HANGING AROUND

Visited the Royal Botanical Garden in Kandy and very much enjoyed the sights of the lush foliage and numerous exotic flowers, which were being enjoyed by the resident wildlife.  To start with we couldn’t hear or see anything but a sea of families and group of friends spread out on the thick green grass - whooping and laughing. So when Matthew spotted a chipmunk hot footing its way from tree to tree we were delighted. However, the more we wandered into the more secluded parts of the gardens, the more we realised that it was chipmunk city!



We’d only taken the small camera to take photos of plants and flowers so getting close enough to any of the chipmunks to get a photo was gonna be a challenge. I became a lady on a mission and was so busy being ‘it’ for a cruel game of chipmunk catch that I hadn’t noticed that I’d stumbled into the ‘love zone’. Amongst the gravestone roots of the Almond trees were not only the object of my camera lens but crowds of courting couples. I don’t know who was blushing more. Me or the shy lovebirds!

Wandering to a safer... quieter part of the park we could hear high pitched screeching. It turns out that it was coming from a host of hanging fruit bats. I had previously believed that bats were silent flyers that flew from dusk to dawn, but no one had told these guys. As we moved on dodging droplets, Matt quipped that it looked very boring just hanging around like that all day.

Almost as soon as he’d finished the sentence, like a heavenly judgement the sky gave a loud grumble and large drops of rain the size of 10 pence pieces started to rain from the clouds. I’m ashamed to say that we were caught like failed Scots without an umbrella and had to make a swift dash to the nearest building which turned out to be the staff cafe. Our penance for judging the fruit bats was over an hour of torrential rain which left us doing our own sort of ‘hanging around’.