A morning in the working countryside around Habarana — paddy fields, a tank crossing, and lunch cooked over firewood in someone's kitchen.
The villages around here farm much as they have for a very long time, organised around the tanks that store the monsoon and release it through the dry months. A village tour is a chance to see that system running rather than read about it.
How it goes depends on the season and who is doing what that week. Usually it involves a stretch on a bicycle along the bunds between paddy fields, a ride in a bullock cart, and a crossing of the tank on a catamaran — a narrow, flat log raft poled across the shallows.
The part guests remember is the meal. Lunch is cooked in a village kitchen on a firewood hearth, in clay pots, and eaten sitting on the floor with your hands from a lotus leaf: rice, five or six vegetable curries, dhal, coconut sambol, papadam. Someone will show you how to grind the spices and scrape the coconut if you want to try.
It is genuinely a working village and not a reconstruction, which is the whole point, and it means things run at a village pace rather than a schedule.
