Sunrise at Ella

We got up early to watch the sun rise over the Ella Gap.  Ella is in a valley where you have a view to the coastal plain 1000m below.

Hill Country and Tea Plantations

We drove to Nuwara Eliya to see the waterfalls and the tea plantations.  Nuwara Eliya means "City of Light" and was the favourite hill station of the British.

Coffee used to be grown in Sri Lanka, but the plantations were destroyed by a disease and the people turned to growing tea instead.  The hill country is perfect for tea:  warm, high and sloping.

Kandy

We spent a couple of days in the mountains, in Kandy.  We drove around the beautiful town, visited a tea factory, the botanical gardens and the Temple of the Tooth.

Kandy is Sri Lanka's 2nd largest city - though you would hardly know it!  The people of Kandy were never conquered by the Portuguese or Dutch, but unfortunately Kandy fell to the British in 1815.

The Temple of the Tooth is right on the lake.  It houses Sri Lanka's most important Buddhist relic - a tooth of Buddha which was apparently snatched from the flames of Buddha's funeral fire in 543 BC and then smuggled into Sri Lanka in the hair of a princess.

A week in Sri Lanka

On the way back to India after the Christmas holidays we stopped off for a week in Sri Lanka.  Our first stop on the way up to Kandy was an elephant sanctuary.

Butterflies

The Mahim Nature Park is full of butterflies!

Simply Blue

The past few weeks have seen a lot of music in Mumbai.  The Thanksgiving weekend we went to Fatoumata Diawara at the Blue Frog.  She is a musician from Mali, though now living in France.  She is full of energy and sang and danced the night away.

The following weekend we went to Bandra to the Simply the Blues concert.  The highlight of this was Dana Gillespie who was really, really blue!

Giving Back

Today was a really special day!  A couple of weekends ago at the Google Summit that was hosted at ASB I ran two sessions about taking and editing photos and turning them into an eBook.  We took a photographic walk through a local neighbourhood close to the school, photographing the colours, shapes, textures, patterns and light - and lots and lots of photographs of the local people. Following our previous Day 9 experiences with photography, I was keen to print out, laminate and give these photographs back to the people.  Today it was such a joy to walk back into the village with the photographs those people in my sessions took to see if we could find the people in our photos - some were very easy to spot as they are wearing the same clothes that we had in the photo.  My sessions at the Google Summit were entitled Powerful Photography, and today I saw just how powerful photography can be - especially when seeing the surprise and pleasure on the people's faces when we gave them back their photographs.

Giving Back - slideshows