SRI LANKA: HENRY'S BATIKS AND A HOME VISIT

On our third morning in Sri Lanka, we began the day with an excellent breakfast buffet at our hotel. It had lots of Sri Lankan options, which is what I ate. I noticed that most of the people in the dining room seemed to be focused on the western-style food, which baffles me. Why eat what you can eat at home when you can try out the local foods? Crazy.

Our first stop was a batik "factory."

Batik work is not a native craft, but rather was brought to the island from Indonesia. However, it has become one of the Sri Lanka's most popular tourist souvenirs.

Our guide (in the purple dress) described the process of designing original patterns and then using wax resist methods to create the beautiful cloths:

We've seen other batik shops in Ghana and in the Caribbean, so this wasn't new, but we did end up buying a large cloth covered in colorful parrots. Here it is on our dining room table:

We continued on our way, stopping at a bank ATM for some cash. This teapot water fountain was out in front:

Our next activity was a visit to a local home to learn about life in the Sri Lanka countryside. Sanjay parked the car and we hopped aboard this cart drawn by a "Kenyan cow," a docile beast with a great hump on its neck:

 We moseyed a few kilometers down a paved road until we arrived at a beautiful lake:

 . . . where we got on an odd-looking boat, which they called a catamaran. (It wasn't like any catamaran we've ever seen, that's for sure.) A plank was nailed to two canoes and topped by a table that served as our seat:

 One man sat in the rear and paddled us across the lake:

That looks a lot like Gilligan's Island up ahead. I'm glad we had blue skies:

Out of the boat and on land, the first structure we saw was this house on stilts. It looked like a treehouse, but Sanjay said it had something to do with elephants. We can't remember if it's an "escape from stampeding elephant" tower or a "lookout for stampeding elephant" tower or something else, but it would be a kid's dream tree house, wouldn't it?

To the right of the tower was what is best described as a picnic area, Sri Lanka-style. I'm sure it was built specifically for the purpose of hosting tourists. There was a long table running most of the length of the building with a cooking area at the far end:

We were introduced to this women in the bright green skirt and pink blouse. She would be our teacher/hostess/chef for the next hour or two. First, she showed us how to husk rice by pounding it using a long, heavy stick. I tried it myself, and everyone laughed at my clumsy efforts, but then Bob tried and he was way worse than I was. I felt vindicated.

She dumped the pounded rice onto this woven board used for sifting. Flipping the rice into the air separated it from the chaff:

. . . leaving this:

The next ingredient needed for our lunch was coconut meat. The woman broke open a coconut, we drank the milk, and then she showed us how to shred the meat with a nifty tool:

Bob hard at work, shredding a coconut:

Our chef demonstrated how make daal from yellow lentils, peppers, salt, coconut milk squeezed out of the grated meat, onions, limes, and some spices that I can't remember.


She used a stone roller to turn the peppers into paste:

Everything was added to the lentils in a pot and set on a wood burning oven on a mud-based counter:

We mixed the grated coconut with peppers to make coconut sambal, a flavorful garnish. A few additional dishes were added (which had been cooked earlier), and we sat down to eat our lunch:

. . . using our fingers instead of a fork or a spoon, Sri Lanka-style. The food was scrumptious, and the meal was maybe my second favorite meal of the trip, mostly because we helped in its preparation:

The woman's daughter, who had been helping in the kitchen, showed us how palm fronds were woven to make roofing for the structure we were in. Looking at this picture, I realize that she has a watchband identical to one I have. That must be either an Apple Watch or a Fitbit on her wrist. It's a small world.

I felt like a giant Alice gone down the rabbit hole next to these petite women:

Like so many places in Sri Lanka, there was a nice garden on the property. I'm guessing everything grows well in the warm, wet climate:

Rather than returning the way we came, via the lake and the cattle cart, we got to ride back in this flashy tuk tuk, skipping the lake entirely and returning in a fraction of the time the trip out had taken.