A Trip to Trincomalee

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After a couple of days of lounging about the beaches and trying to spend as much time as possible twelve meters under the water surface, I decided it was time to continue my exploring. After the morning's diving, I set off back to Trincomalee, the nearby city that I had passed through on my way to Uppuveli. After a few minutes of sweltering on the hot and dusty main road, I was able to flag down a local bus heading south and I squeezed on amongst the brightly-saried women for the fifteen minute ride into town.

Being in the north-east, Trincomalee has a different vibe to the other parts of Sri Lanka I had so far visited. Street signs are written in both Tamil and Sinhalese and there is far more Hindu culture evident in the city with cows calmly roaming the street (including one mischievous one which walked into a shop and started nosing through a sack of lentils much to the agitation of the shopkeeper) and Hindu temples rather than the Buddha statues which had been common in the south.

When I got to town, I set off for the harbour where it looked like most of the sights were. The cloudless blue skies that I had been chasing all the way to the east coast brought with them a searing heat so I was nicely drenched with sweat within a few minutes of walking. It was an interesting stroll. I followed a long road out of town passing by local shops which seemed to mostly be selling dried fish. On the grass opposite the shops, huge fish were spread out on a piece of fabric drying out in the sun and under the shop awnings were great barrels of the product ready to be sold.

I reached the harbour and, in my heat-induced confusion (combined with my terrible sense of direction), I set off in the wrong direction and it was only when I was stopped by a man in a fruit shack on the water's edge that I was pointed in the right direction. I backtracked, climbed a hill, and found Fort Fredrick.

I had assumed that the fort would be a ruin but it is a fully functioning army base, complete with soldiers who smiled at me over their guns as I trotted along the (thankfully) shady pathway through the fort and, for some reason, many deer. Here in Tricomalee, there is a sizeable population of street deer and I had passed them in the city earlier scavenging through rubbish. I suppose most the dogs here prefer lounging on the beach to sniffing through litter (and who can blame them?) so it is left to the local deer to pick up the slack.

The fort was a pleasant place to stroll around with open expanses of dusty land around the army barracks and vine strewn trees offering plenty of much appreciated shade and I took my time exploring, in no real rush to move on to the more strenuous part of the day that I had planned.

The road continued through the forest before coming to a steep hill (again, well populated with deer, these ones busy sifting their way through somebody's private rubbish heap) which I staggered up in my efforts to reach the Koneswaram Kovil temple. On the way I stopped at a cafe that overlooked the ocean for a refreshing king cocounut which I managed to tip all over myself, partly due to excitement and partly from my refusal to use an evil turtle-killing straw, so I continued my journey sated but rather stickier than before.

I continued past the colourful little street stalls until I reached the temple. Outside the temple was a list of rules printed which I quickly perused. No footwear (luckily a man was outside ready to guard shoes for R20 a piece), no photography (fair enough), and no menstruating women (hm). I went on in.

The site is a medieval hindu temple, huge and colourfully flamboyant in the traditional hindu style with vibrantly painted deities piled on top of one another to form an elaborate peak. A pathway lead around the side to a little shrine which was built into the rock face with a view over the cliff to the ocean on one side. Here I encounted a group of teenaged boys who were taking selfies at the shrine in flagrant disregard for the no photography rule, the little scamps. The boys looked at me and laughed (I really wish teenagers would stop doing this!) and then left before one returned a second later and shyly asked if I could be in a selfie with him. Hoping that I wasn't about to make it into a social media post with a title such as "sweaty old woman found on top of rock" or something equally as flattering, I went along with it anyway but with no real idea of why he wanted a picture with me. This happened again later in Jaffna, only the man in question was in his twenties so maybe it isn't just a teenager craze to take pictures with strangers here.

I returned to town, meeting a tuktuk driver along the way who asked me lots of questions about my trip up to the temple and who seemed genuinely heartbroken over my feeble recall for the details ("You didn't see the hanging boxes?" "Um... maybe I did, can you describe them for me again?" "No, if you didn't see them then you must have missed them" (accompanied with an expression of great saddness)). I felt like promising to revisit for a second look before remembering how steep the hill had been and knowing that I would not do it. But still- the hanging boxes do sound a treat.

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