『Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast』のカバーアート

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast

Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast

著者： The Ceylon Press
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 From elephants to sapphires, tea to cricket, Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast explores a remote and secret Eden to discover the stories behind the things that make Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan. 2024 The Ceylon Press 政治・政府 旅行記・解説 社会科学
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  • Kandy Fringes

    Kandy Fringes
    2025/05/22
    3 分
  • Kandy Central

    Kandy Central
    2025/05/22
    Welcome to an episode of Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast, brought to you by The Ceylon Press._________________________________________________________________________________________Very close encounters in Kandy Central is the subject of this guide - a travelogue fixed on those attractions found in the heartland of Kandy city central an easy ride from Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel.Surprisingly, the city is barely 500 years old, an adolescent in Sri Lankan terms, given that the country’s recorded history goes back with stylish ease for at least 2,500 years.Not that anyone dares tell Kandyites this particular fact. For the city regards itself – and to be fair, is greatly regarded by much of the rest of the country – as its true and real soul. Its heart.This characteristic is not something acquired merely by the fact that it houses the island’s most precious possession – the tooth of Lord Buddha. It is also down to the fact that Kandy withstood wave after wave of colonial invasions. It was the very last island kingdom to fall to foreigners. By the time of its formal capture, in 1815, it had already resisted and survived over 300 years of colonial rule that had engulfed the rest of the island.Through all this time it was able to foster, protect and develop the distinctive Singhala culture that had once permeated the entire island before European soldiers, administrators, vicars, businessmen and planters arrived, their gimlet priorities starving the island’s culture of all that was most needed to sustain it.Kandy was the Sinhalese citadel, offering its protection to the rest of the country for all but the 133 years that it was occupied by the British. And this, more than anything else, is what makes Kandy so very important across the island. In a multicultural country still working on how best to present itself, this particular legacy is enduringly important.It is, all the same, a city that demands your full attention, if you are ever to get beneath the interminable traffic jams, edifices inspired by recent Soviet style planning decisions; traffic plans that could be bettered be dead civets; and armies of unnecessarily stressed people forced to talk on tiny or invisible pavements as the cars go sluggishly by on wide roads, which once were shaded by gorgeous trees – before health and safety got to work.If ever there is a city weeping for love and attention; for common sense and decent urban planning, it is Kandy. It is a city that has fallen victim to the grim priorities of businessmen and women, bureaucrats, traffic warlords; and the largely unfulfilled promises of passing politicians.So before setting off the explore the city, take a seat at the Royal Bar & Hotel, an old walawwa that dishes out welcome bowls of chips and frosted glasses of lime juice. It is a good place to contemplate all this before seeing it for yourself. The hotel walawwa is typical of many of the buildings that haunt the city’s tiny, crowded streets, betraying with hints of bashful sorrow, the still remaining traces of striking 17th, 18th, and 19th century vernacular architecture. Balconies and verandas, screened windows and opaque courtyards hide behind shop hoardings that have yet to be bettered anywhere on the island for their chronic ugliness. Even so, to the discerning eye, beauty is there to be glimpsed; there to remind you that all is not yet lost, architecturally. For Kan dy is nothing if not the most secretive of cities: its wonders reveal themselves best to those who look most. It is said that nearly 500 historical buildings hide in plain sight in this way along city streets that still follow the medieval grid that first encompassed this island capital.One such building is the Kataragama Devalaya, a Hindu shrine built by an 18th century Buddhist king. It is a perfect example of just such a surviving treasure – its architecture enlivened by the most intricate carvings, and colours chosen to forever banish grey. Still more dazzling is the nearby Pillaiyar Kovil, a Hindu temple dedicated to Ganesh, the elephant-headed son of Siva; and built by a Buddhist king for his Tamil Dobhi. Its Muslim equal is the arresting Red Mosque, built around 100 years ago with a candy striped façade in reds and whites. Spotting hidden wonders like these is like playing hide and seek with a particular naughty child. You eventually get the hang of it. It is like coming out of a major cataract operation and seeing the world as once it was. For Kandy has plenty of beauty to reveal to the patient eye. And if shopping is your thing there are three ways to best do it. Either throw all your chips in at the Kandy City Centre, a ten-storey mall built to an almost inoffensive architectural style in the centre of the city.Or hit upon the scores of tiny hops selling everything from bananas to bags, batiks to bangles in the old Kandy Bazaar. Or wander up and down the many streets in the centre in the hope of coming ...
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  • Very Close Encounters

