Saturday, 1 November 2014

SRI LANKA varia (Carlos)

Des photos prises au hasard des routes. Different pictures taken in Sri Lanka. Fotos diversas. 
Hedging your bets?... Seen in a tuk-tuk 
Éoliennes. Au Sri Lanka.
Crossing the road
At one point we went through a National Park on our way to Sigiriya. Many wild elephants still live there. 

We were driving on a road, and our guide suddenly stopped. We saw a man with a stick waving at us. This guy (about two meters long...) was teased out of his riverside nest with fish, for our private viewing pleasure. There is a whole group of them living quite close to people (there are people pretty much everywhere in Sri Lanka) 

Flor de loto
Quand il pleut, il pleut. 
There are a large number of artificial water reservoirs, built and maintained by the authorities centuries ago, some still used today. Sri Lanka gets a lot of rain during the Monsoon season, but it would not be able to sustain such a dense population without them
We refrained from talking politics, but it was pretty obvious that the Army had a very large presence in the country, following the Civil War. There will be national elections soon, and we saw a vast number of electoral publicity, and a truly prodigious number of posters and signs with the President (former General) doing this or that, usually accompanied by the local guy from his party. 
While the vast majority of Sri Lankans are Singhalese and Buddhist, there are minorities, of which the largest by far are Tamils, the majority of which are Hindu. Most live in the north, around Jaffna, but we saw many Hindu temples all over, as well as a fair number of churches, specially around Colombo. We saw this vast temple on our way to Anuradhapura from Colombo. We sensed no religious tension whatsoever, at least in the regions we visited. We asked our driver, and he told us it was fairly common for people of different religious backgrounds (less with Moslems) to get married, although often against the wishes of their parents. We learned that there is very little "dating" as we understand it, outside of Colombo.

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