July 19-23: Kandy to Bangkok to Saipan

The 19th was mostly cloudy in Kandy, with some sun and some rain.  I again walked along the lake in the morning, watching for a time the birds and the bats in the trees.  The giant monitor lizard was resting on the lake shore in the exact same place where I had seen it the previously morning.  On a Saturday there were lots of pilgrims, mostly clad in white, visiting the Temple of the Tooth.

After a leisurely day, in mid afternoon I took one last walk along the lake and again saw the big monitor lizard crawling along the lake shore and then resting on the edge of the lake.  I could get to within three or feet of it. 

I showered and then took a tuktuk to the bus stand a little after 3.  There were no seats on the 3:30 bus bound for the airport near Negombo on the coast, so I waited for the next bus, which left about 4:20.  I enjoyed the views as the bus descended from the hills toward the coast.  The bus was crowded and hot, though.  Traffic was heavy along the route and it took more than three hours to reach the airport, at about 7:30.  It got dark just before 7.

My flight to Bangkok left at 1:20 the next morning.  I could have booked a 7 a.m. flight but still would have had to get to the airport at 5, and the earlier flight was about $50 cheaper.  The flight to Bangkok took just over three hours.  I could see lots of lights below until we headed out over the Indian Ocean.  I got no sleep and was uncomfortable as I had a seat that didn't recline.

The sky had already begun to get light when we landed in Bangkok just before 6.  I took the metro and then a taxi to my guest house, arriving before 8.  Bangkok was cloudy and humid.  I took a shower and then napped from about 9 until 12:30, but was still tired after I got up.  After lunch I spent time in an internet cafe and later read some Thai newspapers. with quite guarded reporting after the coup two months earlier.  Late in the afternoon I walked to Khao San Road and back.  For dinner, as for lunch, I ate pad thai (thai noodles), a very welcome change after months of Indian and Sri Lankan food.

The next morning I took the river boat down the Chao Phraya River and then the metro to near Bumrungrad Hospital, where I had my annual physical, as I had done the year before.  I spent much of the afternoon reading and people watching in the comfortable hospital lobby before catching a canal boat and then walking the rest of the way back to my guest house.

The next day was hot, humid, and cloudy.  I read in my room until check out time at 11.  I had breakfast and then read for most of the afternoon until a late lunch about 4.  About 5 I left in a van for the airport, an hour and a half trip in rush hour traffic.  My flight to Incheon in South Korea left just before midnight.

I slept for a while on the flight, waking up just as we were passing over the Shanghai area, full of lights below.  We headed out over the sea and landed in Incheon after 7 in the morning after a five and a half hour flight.   Just before landing the plane took a zigzag route along the west coast of South Korea, passing over scenic islands just before landing.  The flight was calm though a typhoon was about to hit Taiwan.

My flight to Saipan left after 9, heading south over the Korean peninsula, passing over Pusan, and then over Kyushu, the southernmost of the four main islands of Japan. The sky was mostly cloudy until we had passed over Kyushu and flew over the blue Pacific, but I did get some views of the coast of Kyushu.  After a flight of a little over four hours, my plane landed in Saipan about 2:30 in the afternoon.  I was glad to be back after more than eight months away.

July 13-18, 2014: Kalpitiya, Kurunegala, and Kandy

July 13th was a sunny day in Anuradhapura.  After more than an hour wait at the bus station, I finally left the city at 12:30 on a bus heading to Puttalam on the coast, about 50 miles to the southwest.  The bus was fast, but packed full and I had a seat on the aisle, which meant I had standees leaning against me.  The flat, tree filled landscape didn't change much on the way, and the bus arrived in Puttalam about 2:30.  I immediately boarded a bus bound for Kalpitiya on the Kalpitiya Peninsula, a long finger of land running north with Puttalam Lagoon to its east and the Indian Ocean to its west.

Leaving Puttalam, the bus headed first south along the windy, white capped Puttalam Lagoon for only about three miles before turning west and then north, heading up the peninsula.  The landscape became drier, though there were thousands of coconut palms along the way, most in big groves of evenly spaced trees.  I had lagoon views along much of the way, with giant modern windmills near the southern end of the lagoon, and also saw a lot of churches on the way.  The bus was packed at first, but thinned out as we traveled north.  By the time it arrived in the dusty town of Kalpitiya, near the peninsula's northern end, I was the only passenger.   

I had some trouble finding a place to stay until someone told an Italian guy building a guesthouse about me and he invited me to stay with him in his unfinished guest house.  He cleaned up the room for me and it turned out to be a great place to stay.  The windy waters of the Kalpitiya Peninsula are gaining a reputation as an excellent spot for kite surfing, but guesthouses are all outside of town, near the beaches.  The town itself has a well preserved old stone fort and an old Dutch church.  The fort, however, is occupied by the military and foreigners aren't allowed in.  I did see a sentry posted atop its old wall and an old, obsolescent machine gun rusting away atop another wall.  The church, too, was closed.  I did see what looked like a few old tombs in the churchyard.

The town is mostly Muslim and was relatively quiet in the late afternoon, perhaps because it was Ramadan.  I was hungry and bought some cookies and tried to eat them surreptitiously.  I walked to the dirty town beach with many small fiberglass fishing boats, including one named Titanic, on it.  I sat on one, ate my cookies, and looked out at the lagoon.  A donkey wandered by.  After dark I ate a good chicken dinner and then went back to the guest house and talked to the Italian guy until after 9, when he went to bed to get some sleep before getting up after midnight to watch the World Cup final. The wind blew quite strongly, making the night cool.

The next morning I got up about 7 and took a walk around the friendly little town.  The sun was out and the wind was still blowing strongly.  I found a little restaurant, which must have been Christian owned, and had a breakfast of eggs and sweet hoppers, which are thin pancakes with some sort of sweet filling.  The Italian guy got up a little before 9 and gave me a rundown on the World Cup before I left by bus for Puttalam at 9:30.  On the way I spotted a little church with a huge modern windmill just behind it.

The bus reached Puttalam after a little more than an hour's journey.  At 11 I left on a bus heading south along the coast to Chilaw, about 30 miles away.  This bus was very slow, stopping constantly to embark or disembark passengers.  It took us two hours to travel the 30 miles.  Along the way were more coconut palms, thousands and thousands of them, again mostly evenly spaced in groves.  The ocean was never in sight, though we did pass by a lagoon between the road and the coast.  We passed by several churches and a few mosques.

From Chilaw, which is less than 50 miles north of Colombo, I took a bus heading inland and after more than an hour got off at the little village of Panduwas Nuwara to see the ruins dating from the 11th century.  The king who recaptured Polonnaruwa from the Tamils had previously established his capital there.  By the time I arrived it was after 2:30.  I was able to leave my backpack at the little museum, but had to be back there by 4 when it closed.  I made a too rapid tour of the ruins, which aren't much, including the remnants of a royal palace and three monasteries, all among trees.  I also encountered a group of about ten very shy but friendly young monks in bright orange robes.   

A little after 4 I caught a passing bus heading to Kurunegala, about 20 miles further inland.  On the way the landscape became a little hillier, with some rock hills rising above the trees and green rice paddies, a very pretty area.  On the way a few sprinkles fell and then it rained hard for maybe five minutes, which was the first rain I had had since leaving the hills more than a month before.  Reaching Kurunegala, a busy, congested city only about 30 miles northwest of Kandy, about 5:30, I walked to a guest house on the tank and checked in.  I got rained on on the way.  The town and tank are surrounded by three large rock hills, said to resemble an elephant, a tortoise, and an eel.  I could sort of see the elephant.  Kurunegala was one of the short lived capitals, for about 30 years around the turn of the 14th century, following the destruction of Polonnaruwa, when the Sinhalese fled south, but nothing of that era remains.  The guest house was a little shabby and overpriced, at 2200 rupees, about $17 a night, but was comfortable enough.  It was quiet and cool on the tank.  Kurunegala is at about 400 feet elevation.

The next morning was sunny as I ate a very good breakfast, even including bacon, on the terrace of the guest house, with views of the tank and the surrounding rock hills.  About 9:30 I left for a day trip on a fast, uncrowded bus heading north to the little town of Maho, about 25 miles away.  From there I took a tuktuk the three or four miles to the citadel at Yapahuwa, arriving about 11:30.  I ended up spending more than three hours there.

Yapahuwa was another short lived capital in the late 13th century.  It was chosen as capital as it was seen as highly defensible, with a four hundred foot high granite rock rising above the countryside.  At the base of the rock are the restored ruins of two city walls and two moats, along with the foundations of other buildings.  Leading up the rock is a stone stairway, the first two flights very steep and the third beautifully decorated with statuary.  There are elephants, goddesses, dwarfs, and panels of dancers and musicians.  The stairway also has two magnificently carved lions, one on each side of the stairs.  At the top of the stairs, after about a hundred foot climb, is a terrace with the foundations of what was the Tooth Temple.  The Sinhalese kings always brought the tooth with them to their new capitals.  Yapahuwa's citadel, however, fell to the Pandyans from Madurai in 1284 and the tooth carried away to India.  It was, however, returned after only a few years.  Yapahuwa was largely abandoned after its capture.

From the terrace, which had great views over the countryside below, a path leads up another 300 feet or so to the top of the rock, from where there are even more wonderful views out over the green countryside, with rice paddies and hills to be seen in the distance.  The wind was very strong on top, almost strong enough to blow you over.  From one ledge you could look down and see the stairway to the terrace with the ruins of the Tooth Temple.  Few people were there.  The sun was in and out of the clouds, but the strong wind kept it cool.  On top are a small brick dagoba, some post holes and drainage channels in the granite, and some rock cut steps.

There was little shade on top, and after enjoying the views, I walked down the way I had come.  I explored some of the meager ruins at the bottom and went inside a cave temple with some Kandyan era murals. 

Having been told that a bus to Maho would soon be coming by, I started walking back towards Maho and the bus came about five minutes later.  In Maho I left on a 3:30 bus bound for Kurunegala but got off about halfway at Padeniya to see the Kandyan era temple there, with 28 carved wooden pillars and stucco lions atop the walls.  Several old ladies were cleaning the grounds, raking the sandy soil around the temple.  One was particularly friendly and happily posed with four others, all holding their rakes, for a photo.  A bodhi tree nearby had roots breaking out of the rock walls of the terraces on which it stood.  I caught a bus back to Kurunegala about 5:30, arriving about 6.

The next morning I took a short walk atop one of the granite outcrops along the lake in Kurunegala, and then about 9 took a bus northeast for about an hour on narrow country roads to Ridi Vihara, a temple at the site of a silver mine whose discovery permitted King Dutugemunu to complete the great Ruvansalivaya Dagoba at Anuradhapura.  He built the temple in gratitude, though what is there now is from later eras. 

From the bus stop I had to walk for maybe ten minutes, the last part up several flights of stairs, to reach the temple.  A snake, maybe five feet long, slithered by just as I reached the top.  Sri Lanka has the world's highest incidence per capita of fatal snake bites, but this one didn't look poisonous.  The temple elephant, chained to a tree, was munching some foliage piled up for him.  He had a single long tusk.  I wonder what happened to the other one.

