The tour companies strongly encourage tourists to hire drivers and that's not just to boost the economy. It's a safety issue. The roads are narrow and potholed, generally two lanes or less, and traffic is both heavy and diverse. The most common vehicles include bicycles, tuk-tuks (three wheeled enclosed motorcycles), modified tractors, trucks, and cars, in order of increasing velocity. The speed of the vehicles varies wildly, so cars are continually passing other travelers. Remember the potholes and two lanes?
Yep, you'll have cars going in opposite directions while simultaneously passing bikes and tuk-tuks, as many as four abreast, on a two lane road. Use of the burm is widespread and has prevented countless fatalities. Let's just say we were all glad to have Nandana who got us around the country safely and, with liberal dramamine, in reasonable comfort.
Our first night was in a hotel on the beach in Negombo, close to the airport. The beach was great - probably 100 yards of sand from the hotel to the sea, and stretched in either direction as far as I could see.
That's A with one of the sailboats you see in the boys' surf picture. But we only had the morning to enjoy it because we had a long drive to Sigiriya, our base for the next three nights. The drive was quite interesting though, as you just read, and filled with sights. There are fruit stands with coconuts and bananas all along the roadside, and Nandana was great at pointing out different plants and animals.
It was interesting to see the Buddhist shrines next to Catholic churches and Muslim mosques. I was surprised to see religious tolerance, and I don't know whether that's because I've spent the last couple of months in Qatar where non-Muslim religions are invisible or because I assumed a third-world country wouldn't be so progressive.
We stopped for lunch at a place he recommended at the edge of a lake. The food is... well, it's curry. You can often get simple Western food but generally, the food is curried x. Turns out that it's kind of hard to feed blonde kids in Sri Lanka because even the plain chicken sandwich has curry and even the hamburgers have minced onion mixed in. We were hard pressed to find anything J and A would eat, but C was in his glory. That kid eats like a champ - there's not a table he's seen that doesn't have something he likes on it. He doesn't get motion sickness and can sleep anywhere too, which was a good thing. Overall, C definitely won the prize for being a good traveler.
The best part of the day was the elephant ride. Nandana brought us to a place near Sigiriya where they do elephant rides, which I thought sounded pretty kitschy but it was really fun. Sometimes I need to remind myself it's OK to be a tourist. Our elephant was named Rani and everyone enjoyed the ride, even A who I thought would hate it. As the sun got lower, the creatures started coming out - the sky was filled with huge fruit bats, and we saw monitor lizards and cormorants and cranes and a hornbill and monkeys and all sorts of cool things. Of course there was a vendor conveniently selling bags of bananas so we all got to ride on Rani's neck and feed her bananas. Except for A because three-year-olds don't do that, as she was quick to point out.
And here are the fruit bats - click to enlarge.
We arrived at the hotel after dark, so it wasn't till morning that we got to appreciate the surroundings. You can see Sigiriya rock from the open-air restaurant.
All the restaurants were open-air; now that I think of it, the only reason they closed rooms off was to keep in the air-conditioning. We were outside all day long from the minute we left our hotel room. Sigiriya Village, our hotel, had beautiful grounds filled with plants and wildlife (mostly birds and monkeys). We had two adjacent rooms and the kids decided they were brave enough to sleep in their own room rather than splitting up with the 'rents. Crafty little buggers - they figured out they wouldn't be allowed to turn on the TV unless they ruled their own roost. Score for both kids and parents. After a two-minute tutorial J was confident he could summon us on the phone and we all got a good night's sleep.
In the morning we got off to see the ancient ruins at Polonnaruwa. On the way Nandana stopped at the roadside where he knew a man who feeds monitor lizards for the tourists.
Polonnaruwa is the second ancient capital of Sri Lanka, after Anuradhapura. Those two cities, with the last ancient capital (Kandy) create the cultural triangle. Polonnaruwa was the capital from the 11th to 15th century. The fun thing about ancient ruins in Sri Lanka (aside from how very old they are) is that you can walk around inside them. Be careful not to fall off the edge. This is the council chamber where the king would meet with his advisors.
All the walls and columns were engraved with relief pictures of lions, elephants, monkeys, dragons, and flowers.
Here is a moonstone - they were placed at the bottom of the steps at the entrance to temples and other important chambers. It represents the cycle of reincarnation from geese on the outside through elephants, horses, creeper vines, and finally the lotus in the center representing nirvana.
The most common ancient architectural feature in Sri Lanka is the dagoba. The one at Polonnaruwa is 55 meters high and was built at the end of the 12th century.
Here we are standing with a Buddha inside one of the smaller shrines surrounding the dagoba.
And this is the rock-cut shrine at Polonnaruwa. These depictions of the Lord Buddha, along with two more to the left that don't appear in this photo, are all cut from one enormous rock. It's hard to get a feel for the magnitude of many of the Buddha statues in Sri Lanka - they're just so huge.
We decided to climb Sigiriya rock in the morning on Sunday.
Sigiriya is a citadel built by King Kasyapa who reigned for only 18 years at the end of the 5th century. This is an interesting story: he killed his father the king, stole the crown, and sent his older brother into exile in India. With this history, he was pretty paranoid so he built this citadel on top of a 370 meter high rock to protect him from his brother's inevitable return. It's worth a few minutes to read the wikipedia entry on Sigiriya. These are the gardens at the base of the rock.
The steps are carved right into the cracks between boulders.
The actual palace at the top has been destroyed by time but here the kids are at the very top step.
Looking back down to the water gardens.
And this is what the top stretch of steps looks like...
Every once in a while you come across a snake charmer.
Cows roam freely all over the place.
In the afternoon we took a jeep safari tour of Menneriya National Park where we saw loads of wild elephants, including several babies.
On Monday we had an unbelievably long day. We needed to drive from Sigiriya all the way down to Kogalla, at the southern tip of the country. We started at about 8:30 and made three stops: at an Ayurvedic garden where we had a tour and learned about medicinal herbs, at Dambulla cave temple, and at the Pinnewala elephant orphanage. The cave temple at Dambulla was impressive - five caves filled with hundreds of Buddha statues and murals.
I especially liked this shrine, where in the 12th century they added a couple of Hindu gods just to be fair. You can see Vishnu on the left, next to all the Buddhas.
But by this time we were pretty well behind schedule and a long way from our hotel, with one stop left at Pinnewala. Just our luck - the bridge for the main road was out and it took forever to get there on a tiny, winding, cratered one lane road. Thank you, dramamine. We got there just in time to see them finishing up the elephants' bath in the river and walked around to get a front-row view. It was a great vantage right there on the rocky bank of the river. Turned out that was also the exact path they parade the elephants along to get back to the orphanage. It was pretty exciting when the elephants started coming straight at us; C and I were pressed against a rock wall trying to get out of their way while Dad fled with A and J up to the gate for their own close-up. Those elephants are pretty blinkin' big, and not so tame that you'd really want to be that close. Unlike the docile Rani, I got the clear impression that these guys wouldn't mind charging and there was no fence, no wall, not even a mahout with a pointy stick between us and them. I started thinking that maybe the super-conservative American safety measures weren't such a bad idea.
It was now nearly 5 pm, we had gotten about 50 km down the road and we had about 200 km left to go, and the average traveling speed in Sri Lanka is 30 km per hour. It was very late by the time we arrived at the Fortress Hotel, in Koggala just east of Galle. We were exhausted and ready to spend a few days chilling out by the beach.
