Kandy to Sigiriya

Sigiriya, 4:20pm

Today couldn't have started better. After a delicious 'dosa' breakfast I was picked up to go have an 'ayurvedic' massage in the outskirts of Kandy. It was so ridiculously cheap that I took a foot massage on top of my full-body one. The location wasn't as great as advertised, because they recently moved to a cheaper place due to Covid. The massage itself though was super relaxing and pleasant.

After that I took the bus 41 towards Polonnaruwa, that drives along the A9 road. This road is the nerve of Sri Lanka (it crosses it North to South) as I learned from my readings of 'This Divided Island' by Samanth Subramanian, the book I'm reading during this trip. During the war the army used this road towards Jaffna to fight the Tigers. It's shocking to consider that such civil conflict ended only in 2009 and that there were still some riots afterwards. I'm super interested in the religious conflict and the situation right now.

I've seen a mosque next to a hindu temple, literally *next* to it. Every person I talk to, every bus I take, every tuk-tuk driver I meet... I just want to kow what's their identity and their view about the conflict. This tuk-tuk driver -whose mobile wallpaper said "May Allah bless you"- I asked him "Are you a Tamil?", he answered "I'm muslim". Only after he added "I speak Tamil". I find it very interesting to see that the sense of identity is specially based on religious perspective. And this applies to every community in Sri Lanka. I wonder what would they think about me if I told them I'm atheist.Read more