of mine, managed to give me every bad piece of advice in the book within about 2.5 minutes.  I need to vent it here.

1. "I hope you learned a valuable lesson."  Needless to say, looking at someone notably dispossessed and bruised and impressing a moral lesson upon them is ... not helpful, to say the least.  You are not the teacher, and I am not a child who acted badly.  No "lesson" needed to be learned.  I made an error in judgement, which will continue to haunt me for the rest of my life.  You have *NO RIGHT* to treat me--or any robbery victim--as if this is a minor classroom lesson to be inculcated upon the benighted.  I will not stand for such treatment.  End of story.

2. "They always pick on the weakest ones."  I'm not weak, and you are my instant enemy for perceiving me that way.  Being a 116-pound female doesn't make me a total wimp; express sympathy if you want, but learn to do it without insulting me.

3.  "It's just a material possession.  Be grateful you didn't get hurt."  Um, NO.  The laptop was not a material possession.  It was my entire inner world, all my stories, all my creativity, all my secrets, and my entire last 5 years in a convenient, 3 pound carrying case.  It was my sole source of entertainment, beauty, and joy in a crumbling world.  It was my only convenient means of accessing the outer world, and it was taken from me.  It feels like I've lost a limb.

And see, the thing is, God gave me this remarkable capacity ... it's called "healing".  I'd have sooner taken hits and still have my laptop in my possession than the reality.  Don't dictate me what I should be grateful for.  I've lost my soul child, make no mistake.

4. "I always buy a can of mace.  You might want to invest in one, too."  It seems like sound advice till you consider that the damage is already done, that the mace would have been in the bag if I'd remembered it at all, and that I likely wouldn't have thought to use it even if I were holding it in my right hand.  I was holding keys in my right hand (between my fingers!) and I didn't even think to use those.  I was also holding an umbrella with a sharp point, and I didn't use that to my advantage either.

Let's face the reality: Mace is useless crap.

5.  ....
The elipsis represents silence.  Most people just try to change the subject or say, "Too Bad, here's a hug".  Most don't really share my sense of outrage.  If you don't care about my being robbed, don't ask me to tell my tale of it.  Please and thank you.

AT LEAST ACT LIKE YOU CARE.

Rant over.  

Loose Ends

I've spent the last several days trying to clean up the mess that those motherfuckers created for me.

Anger
On Sunday, I asked my tuk-tuk driver to take me to get my sim card replaced (I had to call him from a guesthouse since I didn't have a phone anymore, nor did I possess his phone number).  There was $40 on that card, and I needed to get it transferred to a new account before the jackasses used it themselves.

The problem was that I was still too angry in the morning to function as anything other than a sociopath.  I chewed out random strangers I passed on the streets, I ragged on my tuk tuk driver, and I threw a pen at the salesperson's head when she gave me the run around regarding my sim card.  (Yes, really.)  Then I stormed out.

I couldn't function like a normal human being, which was fine because no one else seemed to be fully functional either.  I couldn't call anyone, do anything, contact the police, whatever.  I drifted around town in a state of rage and confusion.

Finally, at the end of the day, I approached a cell phone kiosk and bought an old cell phone for $15, along with a new SIM card.  At least that problem was solved.

Business
The next day was when the fun started. I was somewhat emotionally recovered by then--enough not to be on the brink of criminal insanity anyway.

- I went back to the phone company (I took a number and waited half an hour in penance for my outburst the prior day) and got a new SIM card, my old number, and all my credit back.  The thieves hadn't thought to place any calls on it, thank God.  And now they can't get anything for it, seeing that my phone was a beat up worthless piece of shit IN ARABIC.
- I went to the bank and ascertained that a) my money was OK and that b) the account is not accessible without ID.
- I went to the embassy and scheduled an appointment to report the robbery (useless though that may be)
- I went to the police.  That's the interesting part of this tale:

The local  police station is located right behind my house pretty much.  They don't really speak English, so I had to go with a translator (not possessing the language skills to report a robbery).  Like most things I've done in Cambodia, it was like an episode of absurdity and confusion based on Being John Malkovich. (Floor 7 1/2 and all.)

First of all, there were no police on duty.  We finally found the local commander sitting in a darkened room on a yellow plastic interrogation chair, shirtless.  No fan running, no A/C unit.  I don't know why, either (but this sort of thing is a commonplace occurrence round these parts).  He was way too young and hot to be a real policeman, let alone anyone's commander.  I refrained from pointing this out at the time.

Instead, I filed my report--in this case, it involved tearing a used piece of computer paper in half and filling out the particulars on the unused part.  I also included a graphic illustration of the computer in question, as if it would be remotely helpful.  Not in English, anyway.

Then I promised him a few hundred dollars if the computer was returned to me (thus, effectively eliminating any chances I will have at entering the foreign service).

Then I paid five dollars as a gesture of good faith and left.