There are three temples, one a small Hindu temple converted into a Buddhist one about a thousand years ago.  The main temple is a little larger, built under a stone outcrop said to resemble the hood of a cobra.  It contains a large reclining Buddha along with many other Buddhas, both statues and murals.  An interesting feature is the row of Delft tiles, provided during the Kandyan era by a Dutch ambassador, below the large reclining Buddha.  Most of them feature Old and New Testament scenes.  Several groups of pilgrims, bringing flowers, came in while I was looking around.  A friendly young monk particularly wanted me to notice the tiles.  Just above this temple is another Kandyan era temple with interesting murals and a moonstone. 

From the temples I walked to the top of the hill, with a restored dagoba on top, for some pretty views over the countryside.  The area is hilly, with rice paddies beneath the hills and flowering trees. 

After spending about three hours there, I caught a bus back to Kurunegala, had lunch, picked up my backpack from the guest house, and left after 4 on a bus bound for Kandy, about 30 miles southeast of Kurunegala, the bus rising from about 400 feet elevation at Kurunegala to the cooler hill climate of Kandy at about 1700 feet.  We didn't rise much during the first third or so of the very scenic journey, with green, forest covered hills all around and rice paddies along the road.  Then began a steep ascent into the hills. 

Arriving in Kandy, I walked along the lake to a guest house south of the lake in the area where I had stayed before and then walked along the lake until dark.  A cool wind blew off the lake and it felt good to be back in the cooler hills after more than a month in the hotter lowlands.  In front of the Temple of the Tooth workmen were constructing stands for the Esala Perahera, the grand annual procession of the tooth, with a hundred or more elephants, which would take place in early August.  I would have loved to see that, but my visa expired July 20 and I had already spent almost three months in Sri Lanka, far more time than I had expected.  I had not be able to book my flights to Bangkok and then to Saipan previously, so I did so my first night back in Kandy.

The next day I pretty much relaxed in the cool climate and beauty of Kandy.  I took a long walk along the lake, spotting the largest water monitor lizard I have ever seen.  It seemed quite unperturbed by the people and traffic along the lake shore,  It was lying still, just outside of the water and on the grass, and not moving at all except for opening and closing its eyes.  I had a great look at it, from maybe ten feet away.  It was well over six feet long, somewhere between seven and eight feet.  I had read that they reach only about six and a half feet in length, but this one was more than that.  I also spent some time sitting in the lobby of the venerable old Queen's Hotel.  There were a lot more foreign tourists, including lots of families with children, in Kandy than when I had been there the last week of May. 

The next day was another relaxing day.  I again walked along the lake in the morning.  I noticed that several trees along the lake near the Hotel Suisse were full of nests of cormorants, egrets, and herons.  There were dozens of nests in only three or four trees.  The sidewalk below was guano stained, as were many of the trees' leaves.  Some of the chicks were quite large and noisy.  I saw three egret chicks in a nest being fed by one of their parents who flew in from the lake with food.  Higher up in the trees were fruit bats, maybe a hundred in total, sleeping while hanging onto the limbs.  A little further on I saw the big monitor lizard again, basking in the sun but with a little more movement than the previous day. 

It rained later that day and in the late afternoon I took a slow walk around the lake, covering the two mile or so circumference in maybe an hour and a half, with lots of stops.  I again encountered the giant monitor lizard, this time crawling along the banks.  Eventually it slipped into the water and swam along the shore, checking out various spots.  I walked along watching it and noticed it used only its tail to swim, with its legs positioned close to its body.  Eventually it swam across the lake to the other side. 

I watched the birds in their nests for a while and later talked with a guy born in Kandy but now living in Perth, Australia, where he just retired from teaching statistics at a university.  He was visiting his parents and told me that in the 60's there were maybe 50 cars in town and that he would see only three or four at a time on the streets.  Now some streets, including the one that runs along the southern shore of the lake, are overwhelmed with vehicles.  I spotted a big white pelican settling down on a wide tree limb for the night just before dark.  I hadn't seen any pelicans here before.

July 5-12, 2014: Mannar and Anuradhapura

I finally left Jaffna about noon on the 5th, after spending a lot more time there than I had planned.  While there I saw very few tourists, maybe ten the whole time I was there.  My bus was heading south to Mannar, an island just off the northwest coast of Sri Lanka about 70 miles from Jaffna by road.  The bus first headed east from Jaffna before turning south and crossing the Jaffna Lagoon, maybe ten miles west of Elephant Pass, over a several mile long causeway with an arching bridge part way along the causeway.  There were a few fish traps in the lagoon, which was shallow here but not as shallow as at Elephant Pass.

Once over the lagoon the bus headed south on a road that more or less paralleled the coast (Palk Bay), but we never saw it.  The dry terrain consisted mainly of sparse yellow grass and shrubs, with palmyra palms, but one section was a sort of dry forest with some lovely trees and dense underbrush.  There were a few army camps along the way, and few houses and towns.

Mannar is a long, thin island about 20 miles long with its southeast end just off the coast.  After traveling more than three hours we reached the causeway and later bridge that reaches the island.  I spotted some black headed ibises searching for food in the shallow water as we crossed the causeway.  The town of Mannar is just over the bridge with a mostly ruined fort just to the north of the bridge as you reach the island. The bus arrived about 3:30 on a cloudy afternoon and I found a very nice little guesthouse for only 1000 rupees, less than $8, the cheapest I've paid here in Sri Lanka.

I spent the rest of the afternoon walking around town, passing a cricket match in a dusty pitch and then walking along the town's main street and eventually on a road to a baobab tree, native to Africa, on the outskirts of town.  There are lots of churches in town, and I've read that the island is 40% Catholic.  The Muslims were driven out by the Tamil Tigers, but some have obviously returned, judging by the dress I saw on some of the women and men.  Mannar is in the Tamil part of the country.

The baobab tree is enormous and, unlike most of the baobab trees I have seen in Africa, was in full bloom with its gnarly branches covered with leaves.  Among the leaves were pale red flowers and small fruit.  Often these trees are leafless and look like they have been planted upside down, with their roots sticking up in the air.  A sign next to the tree said its circumference is 19.51 meters (how's that for precision?  not 19.5 but 19.51), about 64 feet, and its height 7.5 meters, almost 25 feet.  So its trunk is almost as wide as the tree is high.  The sign also said it was "planted by Arabian sailors in or around 1477."  I wonder how they arrived at that date.  There was some graffiti on the elephant hide like bark.

From the baobab tree I walked back to the bridge that connects the island to the causeway.  A sign said it was built by the Japanese in 2010 and is about 500 feet long.  The remains of the partially destroyed old bridge run alongside.  I've read that the old bridge was blown up in 1990 during the civil war, cutting off the island for seven years, so there must have been another bridge from 1997 to 2010.  With the wind blowing strongly and the sky cloudy it was cool on the bridge at the end of the afternoon, with good views of the fort and lagoon.  I stayed there until after sunset.

The next morning I walked to the bridge and then the fort.  The morning was cloudy at first, but then the sun came out while I was exploring the fort.  Mannar was taken by the Portuguese from Jaffna in the 16th century because of the pearl banks just south of it.  (Apparently there is a Bizet opera entitled The Pearl Fishers set in Mannar.)  As late as 1905 there were 5000 pearl divers recovering 80 million oysters a year, but now the industry is dead.

The Portuguese built the fort and the Dutch expanded it.  I spent a couple of hours exploring it.  When I entered several little donkeys were grazing on the yellow grass.  One was a furry little newborn.  The adult donkeys are small, only about three feet tall at the shoulder.  Mannar was the first place I saw donkeys in Sri Lanka.  I had seen several along the streets of downtown Mannar the afternoon before.  They don't seem to be used for anything.

Among the ruins is one building that was a church.  Inside is the stone top of a Portuguese tomb dating from the 1570's.  There are several stone Dutch grave markers on the floor, the earliest from 1697 and the others from the 1700's.  An English plaque memorializing a father and mother is on the wall.  Palmyra and coconut palms grow among the ruins in the square fort, with bastions at the four corners.  Lots of fallen purplish palmyra fruit lay all around.

I wandered through the many ruined buildings and then walked along the walls.  There were many crows flying about, some with pieces of grass in their beaks for building nests.  As I walked along the walls near some palmyra palms, a crow hit me in the back of the head.  I must have been to close to its nest. A little later on another did the same thing and others flew close to me, hovering overhead.  I took to running along the walls waving my arms when I got close to trees and managed to avoid further attacks.

After lunch I hopped onto a bus destined for Thalaimannar, the town at Mannar Island's far northwest end, 20 miles away.  I sat on it for about an hour before it finally left shortly after 1, taking about an hour to reach Thalaimannar.  En route there were some views of Palk Bay to the north and I saw a few baobab trees also, one that seemed to be hollowed out.  I saw a lot more palmyra palms in the sandy soil.  A few donkeys grazed along the road, but more cows and goats.  We passed through two little towns and followed the newly renovated railroad tracks.  Just before reaching Thalaimannar the bus turned off the main road to pass by the brand new train station near the jetty where the ferry to Rameswaram in India used to depart.  I wonder if there are plans to resume the ferry, as I can't think of any other reason to rebuild the train tracks to the jetty.

Thalaimannar seems to be more of a village than a town.  I walked five or ten minutes north and reached the coast, which I walked along for about half a mile to the west.  The road ended at a rudimentary navy base which I wasn't allowed to enter.  I did walk from the road across the scrub and then through some very short mangroves, at most a foot high, to reach the beach.  Running the 20 miles or so from the tip of Mannar to India is Adam's Bridge, a series of sandbanks and islets.  The name comes from the theory that when Adam was expelled from Paradise, in Sri Lanka, he traveled across this "bridge."  It was in fact an isthmus connecting India and Sri Lanka when the seas were lower.  In the Ramayana this is the route Hanuman and later Rama take to reach Lanka, slay its demon king Ravana, and rescue Sita.  I had hoped to see something, perhaps some of the islets.  I could see the coast of Mannar to the west and maybe one islet off the coast.

I walked back to Thalaimannar, arriving about 3:30 after being barked at by five puppies hiding in the thicket of thorn bushes along the way.  Rather than wait for the bus I walked along the road south through a sort of palmyra forest.  The sky had clouded up so it was now cooler and the spiky palmyra trees were very interesting to see up close.  The bus came by after 4, sooner than I would have preferred, as I was enjoying the walk.  An hour later I was back in the town of Mannar and again walked out to the bridge and later to the fort before sunset.  The sky was cloudy but there was a bit of color at sunset.

It was hot and sunny the next morning at 10:30 when I left on a bus heading southeast to Anuradhapura, 70 miles and two and a half hours away.  My bus had paintings of St. Francis holding the baby Jesus, or some baby, plus another of the full grown Jesus, at the front.  Before we left I spotted another bus with a large painting of a ferocious looking eagle on the side, with a small portrait of Jesus on the door above the words "Don't Be Afraid."  After crossing the bridge and causeway and reaching the mainland, the bus stopped at a small roadside shrine with a statue of St. Francis.  One guy from the bus, not the driver or the ticket conductor, hopped off, removed his sandals, and prayed before the statue while we waited.  He finished, hopped back on board the bus, and off we went.