    Very Close Encounters
    2025/05/22
    Very Close Encounters are the subject of this guide - a travelogue fixed on those attractions, adventures and activities that lie easily within a 10-15 miles journey from Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. Kipling believed that to understand a country you had to smell it. Especially the perfumes of its past. Yet the past is documented in so many different ways - in books, or architecture; in music or even food. In Sri Lanka, it is the temples that best hold its story. The island’s temples are far more than just places of worship. Read them right and you read the real record of the land. They are garrulous witnesses to its kings and wars, its festivals and customs, everything in fact that reflects back the country’s life for over two thousand years. Fortunately, two of its greatest medieval temples lie near at hand, together with a Buddhist temple that looks Hindu; a Hindu temple built by the last Buddhist king; a temple equally favoured by both religions; a Victorian church that’s escaped from the home counties - and the holiest Buddhist site on the island. Equally close is a mountain range beloved of trekkers; and one named for gnomes adorned by a vast statue; a lake beloved by cormorants and pelicans; a forest sanctuary for birds – and probably the best botanical garden in Aisa. In between these places are lands of a different sort – tea plantations; a farm famed for mushrooms; melancholy cemeteries and a battlefield where colonial ambitions met a bloody end. Close by is the island’s greatest surviving royal palace; frescos that tell tales centuries old; a rock pierced by a road; and an antique version of the Nine Arch Bridge. And for oniomanias there is a shop and museum dedicated to tea; a village dedicated to copper and brass and an antique shop that never ends. But let’s start with a song. All good days begin with a rousing hymn and this one starts with “All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small, All things wise and wonderful, The Lord God made them all.” So goes Mrs Cecil Alexander's anthem in “Hymns for Little Children,” published in that most revolutionary of years – 1848. But it is her second verse that calls most to twitchers and eager ornithologists. “Each little bird that sings,” it goes: “he made their glowing colours, He made their tiny wings.” It is a tune worth humming as you drive to UdawaththaKele Forest, 12 miles away from The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel and perched just above Kandy’s Temple of The Tooth. It is one of the country’s loveliest bird forests: remote, wild – but accessible. All creatures great and small live in its 104 hectares, along with orchids and ferns, four hundred and sixty plant species; butterflies, snakes, snails, lizards, toads, frogs, insects, monkeys, civet, deer, loris, boars, porcupine, the ruddy mongoose, giant flying squirrels, bandicoots, and bats. But it is of course the birds that draw most of all. Over eighty species have been recorded, many endemic, including Layard's parakeet, the yellow-fronted and brown-capped babblers, the Sri Lanka hanging parrot, the three-toed kingfisher, mynas, golden-fronted and blue-winged leafbirds, spotted and emerald doves, Tickell's blue flycatcher, the white-rumped shama, the crimson-fronted barbet, the serpent eagle, and brown fish owl. Appropriately, for a trip inspired by a hymn to animals, just beneath the forest lies the Church of St Paul, built in 1846, two years before Mrs Cecil Alexander's hymn was published. Over succeeding decades, the church’s terracotta bricks - now weathered to a red-ochre hue – would have echoed with the tuneful musical notation added to her hymn by William Monk. Monk’s great other hymn was “Abide with Me” – and that is precisely what this most home counties of Anglican churches has done. It has withstood more than the most expected tests of time. Just two years after its completion it weathered the shattering 1848 Matale Rebellion – and then all the succeeding wars and insurrections that beset the island, protected by vast gates of wrought iron fabricated far away in Edwardian England. Inside the dimly lit church is a majestic pipe organ donated by Muslim businessmen from Bradford, a silver-gilt communion set gifted by the King of England – and a blazing 1874 stained glass window of the Crucifixion, the Ascension, the Angel in the Tomb, and the Nativity, the gift of a planter’s widow. Outside, beyond its residual beam is Kandy Lake, and its prospect of a bracing walk. Known as the Sea of Milk, the lake is surround by a dramatic Cloud Wall across much of its three-kilometer circumference and is overhung by huge rain trees. Across its eighteen-metre depth lurk whistling ducks and monitor lizards, turtles, cormorants, egrets, pelicans, eagles, owls, herons, and numerous fish including an exotic and savage 9-foot-long alligator Gar – a fish with a crocodilian head, a wide ...
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    44 分

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