It's not much, and it will never work, but it's about the only thing I can do at this point.  At least it stops me from raging and foaming and threatening physical violence at service personnel.

Again I Have Survived; Again I Have Lost

All the self-defense classes I kept forgetting to take did not come in handy Saturday night when I was forcibly divested of my laptop and phone in the Vietnamese Memorial park as I walked home late.

I make it a general rule not to carry my laptop around at night, but unfortunately, late hours on a laptop are my only means of chatting with people in other countries.  I digress.

In case you want to know what it actually feels like to get robbed, read my blow by blow account below:

I was walking home, minding my own business, feeling perfectly calm, when a giant arm suddenly grabbed my head from behind.  This didn't alarm me so much as it utterly confused me.  It was not violent or unfriendly, it almost felt like someone was playing a joke on me.  Lacking samurai training, I did not have the intelligence or common sense to duck, to punch the guy who was doing it, to knife him with my key, or to turn on him and scream something catchy, like, "That's my purse!  I DON'T KNOW YOU!".  I was just utterly WTF??

Then a second guy grabbed my bag from behind.  Him, I did fight with, but only so much as was possible with the first guy bear hugging me into submission.  I somehow wound up face-down on the ground, holding my bag like my life depended on it.  I honestly don't remember if they forced me down, or if I fell in the struggle.  I also can't remember what stopped me from grabbing my bag with both arms--if the first guy was holding me down, or if I was just that fucking stupid.  I may have frozen up.

The man grabbing my bag proceeded to pull it off my arm so hard that the strap broke, leaving me with pretty much the bloodiest, ooziest rug burn you've seen in your life, all over my arm and underarm.  He then punched me in the side, which, given that he was a coward and utter wimp, didn't even hurt (or even leave a bruise).

Picking myself up off the ground, I proceeded to chase them, enraged to a barbaric degree.  I was going to kill them, I really was.  I mean physically beat the shit out of them...somehow.  I'd have gouged their eyes out with the metal point of my umbrella, anyway.  Or something.  OK, being a five-seven, 110 pound female with health issues, I probably would have come off the worst in that fight--but I am prone delusions of invincibility and fully intended to unleash my wrath on them.

But, my thyroid-wracked legs weren't really any match for those of hardened criminals, and they got away with my laptop and cell phone.  A tuk tuk driver found me, and not understanding my pleas for help, took me to the nearest bar, where a random expat met me and tried to calm me down (which wasn't possible at that point).

She gave me $20 and gave me a lift home, and recommended I contact my embassy.  At home, I promptly destroyed everything made of glass in my house with my unbloody umbrella, such was my unchanneled rage.  Then I proceed to go on a 6 hour rant off my balcony, at the top of my lungs, about the evils of Cambodian society.  I sounded like Moammar fucking Qaddafi--challenging the powers that be like a lunatic.  Now all the neighbors hate me, which is fine, because I hate all of them.

But let me recount why I was so angry.  Not just the violation--I've lost everything I valued in life.  My ENTIRE LIFE was on my computer.  If they'd burned down my house and everything I physically owned, it wouldn't have been half as devastating to me.  That's not an exaggeration.

Here's why it sucks:
My cellphone--
- was from Dubai and could write in multiple languages, including Farsi and Arabic
- had my photo of me with Sheikh Mohammed
- had all the contacts I've accrued since 2007
- had an ornament that a student of mine gave me
- had recorded music

It's a beat-up piece of shit, complete with holes where you can see into the internal components, and it had no value to anyone except me.

My computer contained--
- photographs dating back to 2008, including personal ones and detailed photos of all my world travels
- everything I've ever downloaded
- my music
- all my Chinese lessons
- all my Khmer lessons
- my copies of passport photos
- my resume
- all my created artwork
- all the blog entries I was going to post (like the one I was illustrating about dengue fever that now you will never read)
- my private journal
- my stories I was going to publish
- all my personality theory work (some of which was expensively gotten)
- several online books
- my collection of awesome images I'd found online
- the passwords to all my accounts
- lots of embarrassing personal details
- my internet access
- my access to everything in the world, including my ability to easily apply for a job in Japan (my projected next move)
- my local bank account

What I was most depressed about is that no one else seemed to care about this.  To me, my life is over.  I am ruined.  I've lost my family, my health, my wealth, my country, my place of residence, my future, and now the only object that I vested anything in and had anything I remotely cared about.  It's as though they robbed me of my very soul.

Worse, it's going to be sold for $50, memory wiped clean, and be sold at a huge markup to some spoiled brat.  My entire life, all my memories, my hopes and dreams, everything I valued and cared for in this world--worth a beating and $50.

I can only be grateful of two things--
- I didn't get raped
- I didn't get killed
-I can't even be grateful that I wasn't hurt, cause I'd honestly rather still be in possession of my computer even if I had some cuts, bruises, and a few cracked ribs.