The first hour or so of the trip was on a poor road, with lots of the culverts en route being rebuilt.  After that first hour, the new road was smooth and much faster.  We followed the recently rebuilt railroad tracks through scrub and sandy soil at first, with thicker forest and taller trees the further we went inland.  Nearing Anuradhapura the forest seemed quite thick, though this is a dry area, with rain only from about October to December.  We reached Anuradhapura about 1 and I found a very nice place to stay, sort of a homestay in a family home with several rooms for tourists.

For more than a thousand years Anuradhapura was the dominant city in Sri Lanka and for much of that time one of the most magnificent cities in the world.  The chronicles say it was founded in the 4th century B.C., but it may have existed earlier.  In the 3rd century its king and his followers were converted to Buddhism, supposedly by the son of the great Indian Buddhist Emperor Ashoka.  The city's prosperity was based on the building and maintenance of great reservoirs, or tanks, that provided water for agriculture during the long dry seasons.  The water system was quite elaborate and allowed the kingdom to produce enough rice and other crops to support armies and massive building projects.  However, the city was often conquered and plundered by Tamil kingdoms in India, or even taken over by Tamil generals in its own armies.  Its final destruction came in 993 after it was conquered by the great Chola king Rajaraja I, who established a Tamil kingdom with its capital in Polonnaruwa.  Still, when a Sinhalese king finally conquered Polonnaruwa in 1056, he chose to be crowned in Anuradhapura, though he made his capital in Polonnaruwa.  At the end of the 13th century, as Polonnaruwa fell and was abandoned as the Sinhalese moved south, Anuradhapura, too, was abandoned (except, apparently, by a few monks) until rediscovered by the British in the 19th century.

The ruins at Anuradhapura are extensive and the greedy government charges foreigners $25 to see them, with the ticket good for only one day.  However, unlike at Polonnaruwa, the ruins are not fenced in and are so extensive that there are not ticket checkers everywhere.  About 3 I took a bike from my guest house and biked to the southern area of the ruins.  The ruins generally are west of the new town established by the British in the 19th century and now with about 70,000 people.  To get to them I had to bike only two or three miles, first along city streets and then through the countryside of rice paddies.  The town has three tanks, two to the west and one to the east.  I headed towards the Mirisavatiya Dagoba between the two western tanks and, along with another tourist on a bike I met while looking for it, finally found it.  Almost all the signs along the way are in Sinhalese, with few in English. Anuradhapura is a major pilgrimage site for Sri Lankan Buddhists, second only to the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy.

The dagoba (stupa) is fully restored, or rather rebuilt, and is painted bright white.  Its first version dates from the 2nd century B.C., built by Sri Lanka's most admired king, Dutugemunu, after he conquered the city, completing his conquest of the island.  It was rebuilt over the centuries and before its most recent restoration resembled a weed and tree covered hill, like all of Anuradhapura's dagobas.

South of the dagoba, along the eastern edge of one of the tanks are some ruins in what was a royal pleasure garden.  One of the pools in the gardens has several wonderfully carved bas reliefs on the stone outcrops next to it of what look to be very happy elephants playing among lotuses in the water.  The area was very nice, filled with trees, and we were the only people there.

South of that is a temple with more elephant bas reliefs around its much larger pool, though the bas reliefs of the elephants are not as fine as in the gardens.  A small museum contains some other very fine sculpture and a modern reclining and very colorful Buddha lies in a building with swallow nests in one dark corner.  As I was examining the nests, a swallow flew right past me and into a nest.  I saw its small head pop out of the nest several times just a few feet from me.  Next to this building is a cleft in the rocks filled with thousands of small bats clustered all over each other.  We climbed up to the top of the rocks, with views of the dagobas to the north, rice paddies to the east, and the tank to the west, over which the sun was setting.  We had to walk back through the gardens to get our bikes.  A couple of langur monkeys were sitting on stones in the gardens eating hard green mangoes.  I got back to my guest house just before dark and had a very good dinner there.

The next morning, after a good breakfast with eggs, toast, fruit, and tea, I headed back to the ruins on my bike about 8:30.  Besides the southern ruins that I had visited the day before, there are four major sets of ruins, including the ancient citadel and three monasteries.  Each area covers many acres.  Two monasteries are south of what was the walled citadel and I headed to the earliest of the two, the Mahavihara, founded in the 3rd century around the bodhi tree that grew from a sapling from the bodhi tree under which Buddha obtained enlightenment in Bodhgaya in India, the sapling having been brought to Anuradhapura by Ashoka's daughter.  At least that is the story.

Passing an army camp near a lotus filled pond and then along the shores of the northernmost of the two western tanks, I headed first to the gleaming white, fully restored and rebuilt Ruvanvalisaya Dagoba.  It is a big one, about 180 feet high, but only the third biggest in Anuradhapura.  It is, however, the most important religiously, as it is believed to hold several relics of Buddha.  Just in front of the entrance is a big sign with photos of the dagoba before (1890) and after restoration.  In the 1890 photo it looks like a big mound covered in trees and bushes, with a few stone pillars in front of it.  The pillars are still there, but everything else now is vastly changed.  Shoeless and hatless, as required, with lots of pilgrims mostly clad in white, I wandered around the big courtyard on all sides of the dagoba.  The glare from the big white dagoba was almost too much.  A small procession came by, with a couple of umbrellas over some of the marchers and two drummers and one guy with a small oboe.

Donning my hat and sandals again, I walked south along the pedestrian path towards the bodhi tree, passing lots of garbage littering the grounds under the trees.  Anuradhapura gets hordes of pilgrims and they mostly just throw their trash wherever they want.  Just before reaching the bodhi tree I passed the remains of a 2nd century building that is said to have been nine stories high with a thousand rooms.  Only a forest of stone columns remains, some 1600 of them, it is said.  They are all fenced off.

By the time I reached the bodhi tree it was about 11.  The tree is second only to the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy as the most highly prized site for pilgrims and I've been told there are big crowds early in the morning. It wasn't very crowded when I arrived.  The complex, which is entered after a police check, has four levels of terraces with golden railings, the top two closed off to the public.  On the top terrace is the original bodhi tree brought from Bodhgaya, supposedly planted there over 2200 years ago.  On lower terraces are several more bodhi trees, all said to have been grown from saplings from the original.  The bodhi tree in Bodhgaya was destroyed soon after its sapling reached Anuradhapura and the one there now was grown from a sapling brought from Anuradhapura.

The bodhi tree on top is not particularly impressive, and does not seem so very old.  One limb is held up by golden poles.  On the highest terrace that you can climb to (the third highest) are several altars, and pilgrims were depositing flowers, usually lotuses, on them and then praying.  Many people were sitting on the sandy ground and praying, or just sitting.  Colorful Buddhist prayer flags hung from the railings and elsewhere.  Some of the pilgrims handed some sort of folded fabric to an attendant standing on stairs leading to the second highest terrace.  When he had a large enough stack of them he took them up to the second highest terrace and deposited them along the railing of the highest terrace.  I wandered around for an hour or so watching all the activity.

I walked back to my bike, which I had left near the big dagoba.  Before reaching it I stopped at a ruined little brick dagoba under some beautiful rain trees to drink some water and eat some cookies.  It was midday and hot.  The trees were full of birds, and monkeys, both langurs and macaques, were in the trees and on the ground.  A guy with a large and colorful cobra in a basket displayed it for tourists.  From where I sat I had a good view to the east through the trees of the massive brick Jetavana Dagoba,  Anuradhapura's and the world's largest.

I biked to get a better view of the Jetavana Dagoba and then turned around and headed to the Thuparama Dagoba, dating from the 3rd century B.C. and the earliest one in Anuradhapura.  It is relatively small, only about 65 feet high, and fully restored and rebuilt and painted a bright white.  It is a pretty little dagoba, surrounded by four concentric rows of stone pillars of diminishing height, most still topped with capitals decorated with eroded geese.  Not all the pillars are still standing, and several lean.  It is thought that perhaps they supported a roof over the dagoba.  The place was full of glare at 2 in the afternoon.  The stone courtyard all around it was now too hot for bare feet.  I put on a pair of black socks I had brought with me.

From the dagoba, with my sandals back on (and my socks off), I walked to some more ruins of monastery buildings, usually just foundations with lots of stone pillars.  One had an excellent moonstone at the entrance, with more wonderful carvings on the balustrades along the stairs into the building.

I next biked east to the ruins of the Jetavana Monastery east of the Mahavihara Monastery.  This was the newest monastery, founded in the 3rd century A.D. by a king having a dispute with the Mahavihara Monastery.  I managed to get by the ticket checkers at the south side of the monastery by entering it over a small bridge on the west.  Its centerpiece is the huge Jetavana Dagoba, unpainted but restored in brick and standing about 240 feet high.  Originally it is supposed to have been 400 feet high, and when built was the third highest building in the world, after the two highest pyramids at Giza in Egypt.  I approached it walking past the foundations of monastery buildings, including one ruined building with the remains of a stone door jam more than 25 feet high.  It is thought to have been an image house holding a large standing Buddha. Under the cracked lotus plinth inside a latticed stone tray, with 20 or so cubicles for relics, is visible.

I reached the huge dagoba and walked around the big stone platform surrounding it.  I wore my socks to protect my tender feet from the hot stone.  Few others were there.  The dagoba is still the largest and tallest structure in the world made entirely out of bricks, an estimated 90 million of them.  Originally it took a quarter century to build.  The reconstruction was finished in 1981.  The bulbous lower portion is topped by a cube with a broken brick spire atop the cube.

I wandered through the ruins, mostly foundations, south of the dagoba.  There are also quite a few stone pillars, particularly at what was the chapter house, a well preserved stone pool, and an unusual stone latticed railing around what might have been a bodhi tree or an image house.  A big langur monkey was sitting on the rail as I approached.  Several others were around and I watched them for a while.  About 6 I started biking back to my guest house, which took about 20 minutes.

The next morning I left by bike from my guest house a little after 8, heading to the ruins of the Abhayagiri Monastery, the most northerly, north of the citadel.  It was founded in the 1st century B.C. and soon surpassed Mahavihara as the largest and most influential monastery.  In the 5th century A.D. it had 5000 monks and was more open to new currents of Buddhist thought than the more conservative Mahavihara Monastery.  Lots of foreigners came to study there, including the famous Chinese traveler Fa Hsien, or Fa Xian, in the early 5th century, about 1411-12.

On the way ticket checkers at two stops yelled for me to stop but I just biked past smiling and waving and saying something incomprehensible.  I biked through the east side of the monastery and beyond it for a couple of miles to the remains of a stone bridge over a little stream.  It is made of big slabs of rectangular stone.  The people along the way were friendly and I think a little surprised to see me.

I biked back to the monastery and then along a dirt road well before the ticket checkers.  I spotted the ruins of an old pool, with a jumble of rectangular cut stone that formerly lined the walls.  Through the trees I biked to the east side of the giant Abhayagiri Dagoba, parked my bike, and then walked around the large stone platform surrounding it.  At about 10 it was early enough in the morning that I didn't have to wear my socks. The dagoba supposedly marks a spot where Buddha left a footprint, standing with one foot there and the other one on Adam's Peak.  The original dagoba dates from the 1st century B.C., but was enlarged in the 2nd century A.D., rising to about 380 feet in height, only slightly shorter than the Jetavana Dagoba.  Until just a few years ago it was under restoration, with workers tearing off the trees and bushes and adding new bricks.  Around the dagoba are many little hillocks, only a few feet high, with trees growing on top.  I wonder  if they are overgrown little stupas.

