Sri Lanka- Day 2

I found my pictures of the house we rented! It is only a couple years old and very nice and in aperfect setting.

 The view from the pool:

 On Day 2 we headed into town to get onto a river cruise through the mangrove forest. While we were traveling through town we got stopped by a procession on the way to the temple. It was amazing. The men in front were playing music and the women behind are carrying plates of fresh fruit for the offerings to Buddha. At the very back were some girls in costumes that were performing dances. I asked if it was a special occasion but apparently this is the usual fanfare for getting to the temple.

The boat tour was awesome and we saw so much local wildlife. It was very hot and humid but luckily the forests were well shaded but we were all HOT by the end of the tour.

These are the mangrove trees. They sprout from the shallow muddy water and grow up to get all tangled. It looks like they grow from the top down but they don't. A lot of young mangrove is used to make corks for wine bottles.

We stopped for a long time to see and listen to the fruit bats. There are tons of these in Sri Lanka and they make a really loud chirping sound and are quite large.

The bats hanging upside down in the trees (follow the arrow):

These lizards (called water monitors) were laying all over the branches of the mangrove trees. They were huge (this one was about 3 feet long) and eat trash.

 We saw lots of monkeys which delighted us all but they were hard to get pictures of because they moved so fast and it was shady

I loved the background for these pictures of the kiddos:

We saw lots of other animals that were difficult to photograph - alligators, tropical birds, owls and tree frogs. At the very end of the tour our guide took us to a little inlet where a couple of local teenagers have baby alligators that they let us hold. These two were about a month old:

Emery was way less scared of these guys than she was the elephants

After the tour we ate a delicious lunch at the restaurant right on the river. I loved dining in Sri Lanka as it is a very casual atmosphere and people linger for a long time at meals. There are a lot of Europeans who vacation in Sri Lanka and I think that aspect of their culture has been adopted by the Sri Lankans. It was kind of heavenly! The kids couldn't get over the fact that soda is sold in glass bottles:

My favorite part of the meal was the deep fried pineapple with caramel sauce that we got. We ended up going back another time in the week just so we could get more of the delicious pineapple!

After lunch we headed back to the house for naps and to cool off in the pool, where we spent the rest of the afternoon. We had another fabulous meal prepared by the chef and played more in the pool before bedtime!