Birds, boulders, and buddhas are three of the things that we will remember about Sri Lanka.
Because we were only in the country for 5 days, we centered ourselves in Kandy, a city in the tea-growing hill area in the middle of this island country.
White Sitting Buddha, from our airbnb, Kandy
The first thing you notice as you come into Kandy (besides some gorgeous mountain scenery out the train window) is the huge white Buddha sitting on the top of a hill overlooking the city. Sri Lanka is a Buddhist country, and temples and Buddhas are everywhere. Indeed, Kandy is most famous for the Temple of the Golden Tooth, which purports to have a tooth from the buddha. However, we skipped both these places because of our previous innumerable encounters with temples, and spent more of our time looking for birds.
By visiting the Queen Siskrit Royal Botanical Gardens, the Royal Forest, and simply by walking around town, we managed to identify loads of new birds, from the tiny, tidy-looking tri-colored munia to the large, rather ungainly looking grey hornbill. (See previous blog entry on Feathered Friends.)
The boulders are memorable because of the day trip we took with a driver to Pidurangalla, a two-hour drive north of Kandy. The Pidurangalla outcrop is just 2 kilometers from Sigiriya, a UNESCO Heritage site that protects a fortress/temple atop a 660-foot rock tower (or butte).
The 600 meter high Sigiriya rock – you can see the people climbing the steps
Because we were less interested in the temple, and more interested in the views, we opted to climb Pidurangalla. (Also, a much cheaper option than Sigiriya.) We skipped the temple at the bottom of the hill and headed up the very uneven stairs.
As we got closer to the top and past a reclining buddha (remaining from the monastery that used to occupy this space), the path got rockier and more interesting.
Just before we reached the summit, we got to the hardest part of the trail – squeeze through a small slit between boulders, grab a tree branch, clamber over another rock, and use knees and toes to get over the last big rock, and we were at a place with a gorgeous view of Sigiriya.
It was an easy walk over bald rock to the summit, where we sat for a while enjoying the view and a well deserved snack. Then we hit the snag – as more and more groups of people were climbing, it created a bottle-neck at the scramble. Eventually, we were pushy enough to get some folks to wait while we scrambled down the hard part and enjoyed a leisurely stroll back down the path.
We followed the visit to Pidurangalla with a visit to the cave temples at Dambulla, another world heritage site. The temples carved into the caves of this rocky outcrop have been used as places of worship since the first century BC. As we have seen elsewhere in SE Asia, they began as Hindu places of worship and were transformed into Buddhist temples.
Like most Buddhist temples, there were many many statues of the Buddha (according to Wikipedia, there are 153!). But what was more fascinating to us than the statues were the elaborate paintings on the cave walls and ceilings. These paintings follow the contours of the cave and give the impression of wallpaper or hanging drapes. The painting of the caves was done in the 18th century, less than a century before the Kingdom of Kandy was defeated by the British in 1815 (the last kingdom in Sri Lanka to submit to British rule).
Our day ended with a visit to a “spice garden”. These gardens are government-sponsored sites (each numbered) for the preservation of indigenous medicine and we had a fascinating free tour given by a natural medicine student. He pointed out to us many well known spices being grown (e.g. nutmeg, cardamom, coriander) and demonstrated the various salves, lotions, and ointments that would be concocted to treat everything from loose bowls to eczema. The visit ended with us each having a wonderful massage using oils and the obligatory hard-sell to purchase more oils and creams, which we politely declined.
We also took the opportunity in Kandy to visit a tea museum, located high up on one of the hills. This gave us a better understanding of the combination of serendipity and good business sense that can change economies. Tea plants were brought from India to Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon) by James Taylor in the late 1860s. Serendipitously for Taylor, this coincided with a blight that decimated the coffee being grown on many plantations, leaving owners looking for a different crop. However, it was Sir Thomas Lipton who was the marketing genius in the 1890s who partnered with James Taylor to truly make tea the popular drink that it is today by marketing it directly to the middle and lower classes.
Beyond birds, buddhas and boulders, we also enjoyed a bit of Sri Lankan culture. On the first evening we attended a rather touristy version of traditional Sri Lankan dancing and drumming. The drumming intrigued us, as every dance was accompanied by different combinations of drums, and only occasionally by a flute or trumpet-like instrument. The dances were a mix of traditional dances about harvest, birds, etc., and some dances that were spiced up with the acrobatics of the male dancers (lots of spinning, hand-flips, etc.).
Click here for fire walking video
At the end, we were all ushered outside to watch fire breathing and fire walking demonstrations. We both felt ambivalent about this because we’ve heard of the dangers inherent in fire-breathing and this part of the show was clearly done as a “stunt” to wow the spectators, rather than as any reference to Sri Lankan tradition.
This ambivalence of turning “tradition” into “tourism” has been hard to escape throughout our travels. We have seen many many examples of traditional handicrafts that are now mass produced for tourists, thus ceasing to be handicrafts. In Thailand, we avoided visiting the Hmong Villages because of the sense that they were becoming zoo-like. Unlike “living museums” that try to recreate actual life, these villages seem to have simply become a place where the Hmong people can try to sell things to tourists by luring them in with “traditional” rituals such as singing and dancing, as well as traditional dress.
On our last day, we relaxed with bird watching, and ended up resting for nearly 2 hours in the old British regimental cemetery. The birding was only mediocre, but the troop of more than a dozen monkeys kept us well entertained. Being in the cemetery was a reminder of how wide-spread the British Empire was – despite circumnavigating the world, we have been primarily in countries that were once colonized by Britain (NZ, Australia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Kenya) or were affected by European colonization in the neighborhood (Cambodia, Thailand).
But we also realized that being colonized by Britain doesn’t necessarily mean that English is spoken readily. As in many places, basic English is understood, but we often had a hard time understanding what was said to us. Our favorite was this sign on the train.
Green Edges 