Arriving in Kandy, the other day, one of the first things we did was to look for a cheap scooter to rent so to explore the surrounding area. This proved much harder than expected. Whereas in every other part of Sri Lanka with significant tourism where I’ve been you could find a scooter at pretty much every second house for 500-800 LKR per day, in Kandy we looked in vain for a similar deal.
Scooters were scarce, to begin with. We only managed to find a handful of them available, mostly in big hotels and a couple of rental agencies. And all of them asked for a minimum of 1,500 LKR after bargaining. The whole thing was very discouraging.
Our luck seemed to take a good turn later in the evening. One of those tuk-tuk-drivers/travel-guides/girl-fixers/pot-pushers/ask-me-anything-I’ll-do-it lads loitering around the touristic centre of the city claimed he could fix for us a scooter tomorrow for 1,000 LKR. It was a decent deal. We got his number and agreed to meet by the following noon.
So we did. I, my friend, the lad, and two more of his friends, we got on his tuk-tuk and began driving up the narrow roads ascending the steep slopes surrounding the city of Kandy. The poor engine hummed grumblingly of the exertion. The views down to the lake of Kandy and the enveloped in thick vegetation city were gorgeous.
We made a number of stops along the way. The lad would go off and speak to some dude or another whom we expected to be the scooter owner… but none of them was. Eventually, he pulled the tuk-tuk over beside an array of parked scooters. “This is the one,” he said tapping the seat of one of them with his open palm. “Will it do for you?” he asked. “Totally!” I responded; it was a very decent bike. “Alright, let’s drive up the hill where the owner lives” he then prompted.
Stopping to chat briefly with every second person we crossed ways with, we eventually parked outside of a house where he walked in. He soon came out by himself again. “So?” I requested to know. “He’s not at home now. Will come back soon. Let’s go and chill at a friend’s place while we wait” he suggested… “Whatever” I retorted.
We drove a short distance, parked, and all the five of us walked into a shoddy house on the edge of a steep cliff. That friend of his was something between a human and a zombie. He surely was hooked on heroin – which surprised me because I’d never seen a junkie in Sri Lanka before – and I also suspect he might have been sniffing perfumes, paints, or whatever other chemical shit. He overall was an alright bloke, however.
He invited us to have a seat on the floor mattress. I did so promptly and lit a fag, waiting to see what is going to happen with excited curiosity; something interesting was certain to happen under such peculiar circumstances.
Sure enough, it did happen very soon. He walked up a narrow staircase and came down carrying two little marijuana trees in two plastic pots. He presented them to us proudly. Both of them were male, which means that they don’t bud, so they have zero value insofar as getting high is in question. Furthermore, even if they were female, I very much doubt they would get to bud at all in that climate. I wondered what he cultivated them for.
Soon enough I found out. He gingerly cut a bunch of leaves off with the scissors; folded them within a newspaper sheet; and ironed them over! The bloke was mad. What was he up to? I barely managed to suppress loud laughter down in my throat. He recovered the dried leaves out of the sheet, crumbled them with his fingers, and rolled them into a hefty joint. And yes! He lit the thing up!
He passed the joint around to everybody till it reached me. I politely refused to take it, both because I couldn’t think of a good reason to smoke ironed marijuana leaves and because I could think of a very good reason not to: they surely aspired to get hold of some cash trying to sell that crap to us; and smoking even a couple of puffs from it would give them an excuse to be extra persistent on their bid.
What I initially failed to understand was that they weren’t actually putting an effort in order to scam us. All of them for real believed that they got high by smoking the leaves. I figured that out when I noted the lad handing some cash to the junkie guy, and him giving him one of the trees in exchange wrapped in a black plastic bag. The five of us who’d come there together left thereafter.
We drove back to the motorbike owner only to find out that he wasn’t there yet and wasn’t intent on coming back on the same day. The lad suggested we go and try another guy, but I judged that all this was nonsense and driving around five people on a tuk-tuk carrying a marijuana tree wasn’t probably the wisest thing to do. So we bid goodbye and left on foot.
After all, having before called a bunch of different folks we found on the Internet with no results, we found a guy working at Suisse Hotel from whom we rented a scooter for 1,000 LKR a day. He was just starting out with his side business, so I assume that by now he must have also raised his price to the city’s average. Anyhow, we got the scooter from him for a fair price and without having a license, and we used it for two day-trips: one to Sigiriya and one to Nuwara Eliya.
Accommodation and Activities in Sri Lanka
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