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.
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.
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