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Published: October 17th 2015
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After a fairly short and comfortable flight from Delhi, we arrived in Sri Lanka's capital city Colombo. As it took us a while to get through customs and get our luggage, it wasn't until 5pm that we arrived at our hotel. As we spent most of the small amount of cash we had on the taxi getting to the hotel, our first objective was to get some more. This proved more difficult than expected.
We tried a few different ATMs with no luck and became worried as we had taken out money at an ATM in the airport. So we had to phone our bank.
They told us that there was nothing wrong on our end and that it must be to do with the ATMs themselves, which didn't real help us. So we wandered around the dark streets of Colombo in the rain, trying to find a different ATM. A breakthrough came when we experienced our first dose of Lanka kindness.
We came across a branch of a local bank, in which a clerk informed us that most of the local banks do not take Visa cards and only cater for MasterCard. So we had to find
an international bank. He kindly wrote down the banks useful to us along with the addresses. Anyway, we got a tuk tuk and eventually got our money, disaster averted.
We had been told that Colombo is just another polluted city and that if we wanted to see the real Lanka we were best to get out of there. Therefore we decided we would spend the one night and leave in the morning. We already had a rough idea of what we wanted to do before we arrived but after reading some blogs online we decided the only way we would pack it all in would be if we hired a driver for the 11 days.
Although this set us back a fair bit, we believed it was worth it due to our lack of time and we had swiftly forgotten the novelty of public transport after our variety of experiences in India.
We woke up early the next morning, had breakfast in the hotel and met our driver for the next 11 days. We called him Chin (his real name was something rather different but he allowed us to keep it simple). The first leg of our
trip was a 4 hour drive to Dambulla. Dambulla is part of the 'cultural triangle' in Sri Lanka's Central Province. We also planned to see the ancient cities of Sigirya and Polonawura. The place of notice in Dambulla was the rock temple, sacred to the large Buddhist population in Sri Lanka. The temple was constructed 1st century BC within the natural caves on the Dambulla Rock. There are five caves with temples, all with various different statues of the Buddha. It was here that we were first informed of the rules when entering Buddhist places of worship.
1. No pictures with your back to the Buddha
2. No flesh showing above the knees or below the neck (for anyone), which led to me wearing our drivers sarong regularly for the first few days
3. No shoes and hats inside the temples or any Buddhist buildings.
We also learned that there are 7 different poses used in the statues of the buddha. They have various meanings which we cant remember!!!
The next morning we set off early for the ancient city of Sigirya. These ruins are also located on top of a 200m rock. The site was originally
built by King Kasyapa in the 5th century, previously used by Buddhist monks as a monastery. The climb was significantly harder than Dambulla rock but the views were even more rewarding. We hired a guide to explain all the archeological findings in the city, and work at the site is still ongoing.
After lunch at a local curry house in Sigirya we headed northeast to the second earliest kingdom on the island, the first being located at Arundhapura. Here we explored a large amount of different ruins including a library, several temples and buildings where the Kings kept court. Although a lack of knowledge on the ancient history of the island somewhat limited the understanding of the ruins, the ancient architecture and sculpting was still very impressive. There was also continued sweaty sarong wearing and feet burning as we paid our respects in the scorching heat.
After a long day exploring the ancient cities we treated ourselves to a dip in one of the lakes we passed on the way back to Sigirya, which had been our base for the last couple of days.
We decided to have dinner at a rasta joint in Sigirya where we
were treated to a traditional Jamaican BBQ dinner, with cold local beers in hand while chilled reggae tunes played in the background. After dinner we had a early night in preparation for our early journey south to the cultural hub of Kandy in the morning.
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