Elephant orphanage fulfills a bucket list

Did you hear the one about the elephant who thought he was a dog? He only wanted to eat leaves and bark. (Sorry, I made that up.)

But we had the most amazing experience today visiting an elephant orphanage in Pinnawala, Sri Lanka. This was part of our second full day of visiting this island nation south of India on the Indian Ocean.

Our day started with a most interesting 90 km drive to this mountainous region of Sri Lanka that includes Pinnawala and Kandy, the second largest, and perhaps the most beautiful city, in Sri Lanka. We are extremely fortunate to have a wonderful and most informed professional tour guide, who is also our friend, Upali's, cousin.

The drive exposed us to the interesting country side, where we observed luscious vegetation, exceptional roads, fascinating vendors and unusually sane traffic.

At different areas, road side vendors offered different things such as lychees, cashews, pineapples, durians, drums, car seats, inflatable toys, and so on.

We arrived in Pinnawala and were excited to see our first ever elephant in the field. Then we entered the elephant orphanage and were blown away with the many elephants grazing and bathing themselves, under the supervision of orphanage workers.

You have to know Cintra to know how special this experience was for us. Our house has countless elephants in every medium -- too many to display.

And now here we were. It was really fulfilling her bucket list . We witnessed elephants being fed. A three year old elephant could gulps down almost a liter of milk in seconds. Then we watched some eat. Yes, they prefer leaves and bark.

And sadly, there was one separated from the others because it had a damaged leg from a bomb blast by terrorists.

At 2 p.m. We witnessed a daily parade of elephants into a shallow river for two hours of basking, bathing and exercise.

The only thing to top this experience is to ride an elephant, which may happen on our next stop.

The second fascinating experience in Kandy was a cultural show in a local hall. The show featured Singhalese performers doing drumming, dancing, and fire eating and walking on fiery hot coals

Following the show we went to perhaps the biggest attraction for tourists, namely the Buddhist Temple of the Tooth. This temple is perhaps the most important Buddhist holy place in the world.

All of these are conveniently located in this spectacular mountain city of Kandy. Much of this part of the country seemed to have been favored by the English settlers back in the 14th and 15th centuries and hence the King erected beautiful structures, created a lake, even built an island, to complete this picturesque gem.

We hope to have much more to report on our second day of this adventure. Meanwhile, I encourage you to read a bit about the elephant orphanage or the village of Pinnawala and the Temple of the Tooth, to get more facts about these attractions.