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Published: July 12th 2011
Our Savanna Guest House
It was hard to leave! Such a relaxing, quiet place!Pollonoruwa
After our great excursion to Sigiria and two nights at the middle-of-knowhere grasslands guesthouse, our driver outlined the last two days of our trip. First, we would be travelling to Pollonoruwa, an ancient capital city about 50km from our hotel. We would see the ruins and stuppas built hundreds of years ago before heading across the country (150km) to Anuradhapura, another ancient capital city, to check into our next hotel.
After saying goodbye to our hosts in the savanna and our car bouncing along the dirt track back to the highway, we were on our way. Its a relatively new, smooth stretch of highway after that, with picturesque straightaways crowned by large trees along the way. The driver knows some back routes to Pollonnaruwa. At one point we're on a rough, one-lane dirt track moving in and around the trees, seemingly driving THROUGH a forest. He knows what he's doing though, because we quickly come across a huge area (several football fields) dotted with very very old looking ruins. After seeing a few ancient palaces and temples we're off to see the first of many humungous stuppas in the forest.
A stuppa is a buddhist shrine made
largely from clay brick and covered with white plaster. Its usually a dome shape, with some sort of pointy cone at the top. Ashes of famous monks, the buddha himself, or other religious treasures are usually housed inside a stuppa. In this case, the treasure must be fairly important, because the stuppa is at least 10 storeys tall. The walls equally wide. Nobody knows what's inside because the stuppa is so old and its basically a solid mound of bricks. Buddhism is still an important religion, so none of the massive stuppas in the region have been excavated. Personally, I like to think they're full of diamonds and solid gold buddhas.
After wandering through the palaces, old foundations and stuppas, we're off on another bumpy ride through a 'short cut' back to the highway. I can't understand why we had to drive through the bush to get out of the area, but I assume there's some sort of toll or something? The drive to Anuradhapura is nice, windows down, Sri Lankan music playing.
Anuradhapura
Our hotel is very nice, slightly outside of the city. There's a HUGE wedding going on, one that requires tables be set up
throughout the hotel. The hotel is made up of a large veranda and a large open space inside the building with rooms off the open area. The tables for the wedding reception (and the guests) are sitting right in front of our room! It was quite an experience, the bride looked amazing with a bright red sari with gold trim, huge gold nose ring and dripping gold jewelry. The groom also had a fancy matching hat (but Trung said the rest of him looked 'rough'😉!
That evening we decided to walk into town to try and find some sort of internet facility (Sri Lanka has very little in this regard). We managed to find one place, about 45 degrees Celsius inside, with three dirty computers. They worked though, and we were able to check our emails and such, but not before my clothes were drenched in sweat. Sri Lanka is a HOT country in May!
After our internet adventure we returned to the hotel to cool off in our semi-A/C room. The wedding was still going strong so we decided after awhile instead of crashing, to walk back to town for dinner. Sri Lanka, as I've said before,
is only two years out of a civil war and Anuradhapura is the furthest North we will go on this trip. I think there must have been some sort of curfew or something in the past, because all of the shops closed about an hour after sunset. We could find only one place to get food, which turned out to be a huge portion of fried rice with an assortment of curries and dhal (lentil stew/curry). Walking around the closed-up town was a bit of a creepy experience, but on the way back we came across a cheery looking supermarket, of all things! Usually, as has been our experience in SE Asia, anything you want can be found at one of the thousands of tiny shops that sell everything from toothpaste to deep-fried tarantulas (Cambodian street stalls). The introduction of the Sri Lankan 'supermarket' is great! Shopping in aisles, with carts, in A/C. It's all very novel and refreshing! Anyways, we stocked up on the essentials, chips, water and other junk for the long, 200km drive tomorrow.
Early in the morning we're packed and ready for our last long-haul stretch between Anuradhapura and Trincomalee. We'll be travelling from the
mid-West to the far East of Sri Lanka, a whopping 200km. Apparently its a 5 hour drive. Should make for a VERY bumpy drive. In my travelling I've come to equate especially long duration and relatively short distances with either spectacular mountain scenery and switchbacks, or spectacularly bad roads. Its flat between Anuaradhapura and Trinco, so I'm guessing the latter.
As we head out of Anuradhapura the going is ok, its old tar roads, but relatively smooth. Then the lower dips in the road start to look a bit potholed, then a lot potholed, then half of the road is gone in a huge washout, and then we come across an area of large rings of sand with black borders. I'm trying to guess what is causing these huge bumpy rings in the road when it dawns on me that they're craters filled with sand. From bombs. Interesting.