At the southern and main entrance to the platform on which the dagoba sits are two little shrines with ancient statues of fat dwarfish attendants of Kubera, the god of wealth, which stand guard at the dagoba. The statues are now in modern little buildings.

From the dagoba I biked west into an area full of ruins, again mostly foundations, of the monks quarters, a very pretty area, quiet and sheltered by many trees.  There is much less garbage on the Abhayagiri Monastery grounds, and fewer pilgrims come up here.  Lots of monkeys were around.  One building among these ruins is thought to be where the Tooth Relic was kept.  Nearby is a large stone pool full of water with swirling patterns of bright green algae on top.  Further along is the monks' refectory with a huge stone trough used to hold rice donated to the monks, probably enough for all 5000 of them.  Along the way are a couple of statues of the meditating Buddha. Finally I reached a huge stone pool, called the Elephant Pool because of its size, 530 by 175 feet, and 100 feet deep.

From there I headed north to see some other ruins with well preserved moonstones and guardstones and had the bad luck to park my bike right next to a ticket checker.  I acted dumb, asked where I could buy a ticket, and biked off the way I had come.  I biked past the Elephant Pool again and then further south and then east to the brightly white painted Lankarama Dagoba, a relatively small one dating from the 1st century B.C. and thought to be part of a nunnery.  It has been overly modernized, so I soon headed further east and entered the former citadel from the north.  Almost nothing remains.  The western walls are now only a long dirt mound.  There are a few houses and shops along the road through the citadel.  I biked to the ruins of a royal palace near the southern entry.  It is a small one, and a late one, built for the coronation of the king who recaptured Polonnaruwa from the Tamils in the 11th century.  Not much remains.  There are some more ruins further north, including what may have the very first Temple of the Tooth.  The ruins of a refectory had another of those huge rice troughs.

The day had been cloudier than the previous ones, with more wind, which was welcome.  About 4 I biked south out of the citadel and back to the Jetavana Monastery, crossing into it over the little bridge I had used the day before.  For the rest of the afternoon I just wandered around among the ruins and trees watching the dozens of monkeys, both langurs and macaques.  About 6 I started biking back to my guest house, a little bit more difficult in the wind on well used bicycle.  Just once while traveling it would be nice to be able to ride a decent bicycle.

The next morning was cloudy and windy as I set off on my bike about 8:30 heading back to the ruins of the Abhayagiri Monastery, about a half hour ride away.  I finally bought the $25 one day ticket and then biked first to the ruins of the monastery's chapter house west of the giant dagoba.  The ruins of what once was a five story building aren't much, but the entrance steps have a very finely carved guardstone, with the usual nagaraja figure standing next to a dwarf and with a multi-headed cobra hovering over him.  Nearby are a couple of other ruined buildings with excellent moonstones, the half moon shaped stones in front of entry stairs.  These two both contains all four animals, elephants, bulls, lions, and horses, plus lotuses, foliage, and a row of geese.  Some later moonstones, which were meant to be stepped on just before entering a building, omit bulls, in deference to Hindus as a bull is Shiva's sacred animal, and lions, as they are symbols of Sinhalese royalty.  I wandered around the quiet, forested area, with several ruins of stone pillars, many leaning haphazardly.  A cave with a rudimentary brick structure and very old inscriptions on the rocks is nearby. 

I then biked to an area east of the giant dagoba to two very large and well preserved stone pools next to each other, used for the monks' ritual bathing.  Water came in through a stone conduit to a small pool with several levels right beside the smaller of the two large pools.  Here the silt would settle before the water flowed into the smaller of the two large pools, and then from that pool into the larger one.  Between the pools and the dagoba is a pretty forested area with several ruins, mostly just restored foundations, plus a very fine Buddha statue in the meditation pose.

By now it was about noon and I sat under the trees and ate some cookies I had brought with me.  I was soon joined by a couple of macaque monkeys and their very small babies clinging to their undersides.  I did throw them bits of my cookies.

About 1 I biked to the nearby Abhayagiri Museum in a modern building and after that I biked further south to the Jetavana Museum in an old colonial building on the southern edge of the Jetavana Monastery ruins.  Both museums had some interesting sculpture and other items.  The latter had photos of the six main dagobas before and after restoration.  The Abhayagiri, Jetavana, Ruvanvalisaya, and Mirisavatiya dagobas were completely covered with trees and bushes, looking like oddly shaped hills.  The smaller Thuparama and Lankarama dagobas also had trees and bushes growing on them, but with some of the brick facing still visible.

After visiting the Jetavana Museum, I wandered around the ruins of the monastery again and sat for a while and ate some more cookies.  Then I biked to the nearby Ruvanvalisaya Dagoba where I spotted an elephant chained to trees and munching some palm fronds and other foliage provided for him.  I watched him for a while and then explored some ruins just west of the dagoba, a couple with moonstones much simpler than the usual ones, the row of animals consisting of only nine of them, three elephants and two each of horses, lions, and bulls.

I biked further south to the ruins of a refectory near the Mirisavatiya Dagoba, with another one of those long stone troughs for rice donated for the monks.  From there I biked further south, back to the royal pleasure gardens I had visited my first afternoon in Anuradhapura to see again the wonderful elephant bas reliefs carved into the stone outcrops next to pools.

From there I biked still further south to stone outcrops that formed the core of yet another monastery, the Vessagiriya Monastery, of which almost nothing remains.  However, I enjoyed climbing up and around the giant boulders for views of the countryside, full of trees and rice paddies.  I could see the white Mirisavatiya Dagoba and, further away, the bigger red brick Jetavana Dagoba in the distance.  While clambering among the boulders, some bigger than houses and seemingly balanced precariously on the stone outcrop, I came across a white clad, white bearded old man meditating under one of the biggest boulders.  I wandered around the area as long as I could and then biked back to my hotel, getting there just before dark.

The next morning about 9 I took a bus only about 8 miles east, but a slow, crowded bus ride of almost an hour, to Mihintale, a rocky hill famous as the place where Buddhism was introduced to Sri Lanka.  At the foot of the hill ancient stone stairs, very wide, lead up past frangipani trees in flower.  About a hundred feet up I took a side set of narrower stairs another hundred feet up to the Kantaka Chetiya Dagoba.  The dagoba is only about 40 feet high (originally thought to be about 100 feet high), with four altars at its cardinal points.  When I reached the dagoba several macaque monkeys were sitting on the eastern altar eating the bright pink-purple lotus flowers deposited there by pilgrims.  Most scattered at my approach but one or two remained, carefully eating the yellow center of the big flowers.  It was amusing to see them stuffing their faces into the big flowers.

The altars have some interesting sculpture remaining on them, which I looked over before exploring the wonderful assemblage of boulders and caves around the dagoba.  There are supposed to be 68 caves.  I found some bats in one of them and really enjoyed wandering through the rocky and forested area.

I walked down the narrow stairs I had walked up earlier and then further up the wide ones, past more frangipani trees, to the ruins of the main monastery.  An alms' hall has another one of those enormous stone troughs for rice for the monks, plus another smaller, though still large, one nearby.  The remains of an aqueduct that brought water can also be seen.  Next door are the ruins of the chapter house with two large stone tablets from the 10th century setting forth the duties and the pay of various officials and employees at the monastery.  Parts are translated and very interesting.

From there I walked further up, maybe 400 feet higher than where I had started in the morning, to a terrace where I had to take off my shoes and hat.  Here there is a small restored white dagoba supposedly marking the spot where in 247 B.C. King Devanampiya Tissa, while hunting a deer, encountered Mahinda, the son of the great Buddhist Emperor Ashoka, who promptly converted him and his retinue of 40,000 to Buddhism.  At least that is the story.  A modern statue of the king stands in front of the dagoba, with the dagoba meant to represent Mahinda.

Next to the dagoba is a gold roofed pavilion over what I think are a set of Buddha footprints that were covered with coins thrown on them by pilgrims.  A gold and a steel railing surround the footprints.  A sign nearby listed the benefactors of the fencing and roof, including a husband and wife and the "Lifebuoy brand of Sri Lanka Unilever."

I wandered around the area, a sort of large terrace with rocky hills looming above it.  A bodhi tree stands on one side.  By now there were lots of pilgrims around.  I climbed one of the hills, a steep rocky outcrop with metal rails and stone cut stairs on the way to the top.  Lots of people were coming up and down the precarious route and I followed an old, gray haired woman in a colorful sari as she made her way to the top.  The top was windy and crowded with people, with only a few square feet of space for them enclosed by thin, low metal rails.  The views are spectacular, over the distant countryside and down to the white dagoba below.  Also, at more or less the same level are the summits of two other rocky hills overlooking the terrace, one with a huge modern white Buddha statue and one with a a brightly white painted dagoba much larger than the one below.

I stood up there in the wind enjoying the views as pilgrims came and went.  At times there were traffic jams of pilgrims, many of them white uniformed schoolkids, on the narrow path up.  Four old ladies came up together, one of them passing out cough drops to the other four and me.  (I read the label, with a depiction of a man coughing into a handkerchief, and they contained extract of clotsfoot and tincture of tolu, among other ingredients.)  I asked her if the others were her sisters, as one of them looked very much like her, and she said, "Sisters [and pointing to one] and mother."  They all posed for me for a group photo and then made their way down.

I finally battled my way down through the crowds along the precarious and narrow route, and then walked up some much easier rock cut stairs to the big white dagoba.  I spent quite a while up there as the views were great.  I could see some of the dagobas in Anuradhapura   There were all sorts of macaque monkeys around, many with their babies clinging to their undersides.  Whenever the opportunity arose, they made for the pink-purple lotus flowers left by pilgrims to devour their yellow centers.  They were quite bold and fun to watch.

I walked down to the terrace and then up to the modern Buddha statue, with more great views.  There were still lots of pilgrims, most of them white clad, when I started heading down just after 4.  I took a different path down, passing a rock cut pool with a carving of a five headed cobra, some more ruins further down in a beautiful forested area, and even further down a small pool with the eroded remains of a lion on his hind feet.  Apparently, water once flowed from his mouth.

I finally reached the road and started walking to the bus stop for the bus back to Anuradhapura.  On the way I passed some restored small brick dagobas.  At one of them pilgrims were lighting some sort of flammable waxy looking substance on top of a coconut and then carrying the lighted coconut around the stupa.  After two or three rounds they would break the coconut over a rock just outside the dagoba enclosure.  One little boy had a hard time breaking his.  It took him three tries to break it sufficiently, while a woman who looked to be his grandmother watched.  I've read it is bad luck not to break your coconut.  I caught a bus back to Anuradhapura about 6:30.

The next day was a full moon day, the Esala Poya, with a multi-elephant perahera scheduled for that night.  Anuradhapura is always a big draw for pilgrims and especially so on full moon, or poya, days.  Before 10 I took a bus heading northwest about 25 or 30 miles to the archeological site of Tantirimalai.  As the bus passed through the ruins of Anuiradhapura I saw hundreds of buses and vans, having brought pilgrims, parked along the sides of the roads.  The road through the forested country to Tantirimalai was also full of pilgrim buses and vans.

