Royal Botanic Gardens, Peradeniya

En route to our hotel in Kandy, we had a lovely amble around these gorgeous botanical gardens..much to the delight of ‘the Boys’ 🙄

The garden premises has a pre-colonial history of Sinhalese royalty from 1371.
They were officially opened in 1821, in the British colonial era, for economic crop production. During WW2 the garden was used by Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was the commander of the allied forces in South Asia, as the HQ of the South East Asia Command.

The gardens are situated along the bank of the River Mahaweli and we saw many buildings that have sadly been severely damaged and destroyed by the recent cyclone that occurred in December which was shocking to see.

During our wander we had a scary incident with a 5 foot rat snake (which apparently don’t bite) which slithered very fast down some steps that we were walking up! We all jumped about trying to avoid it but unfortunately I stood on it! 🙈 Anyway.. it still shot off into a bush! 😅

We also passed through trees which were full of Fruit bats which were very noisy and smelly!Read more