Travel Day 1113 – Colombo to Kandy, SRI LANKA
Over the last couple of days it wasn’t quite easy to decide where to go after Colombo, but in the end the only logical solution seemed to be heading to Kandy and seeing the famous Esala Perahera Festival…
Lit-up Elephants at Esala Perahera Festival in Kandy, Sri Lanka
Esala Perahera was deemed to be one of Asia’s most fascinating festivals and it had been recorded in European documents since the 16th century. Celebrated in honor of the sacred tooth relic of the Buddha, which had been enshrined in Kandy since the 4th century AD, Esala Perahera was set up as a 10 day festival ending on the full moon of the month of Esala. The climax of the annual festival and the most important night in Sri Lanka was obviously the one with the full moon celebration, which happened to be on this very day today…
Ignoring all the warnings that hotels in Kandy and roadside seats needed to be reserved weeks or even months in advance, I made my way to the train station really early to try my luck. As it turned out, the trains were fully booked out, leaving me with no other option than catching a local chicken bus to Kandy. Luckily buses were always available and they simply left when fully packed, shaking and rattling me the 100 kilometers to Kandy in just a little more than four hours time…
Esala Perahera Parade Dancers and Elephants in Kandy, Sri Lanka
As modern as Sri Lanka had seemed in Colombo, distances on the road were apparently still measured quite traditionally, in time. But luckily everything else appeared to be not as cut and dried as well. While hotel prices for Kandy during festival times had been advertised in Colombo to start at 6500 rupees (50 USD), as soon as I arrived and left the bus, things looked quite different already. Local touts were actually offering hotel deals for as little as 4000 rupees which left me thinking that it should be possible to get a place to stay for even less. And luckily my gambling paid off, it was really possible to negotiate a last-minute deal for 2500 rupees…
While this was still a lot of money, at least it seemed to be the best deal one could get during the festival time and it solved my first problem. The second problem that still existed was that of the seat tickets. It really seemed illogical why one would need seat tickets to see a street parade, especially because all parades I had ever been to were standing parades and free of any charge. But when walking to the festival site and along the route of the Perahera Parade, I realized that the only place one could watch the spectacle from for free, was the sidewalks. And these sidewalks had been occupied without a single gap by local families since the early morning hours…
Drummers at Esala Perahera Tooth Parade in Kandy, Sri Lanka
After having been chased away by the police a few times, I realized that at this stage, meaning in the late afternoon of the final festival day, the only choice I had to actually see something of the parade was buying a seat somewhere. A seat for the Esala Perahera meant in this case a simple plastic chair that someone had put in front of their shop, inside their storefront or on their private balcony and selling it to tourists for some serious money. The prices began at 10 000 rupees (76 USD), my hotel had offered me a seat ticket for 7500 rupees and-word-on-the-streets was 3 to 4000 as a last-minute offer…
Once more luckily after some serious negotiations, it was possible to get a seat higher up for a minimum of 2000 rupees and in a building that seemed to be a school on non-festival days. This was actually a really good deal, but considering that my take-out lunch yesterday had been wrapped accidentally in a pay stub, telling me that a local salary in Sri Lanka lay between 4100 (31 USD) and 5800 rupees (44 USD) per month, everything was still a real tourist rip-off. The money made here in Kandy from visitors during these 10 days of Esala Perahera was in that respect some serious income for the few local people who had either plastic seats or hotel beds on offer…
Esala Perahera Fire Handlers at Kandy Tooth Festival in Sri Lanka
But at least the parade was well worth the money spent and I was glad that I had overcome all the troubles to get to Kandy for the final day of the tooth festival. Even if we had to wait for several hours before the Esala Perahera Parade was actually reaching our position, once it did arrive, it did so with full blast. There were people with cracking whips, people handling fire, people with weapons, dancers, drummers and a lot of interestingly lit up elephants. Actually each group of people had their own costumes, their own instruments and was led by their own elephants…
And while the hours simply passed by unnoticed, eventually the main elephant that was walking on white linen while carrying a tooth relic replica, reached our position. At that point the parade was slowly winding down and coming to an end. Even the light colors of the elephants turned from white over blue and yellow to finally red. By then it was about 1 am and the seemingly endless procession finally reached the big temple. Wow, it had been a long and exhausting day, but being part of the tooth festival and seeing the Esala Perahera Parade had been well worth the efforts and it was definitely one of the best celebrations I had ever seen…
Find all Kandy Esala Perahera photos here.
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