Trincomalee
Our driver tells us the story of Trincomalee and the road we're travelling on as we pass our 4th military base. Apparently the fighting was pretty fierce in this region, with Trincomalee a remaining stronghold of the government, sandwitched between two factions of LTTE fighters to the North
and South. The road into the city was closed to all through traffic for the last 20 years, except for military personnel, hence the plethora of bomb craters and the high number of military bases. He goes on to explain that the military purposely left the rough roads to deter cars from driving on it. Great. We're in a car, driving on it now! He said the government has a plan to rebuild the road, but hasn't quite gotten around to it yet. Its quite an interesting drive, sometimes with two wheels on the tarmak and two wheels three feet down in the ditch with oncoming busses, etc. Its extremely bumpy, deep, unavoidable potholes and poorly filled in bomb craters everywhere.
Closer to Trincomalee we see tons of new settlements, farms, houses, UN sponsored 'milk chilling stations' and strange concrete subdivisions where new settlements are popping up. Among these are several dozen sniper bunkers and military bases, most falling down, obviously not used. Its good to see the military dismantling while new settlements developing in the countryside. After 20 years, Trincomalee was a small military town with a dwindling population. Since the end of the war, the population has
been exploding. Several emergency settlements have been built to account for the influx of people.
Our driver takes us down to the beach area, about 5km from the centre of Trinco. Our first stop isn't good enough apparently (which he tries to bargan for us, at a budget of 1000 rupees for an A/C room). I assume the hotel just wasn't willing to give him a large enough commission. We head to the next hotel over and settle on a non-A/C room for 1200. Still not too shabby, beachfront room with patio for $6 each...
The beach is spectacular, leaning palm trees, fishing boats, cows, dogs, a sprinkling of tourists (I counted 12 the entire week we were there). That afternoon we took a walk to some beach huts we could see next door. Beach huts are usualy better to lie in than right on the sand, and they keep the sun off. Plus, there's a great little beach restaurant behind the huts.
That afternoon we spoke with some people staying at the hotel with the restaurant and they tell us they're spending 1000 on an A/C room. After going up to see it, we agree with
the matron of the hotel that we'll take the room the following day! Score, cheaper room with A/C (it's still bloody hot, even though we're on the beach!).
Because we're on the East coast and the monsoon winds have started, the wind is consistenly moving off-shore. The waves are tiny and infrequent so the calm, turquoise waters are spectacular and there is a consistent breeze to try and cool everything off.
We stayed in the beach paradise for 6 days, laying around, eating devilled chicken, an amazing Sri Lankan specialty, watching the cows walk slowly past and playing with the dogs. Every day is sunny, clear skies, the water is calm and clear and the people are very friendly.
One day the son of the hotel matron took a couple of Irish people with Trung and I to an old Chinese war ship from WWII that had sank off shore about 1/2 hours boat ride away. He's got a good supply of SCUBA equipment, but the water is really choppy, so getting everything on is tricky!
The dive is relatively shallow and the wreck of the steel hull is pretty beat up, but the engine is
still relatively in-tact. The boilers are large enough for me to fit inside, and the engine pistons are taller than me. Everything is on this huge scale, its really an amazing sight.
After lazing around and reading three novels in my beach hut over 5 days, it was time to go explore the city of Trincomalee. Its a bustling town of about 50 thousand, with tight, winding streets, a large fisherman's village shanty town and a large shopping area. The city is built at the base of a large point of land that juts out about 3 km into the ocean. On the point is the Trincomalee fort, originally built by the Dutch in the 1600's. The port has been fought over again and again in the last 400 years and has been built and rebuilt during those times. It's still an active military base, so it was a bit strange when we walked up the road, past a herd of native spotted deer, and arrived at the original 1640's gate to meet several guards with machine guns. After gesturing we wanted to go in and getting smiles and nods from the guards we understood we could walk on
through without getting shot. Still a bit uneasy with so many machine guns around!
The base is just like a military base, a bit more 'rustic' than Western standards, but there are soldiers running in track suits and guards everywhere, bunkhouses, stores, parade grounds, etc. Our first surreal stop is across the barrack area to an ancient buddhist temple built on top of one of the walls overlooking the sea and the harbour. The view at sunset is stunning with the fisherman's village and twinkling boats in the harbour.
We could see a temple from our hotel at the extreme end of the point, so we head through the military base, up a steep hill and arrive at an impressive Hindu temple. It's perched on the edge of the cliff as if holding on for dear life. I don't quite understand Hindu religion quite yet, but from what I gather there is a huge 'family tree' of gods for all purposes. At this temple, the statues of the gods are coated in gold and the specific god being worshipped looks like the golden statue of Michael Jackson holding his pet monkey, Bubbles. Weird, but beautiful in it's own
way...
The time comes for us to leave Trincomalee (my wallet is aching from buying all those novels to read, damn Kindle!!) Our next stop is Nuwara Eliya, an important British colonial hill station in the high mountans in the South to see the old British charm and tea plantations. Can't wait!
xoxo
Andy
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John
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Cowabunga!
Did you give the cows names? I would have. I wonder if the white cow realizes that he's different than the others...