I enjoyed three very intense moments of this journey.
In the region of Ratnapura Philippe visits a precious stone mine: Philippe comes down a ladder and in the depth of the mine full of water he sees how the miners are looking for the precious stones and speak with them about their chance to find once a big stone.
Near Pothuhera Phillipe sees the Cavadee (or Kavady) , a Hindouist ceremony, a man with hooks in his back is hanged on a trunk of banana tree who enters in trance and doesn't feel any pain, that his way to show his devotion (in the documentary of Malaysia an Hinduist man with hooks was pulling a vehicle) and the people of this small town are singing and dancing around him.
Lasst very intense moment: Philippe meets the Veddas who live in the forest: they invit him to look for wild honey in the forest;they find a trunk full of bees, Philippe is quite afraid, the Veddas made a pray of the spirits and then took off the wild honey; nobody has been stinged by a bee. Later they have a meal together, there are dances and songs and some women fell in trance (a moment of communication with the spirits of the ancestors.
But in this journey there are also peaceful moments: the trains are crowded but the passengers are quit and kind: a young woman who looks radiant explains that she is Buddhist, she has received a good education and one must be happy with the life).
Other peaceful moment : the Buddhist ceremony at Anuradhapura, villagers coming with their long Buddhist flags to wrap up the pagoda.
I enjoyed also all these short encounters of Philippe with kind people: the employee in charge of the timetable display board, the passengers speaking about the tsunami, the station master talking about the manually operated semaphore, the postal wagon employee talking about their duty or the passenger speaking about the bus-train.