The bus reached Tantirimalai after a journey of about an hour and a quarter and it was not the remote and little visited site described by one of my guidebooks.  Tantirimalai is a large undulating rock outcrop and on this poya day was full of white clad pilgrims, most walking and running around barefoot.  (Another tourist had been there a few days earlier and had told me it was almost deserted on that day.)  Dozens of buses and vans were parked along the road.  I kept my sandals on as I roamed the rocky expanse for about two hours.  The day was mostly cloudy and the wind was blowing strongly, so it wasn't as hot as it could be on that massive expanse of rock.

Tantirimalai marks a spot where Mahinda's sister rested while delivering to the newly converted king in Anuradhapura the sapling of the bodhi tree in India under which Buddha was enlightened.  Two large Buddhas are carved into the rock at different places.  A sitting, meditating Buddha is flanked by gods fanning him.  An even larger Buddha reclines.  Both are impressive, though the latter less so when you approach and see that most of his face has been restored with cement.  A modern white dagoba sits on one summit and a bodhi tree in an enclosure on another.  Across a long pool of water created among the rocks by a little dam are some ruins among more rocks.  In one narrow defile between the rocks is a sort of mini forest, through which a path runs to a rock overhang with prehistoric painting on it.  Next to it is as sign with a hilarious map showing prehistoric rock paintings around the world, locating Paris in northern Africa.

I wandered around some more, climbed some of the rocky summits for the views over the rocky area and the green countryside beyond, and then made my way back to the entrance.  A long line of pilgrims led into an enclosure where free food was being dispensed.  I jumped on a bus about 1:30, which quickly became very crowded, and got back to Anuradhapura about 3.  I showered, rested, and had dinner before heading to the perahera route about 9:30, reaching a spot where a crowd, including lots of foreigners, had formed about 10, when the perahera was supposed to pass by.  I waited for an hour with no perahera and no sign of the perahera coming.  I gave up and walked back to my guesthouse, took another shower, and went to bed just before midnight.  I was later by another tourist that the perahera finally arrived about 11:30 and that it was still in full swing an hour later when she left.

June 26 - July 4, 2014: Jaffna and the Far North

I spent a last morning on the beach at Uppuveli on the 26th and then took a tuktuk to Trincomalee about 10:30.  From there I left after 11 on a bus bound for Vavuniya, about 60 miles to the west.  The bus headed into the dry interior, with yellow grass but lots of green bushes and trees.  The road was fairly bad for the most part, with some road work in progress.  We did pass some very green rice paddies along the way and some that had just been reaped.  There were a few hills before we reached Vavuniya, a three hour trip from Trincomalee.

In Vavuniya I hopped on a Jaffna bound bus, which left at 2:30.  The bus had to turn off at a check post just north of town, where a soldier checked some of the passengers IDs.  During much of the civil war the area north of Vavuniya was the front line between the Sri Lankan Army and the Tamil Tigers (officially the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, with "Eelam" meaning something like "Precious Land").  Jaffna is about 90 miles north of Vavuniya on what is now a very good road.  The train tracks are just west of the road and recently rebuilt.  The gravel on the bed looks brand new.

I didn't see much that might be remaining war damage and the terrain was not as dry and barren as I expected.  About halfway to Jaffna we reached Kilinochchi, which had been the capital of the Tamil Tigers. It was finally captured by the Sri Lankan Army in January 2009 after a three month battle, the beginning of the end for the Tigers.  The town is said to have been pretty much obliterated during the battle, but now looks sparkling new, with a wide main street and lots of new buildings.  There is a war memorial along the highway running through town, a huge cube, maybe 20 feet high, pierced by an artillery shell and with a giant golden lotus blooming out of the top of the cube.  Two soldiers with plumed hats stood at attention in front. There are also lots of posters of President Rajapaksa all over town.  A huge water tower, blown up by the Tigers in the final stages of the battle, has been left where it fell right next to the highway through town.

About ten miles north of Kilinochchi we reached Elephant Pass, where a causeway across this mostly waterless portion of the Jaffna Lagoon connects the Jaffna Peninsula with the rest of the island.  The area gets its name from the elephants bound for export to India and driven through the shallow waters to ports on the peninsula over many centuries.  It is also the location of two of the civil war's biggest battles, in 1991 and 2000.  In the latter battle the Tigers succeeded in dislodging the army from its positions.  Approaching the causeway is another war memorial, a battered armored bulldozer used as a sort of tank by the Tigers in their 1991 unsuccessful attack.  It was disabled by an army corporal who jumped on it and detonated hand grenades, killing the occupants and himself.  There is statue and a big billboard depicting the corporal, now a national hero, next to the bulldozer.  Soldiers with plumed hats stand guard in front of the statue.  On the other side of the causeway is yet another war memorial, a cement map of Sri Lanka being held up by four hands with another lotus blooming out of the north.

Once across the lagoon, the road turn northwest and the bus traveled through several towns, with lots of spiky palmyra palms along the way, before reaching Jaffna, with more than 100,000 people, about 5:30. Jaffna is the north's largest city and the cultural capital of the Sri Lankan Tamils.  Jaffna became the capital of a Tamil kingdom, established by Pandyans from Madurai, in the 13th century and controlled much of the north over succeeding centuries.  The Portuguese spent much of the 16th century harassing Jaffna, but didn't conquer it until 1621, destroying the Hindu temples.  The Dutch captured it from the Portuguese in 1658.  In 1795 they transferred it along with the rest of Sri Lanka to the British.  The city suffered greatly during the early stages of the civil war, with the Tigers gradually taking control of Jaffna and the peninsula from the civil war's start in 1983 until 1987.  In 1987 the city was attacked and captured not by the Sri Lankan Army but by an Indian Peacekeeping Force that had at first arrived to patrol a ceasefire.  The attack devastated the city and the Tigers melted into the countryside.  The Indians left in 1990 and the Tigers gradually retook the city.  The Sri Lankan Army itself subjected Jaffna to a second devastating siege, finally capturing it in 1995. The Tigers never came close to retaking Jaffna after that, not even after capturing Elephant Pass from the army in 2000. Thus, Jaffna was spared further devastation during the final phase of the war.

I spent the next day looking around the city.  I got out before 8, and walked past the rebuilt clock tower, originally built in 1875 to commemorate a visit by the Prince of Wales.  Nearby is the bright white Jaffna Public Library.  The original was destroyed by Sinhalese mobs protected and maybe instigated by the government in 1981, destroying ancient works of Tamil literature.  It was rebuilt in 2002 in the original Indo-Saracenic style.  Near the library is a Hindu style tower and statue commemorating a Tamil leader who died in 1977.

Just west of the clock tower, library, and memorial stands the huge Jaffna Fort, behind a now partially dry moat, with the Jaffna Lagoon on one side.  The fort is the largest Dutch fort in Asia, built in replacement of a previous Portuguese fort in the late 17th century, with additions in the late 18th century.  It is pentagon shaped, with five huge bastions at each of the five points.  I would guess the fort is well more than a thousand feet across at any point.  The fort was scene of much of the action during the two sieges of Jaffna in 1990 and 1995, bombarded by both sides. The Dutch colonial buildings inside, including a beautiful large church, governor's mansion, and several other buildings, were reduced to rubble, with only a few walls remaining.

I spent about two hours wandering around inside and on the walls.  The fort is now in the midst of a massive restoration project, with ugly, bright white cement being used to build up the huge portions of the walls and bastions destroyed in the civil war.  There were workmen everywhere.  The inside is still in ruins, with a huge pile of brick and plaster rubble that I think was the church.  In other areas are a few walls and more rubble. Some of the remaining walls of buildings inside the fort have trees growing on them.  You can now walk along more than half of the walls and bastions, and I did so, with good views out over the lagoon.  The walls and bastions, however, are being restored poorly.

I left and had breakfast about 10:30 and then read a couple of newspapers in my hotel room until about 1:30, when I started another walk around town.  I headed east from the fort, passing churches, a big 19th century school, and a few other colonial buildings.  Eventually I turned north through a leafy neighborhood and reached the former kachcheri (government offices) left in ruins from the battles, with a big sign in front of the ruins saying  "Say No to Destruction Never Again," which, with the double negative, grammatically means just the opposite of what is intended.  Further north I found Jaffna's small museum, with some interesting stuff including a full length painting of a very young Queen Victoria in bad condition, riven with what may be bullet holes.

Further north is Jaffna's largest Hindu temple and the most prominent one in Sri Lanka, the Nallur Kandaswamy Kovil.  The original, as usual, was destroyed by the Portuguese and it all looks rather new, though supposedly begun in the early 19th century.  Men have to take their shirts off to enter and I arrived just in time for the big daily puja that begins about 4:30.  Inside the temple compound are several shrines, the most prominent to Murugan, one of the many names for the non-elephant headed son of Shiva.  Priests conducted pujas at the shrines, waving candelabras of fire, while a drummer and an oboist with an Indian style oboe three or four feet long played.  Lots of bells were rung.  Hundreds of people were in attendance, raising their hands in supplication when the priests opened the curtains hiding the idols at certain moments during the ceremonies.  I followed the priests and devotees all around and enjoyed it all.

The crowds had thinned a bit but the pujas were still going on at 6 when I decided to leave in order to walk back to my hotel before dark.  But I walked only a few minutes before I came across another temple just starting a festival procession and ended up spending about an hour and a half watching it.  Three idols were just being brought out of the main temple into the dirt open space around the temple.  They were carried on small palanquins with thick long poles, with four men for each palanquin.  Led by priests, they circled the temple, with singing women accompanying them.  It was all very colorful, both those in the procession and the colorfully sari and dhoti clad crowd.  I followed the procession and the people in the crowd were very friendly.

The procession stopped at various little booths, sort of makeshift shrines, along the way and then stopped at a large pavilion where the idols were deposited on a base adorned with colorful flowers, paintings, and lights. The priests then conducted a long and elaborate ceremony to the accompaniment of three oboists and a couple of drummers while a big crowd watched.  They waved candelabras of fire in front of the idols and chanted.

I wandered around the crowd watching both the ceremony and the crowd and people were very friendly. One bare chested, dhoti clad, young guy, after the normal questions about where I was from and so forth, told me that the main idol was Amman, another name for Kali, an avatar of Parvati, Shiva's consort.  I had noticed the main idol of the three on display was in a reclining position.  He then went on enthusiastically to bring me up on the present state of the World Cup in Brazil and which teams had made it into the second round.  The ceremony was still in progress, though some people had left, when I left after 7:30, walking back to my hotel in the dark.

