After another massive breakfast at Lake Corner Hotel, our lovely hosts organised a tuk-tuk to take us to the bus station. They also gave us our first tip of the journey - no-one accepts large bank notes. The cash machines around the island spew out 5000 LKR notes which are pretty much useless if no one will take them! The only places that will are the bus stations and petrol stations, not only will they accept them, they'll change them into smaller notes that you can actually use. To help us further, they chatted with the tuk-tuk driver and got him to show us what to do and what bus to get on.
Once on the bus it was a quick one and a half hour journey to Dambulla... and i mean quick! I'm not sure any rules of the road apply to buses in Sri Lanka - we hurtled full speed along the winding poorly tarmacked roads with the occasional slamming of the breaks; bringing the bus abruptly to an almost stop so people could jump off. Once in Dambulla, not realising quite how near we were to our accommodation we jumped in a tuk-tuk, paying 150 LKR to drive literally round a single corner - the driver must have been happy to bump into us that day!
As we only had the afternoon to see the sights we set off towards the Cave Temples of Dambulla despite the drizzling rain. Four kilometres later, passing by the Temple Lake and one small hill, we made it to the ticket office... we happily paid the 1500 LKR each and rounded the corner to see the never-ending series of steps we'd have to climb. I don't know why, but i had envisioned the Caves to be situated at the bottom of the mountain not at the top. Okay, with the "mountain" only reaching 160 m it's probably more of a hill but it still wasn't our finest hour.
We were dripping with sweat and severely out of breath and this was only at the half way mark. Finally we made it to the top, and I at least have a new phobia climbing tiny worn out steps on a steep hillside during the rain but I really think that's only logical. We reached the temple and it was time to kick off our shoes and show our tickets - I felt sorry for a group that had climbed the route from the other side of the mountain... they had to go down the stairs we'd just climbed to buy a ticket before coming back up!
The temple complex was built during the 1st Century BCE and is Sri Lanka's largest and most well preserved site of it's kind. There were renovations to the veranda running alongside the caves during the 1930's but this was mainly to improve it's structural integrity as the complex continues to be an active ritual site. The complex is made up of five caves, with a total of 153 statues of Buddha - no, I did not count them. Most of the statues were 2m tall but the most impressive was 14m reclining Buddha which was hewn out of the rock and painted gold.
Not only were the various Buddha's in the various caves impressive, but the ceiling murals were something to behold. The entirety of the ceilings were covered in murals depicting the life of Buddha, some areas had faded over the years, but considering their age and the fact they reside in dark damp caves i think that's pretty reasonable.
After spending some time wandering the complex and trying to see the views of the countryside through the continuing rain, we decided to head down. We followed the other stairs back down the hillside, it wasn't nearly as steep and although it was longer in distance and some sections had worn away altogether it was much more pleasant walk. The walk also took us the Golden Buddha, this Buddha statue sat above the Buddhist museum is the largest Buddha sat in the "Dhamma Chakka" posture in the world.
After Dambulla our next stop was Kandy, the newest of Sri Lanka's old dynasties. Kandy is home to the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, for hundreds of years this relic held an important role in local politics. They believed if you held the tooth (which is believed to be Lord Buddha's) you held the governance and the last of the Sri Lankan Kings - the Kings of Kandy - made the capital in this spot due to the temple. As we walked passed the boundary fence of the temple we saw hundreds of Buddhist devotees dressed in purity white, alongside equal amount of tourists wandering along the processional walk to the temple, and we too would have joined the hoards ... had it not been $25 each.
I'm not saying $25 is a lot of money, at home I could wander around Tesco's and spend this amount without blinking an eye (then soon realise when i got home, I didn't really buy anything useful at all.) When your budget is £35 a day for two people, $25 each seems like much more money.... for just another temple. Instead we walked around the lake next to it, it was free and when we realised what we thought was a log was actually a massive monitor lizard it was pretty exciting too!
So along with wandering about the town, we accidentally wandered up a steep hill and caught a stunning sunset over the city. How does one accidentally wander up a hill for more than an hour you ask? Well, there was pizza at the top. We didn't know our route was going to be such hard work when we set off, but in the end it was well worth it... once you've started up a hill you might as well get to the top (if that's where the pizza lives).
I like Kandy as a city, it felt real, it felt lived in. The people rushing about the streets were going about their day to day lives. You could go ten minutes without hearing the call of "tuk-tuk", although there was a fair bit of that too. It felt like a place that was aware that it had tourists, but wasn't going to try too hard because of it, although all my views may be skewed - the hostel had a lovely dog. I feel like i'm always in a more positive mood after some canine attention.
The last thing we did in Kandy was buy our tickets for the famous train journey to Ella. We tried to buy them the day before but that was a no-go. You either buy them well in advance to reserve a seat in the fancy carriage or you turn up an hour before buy the cheap tickets - then join the other cheap backpackers in scrambling for a free seat when the train arrives. The second option was the one for us, but i'll get into that on the next post.
Onwards and upwards......