Better late than……. Kandy Dancers at Perahera
A week before Mark and I headed back to Canada for our holidays during the summer we made it up to Kandy to see the Pera Hera Festival. Here is how one website describes the festival:
Festival of the August Moon or the Kandy Esala Perahera
For ten successive nights ending on the full moon day of the month of Esala (July/August) a spectacular procession with hundreds of gaily caparisoned elephants, Kandyan dancers, drummers, trumpeters, whip crackers, torch bearers with all the pomp and glory of the past parade the streets of Kandy. On the back of a majestic tusker the sacred relic casket is carried in procession. Kandyan chieftains led by the lay custodian of the Temple dressed in their traditional ceremonial attire participate in the procession.
It was everything described above and more…what I think I liked best was that the festival was not part of a tourism ploy, but rather just a part of the regular calendar of events for Kandy people – the fact that the parade we saw, on Day 7 of the Festival, was almost 3 hours long, supports this idea!
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