The next morning about 9 I took a very crowded small bus north from Jaffna along narrow lanes and past lots of houses and small agricultural garden plots.  Lots of palmyra  palms grew along the way and I saw at least a couple of army patrols of about six soldiers with automatic rifles slung over their back riding bicycles. By the time the bus reached the north coast, about an hour after departure, the bus was almost empty.   It terminated at the Keerimalai Hot Springs right on the north coast, only about 12 miles from Jaffna, with the Palk Strait separating Sri Lanka from India about 30 miles away.  A pool collects the water from the springs, though the water wasn't hot at all.  A bunch of boys and men were in the pool, the boys trying unsuccessfully to make a three story tower of bodies, boys standing upon boys.  A walled enclosure next to the pool contains a pool for women.  The pool is named after a holy man whose austerities had given his face the look of a mongoose (keeri) and there is a bright yellow statue of a man with the head of a mongoose.  Next to it is a bright yellow statue of a woman with a horse's head, in commemoration of a princess with a face resembling that of a horse until a dip in the springs successfully improved her appearance.  A few people were bathing in the sea, in the bright glare of the sun.

Nearby is a new Shiva temple, the old one having been destroyed in the civil war.  Some of the ruins are still scattered around the new temple.  A tall gray cement gopuram (tower) nine stories high, not yet decorated, stands in front of the temple.  The inside of the large temple, however, is very colorful, full of new colorful paintings of Hindu gods and goddesses.  It was almost empty as I looked around, but an electrically operated Hindu noise maker, consisting of a drum with two drumsticks, two cymbals and two bells, was filling the empty space with a great deal of noise.  Eventually, it stopped.  I wandered around, enjoying the decorations, and eventually got to talking with a balding, pot bellied man, bare chested and in a dhoti.  He told me he was from Toronto and had lived there since 1987.  I asked him how many Tamils there are in Canada and he told me 300,000 or 400,000.  He then told me that was too many, as the recent arrivals (unlike the original Tamil immigrants who were doctors and engineers) were lower class people only in search of welfare, getting married and then divorcing.

I took the bus back about 12:30, taking a different route along the narrow lanes of the northern peninsula until eventually reaching the main road to Jaffna.  The bus passed several vineyards, quite a surprise to see at this latitude, just south of 10 degrees north of the Equator.  (Sri Lanka is located from just south of 10 degrees to just south of 6 degrees.)

The next morning, like the previous ones in Jaffna, was sunny and hot, but with a strong wind from the west. About 9:30 I left on another small bus, this one heading northeast through the peninsula to Point Pedro on the north coast, a little more than 20 miles away.   The bus followed the main road to Point Pedro until crossing another mostly dry lagoon about halfway, and then turned off and traveled through interesting small back lanes past houses and gardens until reaching the town of Velvettiturai on the coast.  This was the hometown of the Tamil Tiger leader, quite a horrific guy, whose family house became a sort of shrine.  I have read that the government has now completely destroyed it and even stationed a guard on the spot so no one can even photograph where the house used to stand.

The road continued east along the coast, with a few small houses and fishing boats along the coast, and then turned inland just before reaching Point Pedro on the coast, more than an hour and a half after leaving Jaffna. I walked east from the bus stop in the town center and then north towards the coast through a maze of narrow dirt lanes past a few houses, lots of palmyra palms, and friendly people.  On the ground I spotted the purplish fruit, a little bigger than a husked coconut, of a palmyra palm, and then saw bunches of them growing up under the palm fronds of several palmyra palms.

I reached the coast, bright in the midday glare, just east of a lighthouse and walked further east past some more fishing boats to a wide and long sandy beach, called Munai Beach, where the coastline turns south.  At high noon the beach was deserted but for one family of about five and a few very small fishing rafts, made of wood and looking like half a canoe, a couple of them up on coconut trunk sections with dogs sleeping under the rafts.  There was absolutely no shade, so I huddled under my umbrella in the bright sun while sitting on one of the rafts.  The wind was blowing strongly, so that helped with the heat.

I walked back to town along the coast, with some fish drying in the sun along the way.  I bought a liter of cold water and drank it down in a shady spot along the coast.  I caught a bus back to Jaffna at 2 and it took the more direct main road back, a trip of less than an hour and a half.

The next morning I headed to the islands west of Jaffna.  The morning was cloudy after several sunny days and as my bus left, about 9, there were dark clouds to the east with what looked like streaks of rain falling from them.  The bus passed the fort and headed southwest over the lagoon on a long causeway, maybe two miles long.  In the very shallow waters of the lagoon were many fish traps, circles of poles with nets, with long lines of poles, also netted, leading to them.  I saw a couple of small boats with lateen sails.

The first island we reached was Velanai or Kayts Island, formerly called Leiden, about ten miles long and only two or three miles wide.  The bus traveled northwest at first, a little less than halfway along the dry island, completely sandy and barren in places and with short yellow grass in other places.  There were also lots of palmyra and coconut palms, plus bushes and some other trees, but few houses.  Turning southwest, the bus passed through the relatively large village of Velanai and then crossed another causeway, again perhaps two miles long, over shallow water heading southwest to Punkuditivu Island.  The bus crossed Punkudutivu and reached a ferry crossing on its west coast, less than 15 miles from Jaffna, after a trip of a little more than an hour.

I had hoped to take a ferry to an island called Delft, or Neduntivu, about 12 miles southwest, but on arrival I was told that the ferry goes only at 9 and 3, and that the last ferry back is at 2, so that was out.  Instead, I took a crowded little wooden ferry a couple of miles west to Nainativu Island, about three miles long north to south and much less wide.  The ferry dropped us off right in front of a modern Hindu temple, where the statues of goddesses and other women all wore bikini type coverings on their breasts that nonetheless showed their nipples, quite an odd compromise between traditional bare breasts and current modesty.

We arrived about 11, just as the midday puja was beginning with a procession in the open courtyard around the main temple of priests and others, including oboists and drummers and a guy blowing a conch shell.   I followed them around and then into the main temple (taking off my shirt, as required), where they paraded around the central shrine and ended up at a shrine in the northeast corner, where they conducted a long and elaborate puja in front of idols of Meenakshi, the fish eyed goddess celebrated in the big temple in Madurai, and Ganesh, the elephant headed god who is her son, as Meenakshi is an avatar of Parvati, Shiva's consort. The priests waved candelabras of fire in front of the idols and performed other rites while three oboists, with long oboes, and two drummers played, with the conch blower joining in every once in a while.  A big crowd had gathered, maybe a thousand people, almost all arriving by bus and ferry from Jaffna and other nearby places.  There were a particularly large number of women, many in beautiful saris, as this goddess is particularly helpful in conceiving children.  At times the whole crowd would raise their hands and let out a low shout.  I was the only westerner during what turned out to be a two and a half hour puja, of which this ceremony was only the middle part, though Tamils now living in Denmark and Norway came up to say hello during the puja.

The two golden idols of Meenakshi and Ganesh were then placed on top of colorful wooden cows atop palanquins carried on thick poles by big, bare chested, dhoti clad men and paraded both inside and outside the temple, with priests and others in attendance, including women carrying bunches of leaves along with little clay pots of flaming embers .  The oboists and drummers played during the processions and it was all very colorful.  During the procession outside three young men clad only in dhotis rolled in the dirt behind the idols while holding husked coconuts in their outstretched hands.  Glistening with sweat, they  quickly became covered in dirt.  At the end of the outside procession, as it entered the temple again, they smashed their coconuts against a rock just outside the doorway.

Back inside, after a final procession along the corridors surrounding the inner sanctum, the idols were returned to their corner for a final puja, which ended the ceremonies, about two and a half hours after they had begun.  I asked a guy if this is done every day, and he said yes, in June, by which I took to the Hindu month that more or less coincides with June.  Later I read that this temple has a 15 day annual festival in June-July.

The crowd mostly dispersed and I sat inside the temple resting for fifteen minutes or so before walking north along the shore about ten or fifteen minutes to a Buddhist temple, recently rebuilt by the Sri Lanka Navy. This is one of the rare Buddhist temples in the overwhelmingly Hindu north, and it commemorates Buddha's mythical second visit to Sri Lanka where he appeared in midair to stop a battle between a king and his nephew over possession of a bejeweled throne.  A silver painted dagoba (stupa) stands in front of the little temple, which has Buddha statues and murals inside, including a painting of a man in a 19th century western suit with what appear to be devilish horns coming out of the top of this head.  Unlike the Hindu temple, the place was deserted.

The sun was hot as I walked back under my trusty umbrella to the ferry crossing.  The little wooden boat that left about 3 was crowded with Hindu devotees leaving the Hindu temple.  Two buses back to Jaffna were waiting on the dock and I left on one of them about 3:30.  The trip took less than an hour under a now bright sun.  The waters of the lagoons we crossed were now bright blue in the bright sun, in contrast to the somewhat gray waters we had crossed over in the cloudy morning.

The next morning about 9:30 I again headed west to the island closest to Jaffna, crossing the lagoon under a bright sun.  Reaching the island, the bus, instead of taking the main road as the day before, turned off to the west and followed narrow lanes that roughly paralleled the main road.  This was a very scenic route, passing a few small houses and at one point a sort of forest of spiky palmyra palms, some very high with smooth trunks, while the smaller ones had spiky trunks in addition to their spiky palm fronds.  Lots of little, just sprouting palmyra palms could also be seen on the dry, sandy ground.  The island has quite a few surprisingly large Hindu temples and Christian churches.

The bus reached the west coast and later passed through Velanai and near the causeway leading to Punkudutivu, the island just to the west, before heading north along the coast, going inland again, and reaching the town Kayts, at the island's northern end, about 10:45.  The day was sunny and hot.  I walked to the jetty just north of town, where a ferry used to run to Karaitivu, the island less than a mile to the north. About twenty scuttled fishing boats lay in the water just off the jetty.  There are good views along the strait between the two islands both to the east and to the west.  To the west is a Hammenhiel Fort, a Dutch built fort on a small island between the two larger ones.  "Hammenhiel" in Dutch means "Heel of Ham."  The shape of Sri Lanka is often compared to a pearl or a teardrop falling from India, but to the Dutch is appeared to resemble a ham.

I walked through the little town, past three churches and several buildings in ruins and lots of fantastically elaborate banyan trees.  Eventually I reached a walled cemetery on the shore opposite Hammenhiel Fort, which was a mile or so offshore.  It is said to be used by the Sri Lanka Navy.  The sun was very hot and I sheltered under my umbrella and trees where I could.  I just missed a 12:45 bus back to Jaffna, but consoled myself with some cookies and a liter and a half of cold water.  I left on a bus about 1:30 for the slow ride back to Jaffna, with the bus filling up with white uniformed school kids now and then.  The trip through pleasant scenery along the way was marred by the driver's almost constant blowing of his loud, annoying horn.  It seemed he could not go more than 30 seconds without blowing it, despite the almost total absence of other vehicles.

The next day I made another day trip from Jaffna, this one to places much further away.  At 8 I left on a slow bus heading south to Kilinochchi, retracing part of the route I had taken on the way to Jaffna.  On the way I noticed one big area on both sides of the road marked with little red signs with skulls and crossbones every hundred feet or so warning of mines.  The bus went across the shallow waters of Elephant Pass again and finally reached Kilinochchi a little before 10.

