Very early start to Sigiriya Rock – climbed all the way to the top – via the Sigiriya damsels (5th century wall paintings) – so high has a splendid ruined castle.
So high, but look at the crumbling old ruins…and product placement opportunity
Returned to Sigiriya [Village Hotel] for swim, packing and lunch (best meal at Sigiriya) before leaving for Kandy.
I wasn’t going to miss that place, despite them saving the best till last food-wise.
On the way we stopped at a wonderful spice garden where all the edible and medicinal herbs were explained to us.
We had massage and tried spice tea at that herb gardenThere we saw a wood carving man using his feet as part of the process
We then stopped at a daft batik factory before going on to Kandy.
We were starting to find these commercial breaks quite tiresome, especially when, as the day went on, the scheduled touring was seemingly more like a short break between these daft commercial visits.
Before dinner we went to a performance of Kandyan dance including firewalkers.
Let’s hope he knew what he was doing
Dinner at Hotel Suisse – better than Sigiriya. Early night.
Part One of our two-part photo album for this Sri lanka trip can be viewed through the flickr link below there are 69 photos therein:
Real gluttons for photo punishment can see raw scans of all 430 photos we took unedited and unlabelled here:
Early start. Morning trip to Polonnaruwa – really bumpy ride – second oldest capital (11th/12th century).
On the way to the main site, we stopped at this place, apparently the Hindu Temple of Penis & Vulva. There was no sign there saying “thanks for coming”, sadly.
[Polonnaruwa] ruins in slightly better repair than Anuradhapura – several temples to see plus more dagobas (stupas).
No, those two are not the Buddha images; that’s Ged & Daisy
Back to Sigiriya Village for mediocre lunch then on optional tour to Dambulla.
Climb up to cave temples – wonderful old (15th century?) Cave paintings and Buddha images – well worth the trip. My feet were attacked by killer ants as we left.
Were the locals laughing at my ant-induced discomfort, my sartorial inelegance, or both?
Yes, goodness knows where those biter ants came from, but as I came out of the cave temples entrance all of a sudden my feet were covered with ants – it felt like hundreds of needles being pressed into my feet. I think I made a bestial roar and started running around and shaking my feet to try to remove the ants. For some reason, this seemed to amuse the local tourists no end. My feet went red briefly and then returned to normal within just a few minutes, as if nothing had happened.
Perceptive readers might have noticed that I was not overly impressed by that hotel, especially in the matter of the grub. Our other beef with the hotel was the paper-thinness of the walls. Although we were in “cottages”, the rooms were semi-detached halves of cottages.
Indeed, the thing that probably put us off group touring for good after this holiday was the vocal double-entendres at breakfast the next morning from our nosy neighbours, who left us and the rest of the group in no doubt that you could hear anything and everything from the next room.
So there we were, on a Kuoni tour around Sri Lanka.
Lucky us, in 1995, we were able to go as far north as the ancient city of Anuradhapura -it was often out of bounds for tourists in those troubled first few decades of Sri Lanka’s independence.
Long drive out to Anuradhapura, stopping at Kurunegala Rest House for rest and Miridiya Hotel for lunch – not bad.
