A giant tea boiler which can be seen from the drive from Hatton to Nuwara Eliya at Devon. Tea boilers like this but much smaller, small enough to fit on a table were found on small road side ‘petti kade’. These were very small cafes (if you could call it that) which served tea and buns. A picture of the modern variant has been posted earlier. Hope to share a photo of the real thing soon.

Pictured in the background is the Watagoda (Originally spelled as Wattegoda by british planters (වටගොඩ in sinhala) rock.

Krunegala is an ancient city surrounded by rocky outcrops. That makes the place hot, very hot. Fortunately there is a lake built by ancient kings right in the middle of the city. I do believe the proper name for the lake is Ranthaliya Wewa (රන්තලිය වැව ) named so because of a legend concerning a golden platter that is said to have been lost in the middle of the lake. But everyone calls it the Kurunegala Lake. The current dry weather is causing the lake to dry up (this photo was snapped in December 2011, it must be nearly all gone by now)

A black ceiling fan spinning rather lazily against the backdrop of the white roof of the Heritage, Dambulla appears to be transparent when in fact it’s made of solid metal. The photo isn’t monochromatic either, it’s another illusion created by every object in the frame being either black or white.

Devotees braving the weather at the famous shrine in Kataragama

What exactly caused the outage is described at the Site With the LAMP. in short it was because a massive spike in demand for amazon EC2 spot instances.

I had a bit of trouble recovering because I hadn’t maintained proper backups but fortunately google cache always came to the rescue.

To make the best tea, you need to pluck just two leaves and a bud from a tea bush. The leaves should not be too mature either. There’s only one way to do it, by look and feel. Each day, hundreds of thousands of a workers across Sri Lanka pick millions of these sets of two leaves and a bud to produce the finest Ceylon Tea, which of course also happen to be the finest tea in the world. That begs the question how do they do it in other countries? using machines of course. Those machines pluck not just the two leaves and the bud but a bunch of leaves and a few twigs as well.

I did not go deep into some jungle to capture this photo of a Crested Serpent Eagle. No siree, it was just shot from my window in Battaramulla. We only a Kilometer from the town center. Despite the efforts of successive governments and countless people, there are a few trees still left standing in this neighbourhood, and sometimes they attract beautiful and rare creatures such as this.