I walked to the war memorial in town that I had passed by in a bus a few days before.  Soldiers were polishing the giant artillery shell that pierces the 20 foot or so cube and the gold lotus that sprouts out of the top of the cube.  Two plumed guards stood at attention to the right and left.  The inscription on the stone in front of the monument is almost a parody of such things, referring to President Rajapaksa as one who was "born for the grace of the nation," leading the "humanitarian operation which paved the way to eradicate terrorism entirely from our motherland."  The "sturdiness of invincible Sri Lanka Army" is also commemorated.  The soldiers finished their polishing just before the changing of the guard at 10.  An officer with a red sash led two soldiers toward the monument and they relieved the two others who has been standing guard.

I walked north along the main road through town to the downed water tower, destroyed by the Tamil Tigers in December 2008 just before the army captured the town on January 2, 2009.  As at the ruins of the Kachcheri in Jaffna, a big sign proclaims "Say No to  Destruction Never Again," though the "N" in "Never" has been covered over, changing it to "Ever."  The area around the fallen water tower is also now a memorial site and I walked around the water tower and into its cavernous interior.

I waited by the side of the road in town until I caught a bus a little after 11 heading southeast to Mullaitivu on Sri Lanka's northeast coast about 35 miles away and passing through the area where the last battles of the civil war were fought.  My guidebooks had nothing about this area, but I had torn out an article from a 2012 Economist magazine about tours that the Sinhalese were taking through the area to see war sites.  On the way to Mullaitivu the bus passed through two of the villages mentioned in the article, Visuvamadu, with an underground bunker said to be four stories deep, and Vallipunam, with torture chambers.  I was tempted to get off in Visuvamadu to try to see the bunker but decided to go to Mullaitivu first and stop on the way back. On the way to Mullaitivu through the dry landscape, but with lots of trees, including lots of palmyra palms, and bushes, I did see quite a few buildings in ruins, with what looked like shell and bullet damage on the walls, but there were many more recently repaired or rebuilt houses and other buildings.  The terrain became much drier as we neared the coast just before reaching Mullaitivu, passing a large lagoon, which we crossed near its outlet to the ocean, with a sandbank separating the lagoon from the dark blue ocean beyond.  I remember reading that the final battle of the civil war was fought near a lagoon close to Mullativu, so I suppose this might be it.

The bus reached Mullaitivu, where it was hot and sunny, about 1.  I walked under my umbrella in the midday glare past new government buildings to the long, sandy, deserted beach and then back to a small restaurant near the bus stop for lunch.  At 2 I left on an uncrowded bus heading to Kilinochchi but got off at Visuvamadu about 3.  I asked at a couple of shops where the bunker was and if I could see it, and was directed to walk a little over a mile east along the road to a certain shop and then turn left.  I did so, and got further instructions at the shop and a little further off the main road at an army base.  I enjoyed the walk under my trusty umbrella in the hot sun along the not very busy highway and even more so on the dirt road lined with palmyra palms and other trees and bushes. I reached another army base with a wire fence surrounding the brick superstructure of the bunker and asked the soldiers at the gate if I could see it.  One went back to ask a superior while I spoke with the others.  One told me this bunker has only two stories underground, while another at Mullaitivu has four.  The soldier who had gone to inquire returned to say I need permission to see the bunker, not exactly a surprise.

I walked back to the highway, spotting a few macaques scampering across the dirt road on the way.  I had time to buy a liter of cold water from the shop before catching a crowded bus heading to Jaffna that came by at 4:30.  I did get a seat, though, for two hour trip back to Jaffna.  Back in Jaffna I was tired, after almost seven hours on buses.  I had managed to raise painful blood blisters on both my heels, too, after having purchased a new pair of sandals in Jaffna a few days before.  The ones I had bought in India in early April were already cracking at the soles and I had managed to implant some sort of thorn or other sharp thing that I couldn't find and dislodge, but did feel every once in a while when my foot put pressure just in the right, or wrong, place.

The next morning I had my usual breakfast in a friendly restaurant and spent some time in an internet cafe before finally checking out of the friendly and comfortable hotel where I had been staying.  I left on a 12:30 bus heading west across the islands to the jetty where I had taken the ferry to Nainativu three days before.  I arrived there before 2, well before the 3 o'clock ferry to Delft, which actually left at 4.  I enjoyed sitting in the shade of the waiting area with a strong wind and excellent views over the milky blue waters under the bright sun.  Just before reaching the jetty I had noticed many buses and vans parked and waiting for pilgrims visiting the Hindu temple across the strait on Nainativu.

The ferry from Delft arrived about 3:30 and I boarded with 50 to 70 others.  I chose to sit on the fore deck braving the sun and spray rather than sit in the dark hold at the stern.  I enjoyed watching the fore hold being loaded with sacks of rice, sugar, onions, pumpkins of some sort, milk powder, and much else. The ferry left at 4 and the fore deck was crowded with people, boxes, sacks, and even plastic containers of gasoline.  A brahminy kite hovered over the jetty and I saw maybe 30 or 40 very small fish, maybe an inch long, jump out of the water in unison three or so times.  I suppose some larger fish was chasing them.  I sat on my backpack with my back to the sun, so that wasn't a problem.  I did get hit by sea spray every once in a while, mostly during the middle part of the 12 mile, hour trip, when the little ferry, only maybe 30 or 40 feet long, puttered through some white capped swells.

Arriving in Delft I searched for a place to stay.  I had been told there was a hotel and right in front of the dock was a place with a sign saying "Rooms."  I inquired and was told yes, they had a room, but there were no beds in it.  A policeman just before I boarded the ferry had telephoned a guy on Delft named David, and eventually David showed up on a motorcycle and took me about a mile west to his house, where he had a room for guests.  The room was okay, though it smelled of fresh cement.

I walked to the beach just a few hundred feet in front of his house and spent the rest of the afternoon walking along it.  There were some beautiful shells among the sand and a little Navy post behind concertina wire.  I walked west along the beach, with lots of palmyra palms inland and the Palk Strait, separating Sri Lanka and India, to the north.  Delft is about halfway between Jaffna and Rameswaram in India.  Only a few other people were on the beach.  I watched the sun set into the trees further along the coast and then returned to the house for a shower with very salty well water and then a dinner of rice and curry and fish prepared by David's wife.

After dinner I talked with David.  It turned out he is a priest in the Church of South India.  He is from Nuwara Eliya and moved to Delft in 2005.  He told me his church has a congregation of 90 and that most of the islanders are Catholic.  He said all the islanders are Tamils.  He and his family (besides his wife, he has a nine year old son and a four year old daughter) were very friendly.

My room was hot, even though I had a fan, but eventually I fell asleep.  I got up about 6:30 and sat on the porch.  It looked like the family had all slept together on the floor of the living room.  There wasn't a breath of a breeze and it was already hot early in the morning.  I should have taken a walk, but I was waiting for breakfast, which took a long time to arrive.  I busied myself watching people bicycle by.  Also, there were lots of crows to be seen.  Many were gathering bits of grass in their beaks, so it must be nesting season.  I have seen more crows than any other birds in Sri Lanka and India.  They are scavengers and there is always lots of garbage to scavenge.

Breakfast finally was prepared by about 8:30 and about 9 I set off for a walk under a hot sun and still no breeze.  I walked just ten minutes or so further west to the two story ruins of a Portuguese fort made of coral and poked about that for a while, climbing up to the second story.  The walls were very interesting, with big chunks of readily identifiable coral of several different kinds.

From the fort I walked east towards the jetty, the street lined with walls of coral rocks stacked on top of each other.  Again, I could often picked out different kinds of coral.  People along the way were very friendly.  Few foreigners make it here.  There were a lot more people on bikes than on motorcycles, and very few cars.  On the way I passed a square stone pigeon house on a stone pole, with cubicles for the pigeons. During the Dutch era carrier pigeons were used to communicate with Jaffna.  I also passed David's unfinished new cement church.  A sign outside said the original church had been built in 1855 by American missionaries who first arrived in 1848.  The sign said Jaffna Diocese of the Church of South India, American Ceylon Mission.  Delft has another, non-Dutch name, but all the signs on government offices and elsewhere read "Delft."

At the jetty I rested in the shade a bit and then turned inland, heading south.  Unlike the coast road, which is paved and lined with homes, shops, and government offices, this road is dirt, with a very few houses at first along the way, but lots of both palmyra and coconut palms, plus the coral walls.  Soon there were no houses or walls, just palms.  I reached an open area, with a sandy declension which must fill during the rainy season. Delft has wild ponies in the south of the island (I think the island is only about 5 miles east to west and 3 north to south) and I may have seen some of them in the distance, but maybe they were just cows.  A baobab tree, native to Africa and brought to the island by Arab sailors, was around somewhere, but I didn't find it.  I think I turned back just before I reached it.  I walked maybe a mile in the hot sun before turning back.  There was just a bit of wind from the south once I reached the open area.

Back at the jetty I bought and drank a liter and a half of water and then walked back to David's house, getting there after 1.  A big lunch had been prepared for me, which I didn't want before the boat ride back. Nonetheless, I ate some of it out of politeness and then was taken to the jetty by motorcycle and boarded a different boat than the one the afternoon before.  I had to sit in the crowded hold on this one, though it was a bit airier than the previous  one.  The crowded ferry left at 2:30 and the seas were not rough at all.  Two buses were waiting at the dock when we arrived about 3:30, but they were already filled with devotees returning from the Hindu temple on Nainativu.  I decided to wait.  Several other buses came and filled up quickly and it took about an hour before I could board a bus and get a seat.  Then the bus waited for about an hour to cram in as many passengers as possible, and then some.  It set off about 5:30 on what turned out to be a slow and unpleasant (much more unpleasant for those who had to stand, packed like sardines) ride of an hour and a half to Jaffna.

June 23-25, 2014: Trincomalee and Uppuveli

On the morning of the 23rd, my last morning in Sigiriya, I again sat on my veranda before breakfast.  I saw the two mongooses together twice, both times down by the stream.  At 11 I took the bus to Dambulla, where I boarded a bus heading northeast to Trincomalee, 60 miles or so away on the coast.  On the way the terrain became drier and flatter, with fewer and lower trees.  Few people or houses were to be seen along the way until we neared the coast.  The bus arrived in Trincomalee about 2:30, passing the whitecapped waters of its Inner Harbor adjacent to the city center.  Trincomalee is the biggest city on the east coast, though with only 60,000 or so people.  It is situated on a peninsula next to a magnificent harbor, one that Admiral Nelson called the finest natural harbor in the world.  The city suffered massively during the civil war, but looks now to be in good shape, seven years after the Tamil Tigers were driven out of the east.  It was also badly hit by the 2004 tsunami.

I found a room in a hotel overlooking a cemetery and then went to a small but very friendly restaurant for a chicken biryani lunch.  I saw a woman drinking an orange Fanta and so ordered one for myself.  During my early days of travel in Asia and Africa, 30 years ago, before bottled water was available, I drank lots of Fanta, often dispensed from a cart filled with drinks and a block of ice.  Drinking it brought back old times, but I don't think I'll be ordering another one soon.

After lunch I walked to Fort Frederick, with bastions and a gate across a peninsula sticking out into the Indian Ocean that leads off the longer peninsula on which Trincomalee is situated.  The original fort was built by the Portuguese after they captured the town in 1623.  The Dutch captured it in 1639.  It 1782 it was taken from the Dutch by the British and later in the year from the British by the French before being restored to the Dutch by the peace treaty of 1783.  In 1795 the Dutch ceded it, along with the rest of their holdings in Sri Lanka, to the British.  It was named Fort Frederick, after the Duke of York, second son of King George III, in 1803.

