Tooth Temple & Pack Up

I spend my last few days in Sri Lanka in the lively town of Kandy. The Temple of the Tooth houses a tooth of Buddha and is the largest shrine of the Sri Lankan Buddhists. Every day, thousands of people flock to the large temple complex directly on Kandy Lake in an alcohol-free October festival atmosphere.

In front of it, dozens of traders loudly offer flowers as sacrificial offerings. Their market cries sound like a spastic tuktuk stuttering through rush hour on speed. I walk past them almost every day – and fail every time I try not to grin.

Buddhists are generally quite a peaceful religion. But when it comes to dentures, the fun stops for them too. Indians and Sri Lankans fought each other so fiercely over dentures for centuries. So much so that the Portuguese were already fed up with the constant back and forth by the middle of the 16th century.

In a cloak-and-dagger operation, they snatched the tooth – some claim dentures – ground it to dust and scattered its remains far out to sea. But they had not reckoned with its reincarnation. Just a short time later, the tooth was back in the temple, bigger than ever and in its new appearance strikingly similar to a bull’s horn. No wonder Buddha fasted so much.

Kandy is famous for its dances. After visiting the Kandy Dance Show, I understand why homosexuality is forbidden in Sri Lanka. It has nothing to do with the stubborn homophobia of Vladimir’s morons. This is all about preserving cultural heritage! The women dance extremely gracefully and gracefully. But the men just look gay in their nipple-free support corsets. Legal outing would therefore be the purest destruction of tradition.

Heavy thunderstorms sweep over Kandy on the last two days. My alternative programme is an Ayurveda spa and the purchase of a tailor-made shirt. At €8, both are worthwhile fun in contrast to the grossly overpriced national parks, temples and elephant vultures. In the evening, I edit 52 Gb of raw footage from Kalpitiya into a really cool four-minute kit video and take care of the homepages of some clients.

On the bus to Negombo, a spin-off of the Augsburger Puppenkiste is on: Sri Lanka is looking for the next superstar. Violins and mullets are all the rage this year. An even better show takes place in front of it. At every stop, flying vendors take to the stage, selling essential travelling supplies such as toilet brushes, gas masks, stain devils or simply rocket fuel. Their captivating presentations are accompanied by eloquent praise and give me a four-carat grin on the 100 kilometres to Negombo.

There are some things I didn’t understand in Sri Lanka, such as the absolute ban on smoking in public. “Absolutely” is still simple: it bothers absolutely nobody. But what’s the point of a cigarrette price policy of €80 per packet by our standards if you can easily reduce the intake of air pollutants within a 1 kilometre radius of every bus by 75% by actively smoking?

Sri Lanka is incredibly colourful and varied. So colourful, in fact, that after just two weeks, my treasured Photoshop dynamic correction function had to apply for Harz IV. Unfortunately, it fell through Sri Lanka’s coarse-meshed social net and hit my desktop hard. With a sprained foot, she is now lounging around on my desktop, walking on arrack and speaking Sinhala faecal language. If “arsehole” sounded as funny in German as it does in Sinhala, our eternally yesterday would have no chance of beating up foreigners for laughing together.

As much as I needed a massive dose of kiting again: I should have done a lot more travelling in Sri Lanka. You only realise how much magic and good people you’re missing out on when you swap the grey of a place for the colours of the street.