Heading to Interior Dumballa and Sirigiya

Sri Lankan kids are so cute and love to have their photo taken by a foreigner, so here are a couple that I thought were worth sharing.

The symbol of Sri Lanka is the lion, but there are elephants everywhere.  Here an elephant is getting a scrub.  Kinda brings back memories of the old car wash days.

A family portrait

I am having some big problems with blogspot today and I hope that they do not persist.  It has taken an hour to get as far as this and I am well past happy hour time.

As I reported I arrived on July 17 and went immediately to Negombo, the coastal town near the airport.  I stayed there for 3 days just to get a little settled and oriented. On the 4th day I woke early to take a bus to the interior of the island, stopping to change buses at Kurunegala and ending up noonish in Dambulla.  I usually resist touts at the bus stop offering to help me find a hotel but I was dozing as we arrived in Dambulla and did not have any sense of where I was in relation to the center, so I accepted a ride from a tut tut who took me to a satisfactory guest house with wifi and a cooling fan.  No air con available, but I am getting used to that.  I had a nap and explored the town on foot, stopping for a beer along the way.  Here I was offered to try gilli gilli, and being up for new experiences I went along.  What I was given was brownish like chewing tobacco, the texture of horse manure and the smell of cloves.  I wanted to see what it was like so I gave it a shot but had to spit the whole wad after a minute.  Sorry, but no more gilli gilli for me.

Dambulla is a small town with a major historic temple.  There was not much to do there but to climb the mountain to view the ancient cave monastery dating from 3C BC.    The caves were painted with images from the life of the Buddha but no photography was permitted.  I had read some travelers comments about the difficulty of the climb to reach the caves, and I was happy when I got there with little exertion.  I guess my hiking in Penang has paid off.  The two boy monks pictured above were there with their mom and I guess she dressed them much like an American mom would dress her children to go to a dude ranch.

From Dambulla I took a short bus ride today to the next town up the road to Sigiriya.  Here is one of the most famous landmarks in this part of the world, the ruins of the ancient capital built on Lion Rock.  Photos of the cave paintings were allowed without flash here as this was a historic, not holy, spot.  Today was a local holiday so the place was really packed with Sri Lankan sight seers.  It seems this was a pleasure center and one poem translated in the museum spoke of "lovely ladies offering exquisite pleasure."  Hmmm.

Today as my bus was leaving Dambulla station, my hotel owner dashed on board and returned to me my charger for ipad.  I was so pleased and grateful for his effort.  I think that Sri Lankan folk are extraordinarily kind.

I usually like to linger in a place longer than one day but I had an offer today that I could not refuse.  I met a French family of 5 who will travel tomorrow by van to the east coast city of Uppuveli which I had sort of picked as my next destination.  Instead of staying here another day I will share van and expenses with them and go tomorrow to the favored beach spot of Sri Lanka.