The fort is still in military use, but you can walk through.  Just past the gate, marked with the date 1675 on one side and 1676 on the other, are some nice old colonial buildings and several huge strangler figs.  Very tame spotted deer grazed here and there, many of them bucks with large antlers.  That was quite a surprise.  I walked by a very nice two story colonial building called Wellesley Lodge, where Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, is said to have convalesced in 1800, suffering from fever and the "Malabar Itch," before his return home after his successful campaign against Tippu Sultan of Mysore in southern India.

The road through the fort leads uphill, ascending a little more than a hundred feet to the tip of the little peninsula and Swami Rock.  On the way I passed four battered tombs, three Dutch and one British.  At the top of Swami Rock is Koneswaram Kovil, one of the five most important Shiva temples on Sri Lanka.  It is fairly modern, the Portuguese having destroyed the formerly magnificent temple that stood here high above the ocean.  A sign in front admonishes you to remove your shoes and headwear and prohibits entry to menstruating women and people who had just consumed non-vegetarian meals.  Despite having just had chicken biryani for lunch, I decided to risk Shiva's wrath and entered.  I arrived in time for the 4:30 puja, conducted by two brahmin priests and attended by only a few people.  I followed the priests around as they rang bells, waved plates of fire, and dispensed flowers at various shrines.  At the end only two sari-clad women and I accompanied them.

Just outside the temple are cliffs plunging directly down to the ocean, a more than a hundred foot drop.  A Dutch woman is said to have leaped to her death from the cliffs in 1687 after her lover sailed away, though records apparently indicate that she was married eight years later.  The view from the cliffs was excellent.  I stayed there for quite a while as fishing boats approached the cliffs below the temple before heading out to sea.  The fishermen, usually two to a boat, would splash some water from the sea below the temple on their boats.  Some lit little fires and prayed before the temple high above.  Twenty to thirty boats must have come by to pay their respects while I was up there.  Most then headed out to sea to the northeast, though some headed in other directions.

From the cliffs I could look southeast and see the lighthouse across the mouth of the wide bay, maybe four or five miles away.  To the west I could look across a much smaller bay, called Back Bay, speckled with fishing boats, towards the town and the setting sun.  To the south is another small bay, called Dutch Bay, where the Dutch landed before attacking the fort.  In the dusk I walked down Swami Rock and through the fort to the walls, which I climbed just at sunset. Spotted deer were grazing atop the grass covered walls and bastions.

After my late lunch I wasn't very hungry and about 7:30 set out from my hotel to walk to the Inner Harbor. Only a block or so from my hotel I came across a small group of people in the dark street in front of a Hindu temple.  A bare chested, pot bellied man in a dhoti said hello and told me that a puja was about to begin.  I stood next to him and watched the ceremony as he explained what was going on.  In front of the altar to the deity Ambala were plates and plates of fruit and a big basin full of oil lamps.  A drummer beat his drum as priests waved candelabras of fire in front of the altar.

After they finished this portion of the puja, a man, not a priest, kneeled before the idol and, as my companion explained, became possessed by the goddess.  He emitted a few screams and vigorously waved his arms and then his head.  The priests handed him two bunches of leaves and he waved those, too.  He then stood and looked over the offerings.  My companion told me he, or rather the goddess, was deciding if she was happy with the offerings.  Apparently happy, the possessed man and the priests went into the nearby main temple, where he spoke with some of the devotees.  I stood outside talking to my companion.  He told me he had two sons, an engineer and a doctor, in Sydney, and a daughter, who is an accountant married to an engineer, in Toronto.  There was a great exodus of Tamils during the civil war.

The possessed man came back to the smaller shrine, and with a few more screams, the goddess left his body.  This ended the puja.  The priests began passing out the fruit that had been before the shrine, first to several old women.  Then one gave me from the collection a banana, a large wedge of watermelon, and a big brown betelnut wrapped in a green leaf.  I pulled out the betel nut, looked at it, and chuckled at it.  A man then took it from me, saying I wouldn't need that, which was true, as I wouldn't have chewed it.  The guy I had been talking to had me sit down and we talked a bit until another guy brought me a plastic bag full of very hot, sweet pongal, a rice and sugar dish often given out at Hindu temples.  With my gifts I headed back to my hotel and ate the delicious hot pongal, followed by the watermelon and the banana.  I figured I had better have something a little more substantial for dinner, so after 9 I headed to the friendly restaurant where I had eaten lunch and ate an egg hopper, a sort of fried egg in a rice pancake, and a sweet hopper, with some sort of sweet filling in a rolled up rice pancake.

I spent the next morning exploring more of Trincomalee.  The day was sunny, but with a good wind blowing from the west.  I was up and out early, soon after 7, visiting St. Stephen's Cemetery right below my hotel, with both colonial and modern gravestones in a weed choked, littered yard.  The grass and weeds were yellow.  Most of the colonial graves were topped with rectangular blocks of brick and plaster raised above the ground.  The earliest I saw is dated 1804.  One obelisk commemorated 56 people who died within a month or so during a cholera outbreak.  Another gravestone noted a death due to dysentery.

From the cemetery I walked a short distance, passing a large, white, colonnaded, two story colonial building on the way, to Dutch Bay, with a good view of Fort Frederick.  From there I walked through some uncrowded streets with friendly people across the narrow peninsula to Inner Harbor, and then walked north along the shore in the strong wind before doubling back to my hotel.  I had breakfast about 9:30 and then walked around town some more, first to the fish market, with rays, an eel, a big yellow fin tuna, and lots of other fish, including lots of cuttlefish.  From there I walked to the dirty beach covered with fishing boats on Back Bay, and then across the narrow peninsula again to Inner Harbor.  Just north of windy Inner Harbor is Orr's Hill, separating Inner Harbor from a lagoon further north.  I walked along the south side of the hill and the north shore of Inner Harbor for about a mile until I reached the guarded entry gate to residence of the Governor of Eastern Province, where I turned around and headed back, making a slight detour up to the crest of Orr's Hill.

I got back to my hotel a little after noon, checked out, and had lunch before boarding a bus that would pass through Uppuveli, less than four miles up the coast from Trincomalee.  After a long wait, the very full bus finally departed about 2.  It only took about 20 minutes to reach Uppuveli, a village with guest houses stretching along a sandy beach.  I found a beach side guest house and sat on the second floor of a thatched beach side building looking out over the ocean until about 5.  Quite a few western tourists, and some Chinese, were staying at the guest house.  There was a very good wind from the west and it felt great to sit with a view of the beach and ocean in that cooling wind.  Down the curving coastline I could see Trincomalee and Swami Rock.

Though the southwestern monsoon, blowing across the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea, is now bringing lots of rain to India and to the southwest coast and central mountains of Sri Lanka, the rest of Sri Lanka, which is most of it, is in its dry season.  Its rainy season is from October to December, when the northeast monsoon, blowing down across the Bay of Bengal, brings rain.

About 5 I started walking down the beach south, in the direction of Trincomalee.  Only a few guest houses front the beach, with even fewer inland.  I soon passed all of them, and a cement bunker just beyond the beach which may date from the civil war but also may date from World War II, when Trincomalee was an important Allied naval base.

I soon reached  group of about 25 fishermen pulling ropes attached to a big net that had been pulled by a boat far out into the ocean and was now being pulled by the men back to the beach.  Half the men were on one side and the other half on the other side of the two ends of the big net.  Finally, the end of the big net, full of thousands of frantically flapping fish, was dragged up onto the beach.  The men waited for the fish to settle down, though some remain flapping, before they began to sort the fish by species into several big wicker baskets.  Most seemed to be of three species, the biggest maybe three or four feet long.  Lots of jelly fish had been caught in the net, too, and they were discarded, thrown onto the beach.  Several dozen crows stood on the beach nearby, waiting for any small fish thrown away.  After the fish were sorted, two men carried the big wicker baskets to the ocean to wash the sand off the fish.  Then the fish were weighed on an old fashioned balance and packed into styrofoam boxes.

After all that was done, I noticed another group pulling in another big net and went to watch them.  They had a smaller haul, yet still well more than a thousand fish.  They also had a bunch with needle-like snouts maybe two or three inches long.  A very big puffer fish had also been caught in the net and had inflated itself as they do when feeling threatened.   It had pretty much deflated by the time the fish had passed the height of the frenzied flapping and the sorting began.  Eventually, one of the sorters picked the puffer up and threw it towards the ocean, not quite reaching the water.  A few of the crows pecked at it, but it was too big for them.  A few waves reached it, but it seemed the puffer was too far gone.  It tumbled through the waves, being washed up the sand and then back.  But finally the puffer regained its vigor, a wave reached it, and it rode the wave back into the ocean.  I walked back to my guest house, reaching it just before dark.  After dinner I noticed there were maybe 50 to 100 lights, from fishing boats, out on the ocean.

The next morning about 9 I set out in a small boat with an outboard motor with three other tourists and a boatman, heading north along the low coast.  We passed the headland to the north and a long beach north of that, passing another beach community with guest houses called Nilaveli, about eight miles north of Uppuveli. A little north of Nilaveli are some rocky islands maybe a half mile off the coast.  We landed on the beach of one, called Pigeon Island because rock pigeons nest on it, for three hours or so of snorkeling.  The snorkeling was magnificent, one of the best places I've ever been snorkeling.  I found one little cove filled with all kinds of colorful coral, a cornucopia of coral, while there was coral in other spots, too.  And there were all sorts of colorful fish.  One school remained almost stationary as I swam through it.  At one point I spotted a black tip reef shark.  It looked six feet long, so it was probably four or five feet long.  It swam past me into shallower waters and then quickly turned around and circled me, heading back out to deeper waters. I got a good long look at it.  After about two hours I came ashore to check the time and then went back into the water.

We left about 12:30.  The ride back, into the wind, was bumpy until we neared the shore.  I ate lunch and then sat above the beach enjoying the view and the breeze until about 4, when I walked to a very well maintained Commonwealth War Cemetery along the main road in Uppuveli.  The caretaker introduced himself to me, bringing a book to help locate graves.  I walked along the several hundred white headstones, with army, navy, and some other insignia, along with names, ranks, and dates.  Several deaths were on April 9, 1942, when the Japanese launched an air raid on Trincomalee, sinking several ships.  I suppose most of the bodies were lost at sea.  The Japanese sank an aircraft carrier, the H.M.S. Hermes, off Batticaloa and it remains there in about 200 feet of water.  You can scuba dive on it, though that is pretty deep.  The earliest grave was dated 1940 and the latest 1961.  I think the British must have had a base in Trincomalee after independence.  Most graves were British, but there were also Dutch, Italians, Indians, a New Zealander, and a Burmese buried in the cemetery.

Afterwards, I walked along the beach again, getting to another group of net fishermen just after they had pulled their net full of fish onto the beach.  I watched the sorting and weighing, but also noticed this time the crows searching the blobs of jelly fish for little fish entangled in them.  After dinner I sat on the beach in the dark until after 9.  The ocean was again speckled with the lights of fishing boats.