I’ve managed to find myself in a place where seeing elephants is no big deal. I’ve found myself in conversations with my new Sri Lankan friends where the topic of conversation is “that time he got kicked in the head by an elephant” or discussing what one must do when being charged by a wild elephant. It’s in moments like these that I really get a reality check that I’m in a foreign country.

There have been at least three occasions where I’ve turned a corner and an elephant has been there. Thankfully, these were all in or around a temple and obviously trained, so I wasn’t thinking of needing to evade stampeding elephant feet. However, I’d never been so up close to one before this trip.

In the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, they house elephants there as it’s the base for the Perahera festival. The temple itself has a casket that contains a tooth from when Buddha was cremated, and is considered a big Buddhist relic. As I’ve come to understand it, elephants are holy to Buddhists, hence having them at one of the more important Buddhist pilgrimage sites.

When I visited the temple, people were paying 100 rupees (the equivalent of a dollar), to be blessed by the elephant.

I saw many a kid approach the elephant, and run away in tears, but most people just let themselves be led around before tapping their head on the elephant’s body. As for me, I watched from the sidelines.

After a while, the elephant was led away, and I followed thinking how silly it was to share the street with the ginormous creature.

As the Perahera parade was dwindling down, I also caught glimpses of elephants being led down the street in one lane, cars driving back on the other. (the elephants are in the left lane, wearing the red and gold cloth)
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I even saw elephants being hauled in trucks.
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My Sri Lankan friends definitely laugh at my excitement over elephants, but it’s not every day you see an elephant strutting down the streets of DC!