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Published: February 27th 2006
Sigirya
Too high and too hot.We left Days Inn at 8am ready for our long guided journey to Anuradhapura via a Hindu temple, the cave temples of Dambulla and the rock fortress of Sigiriya. The intricately decorated Hindu temple was first; its tower adorned in Hindu deities was a sight to behold. After a couple of hours we reached Dambulla, and after paying our entry our guide left us to climb to the top of the hill and to the temple, after completing the 45 minute stair climb we were quite tired as you could imagine in such heat and humidity so we took a quick breather before exploring the numerous temples which were carved into solid rock over 2000 years ago! Reclining Buddha’s were in every chamber, hundreds of Buddha’s in different poses carved from solid rock were surrounded by the finely decorated walls and ceilings of the solid rock chambers. Another 30 minutes and we were back at the bottom of the hill, towering above us was the giant golden Buddha of the Dambulla Buddhist museum, in a pose which looked strangely like he was picking his nails!
No hanging around and we were back on the road again, en-route to Sigiriya, the rock
How cool
An elephant and his mahoot bathing fortress. This fortress is built on possibly the most unlikely looking rock ever. How they built it up there is anyone’s guess. The fortress was built around 250bc. When it was built, part of the huge rock that it stands upon was carved into the form of a lion, sadly only its front paws remain. Being the hottest part of the day and it possibly taking 90 minutes to climb, we opted to take photographs from a distance and have lunch instead.
At around 4pm we arrived in Anuradhapura, it took around 30 minutes to find our hotel which was basically on the edge of Anuradhapura and the Sacred city. The hotel was not what we expected. It was a big, clean and reasonably new, nice looking place, but it was empty. We had our pick of all the rooms, which was strange as every other hotel in the town was full when we were looking! We wanted just to chill out our first night so we decided to eat in the hotel. After waiting an HOUR for our food (we are still the only people here), out came our meals, which were bad, very bad and for Sri Lanka,
How cool
Charmaine petting the elephant very, very expensive! We gave up trying to eat them and so went to bed.
The following few days were spent exploring the town, it was small and different from Kandy and Colombo as it seems just to do its own thing rather than trying to westernise, or capitalise on tourism. Locals go to the sacred city for ice cream and picnics. Monkeys, cows and dogs roam the sacred city. People stare, but try not to get as much money out of you as they do elsewhere.
We spent a day wandering around the Sacred city and visited the Bodhi tree, a tree grown from a sapling of the tree under which Buddha found enlightenment. Allegedly the oldest tree in the world it was surrounded by a double thickness of brick wall topped with spikes and guarded by men in bunkers with RPK’s (machineguns in normal terms). We didn’t think that it looked like the oldest tree in the world but we weren’t going to mention it considering all the artillery that was about!
We managed to find ourselves a nice little restaurant called the Casserole Restaurant in the heart of the town, we decided we would play it safe
Fighting monkeys
Two of the many monkeys, fighting, on Dambulla and eat here every day. Their hot garlic chicken was great as long as you asked them to take it easy on the chillies!
While in town we managed to get hold of a couple of tickets for the new years bash at the Palm Garden Village Hotel. For 1500 rupees ($15 US) we got an extremely decadent buffet, cocktails, drinks, dancing, disco and fireworks (definitely not legally for sale in the UK judging by some of the explosions!). It was a great night and we all had a more fun than we expected.
On the 2nd we were picked up at our hotel and took off on our four hour journey to Colombo airport ready for a bit of a holiday and a rest in the Maldives. Life is tough!
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