Dambulla Cave Temple and Sigiriya Rock

After having an awful night sleep in our room that stank of bus emission, was hotter than the sun and about as clean as an Eastern European brothel, we were up and out pretty early. The Dambulla Cave Temple is 160m above the surrounding plains so we had to walk up to it and we got in by 7:15, paid our 1,500 (£6) each, and stuck our shoes in the paid shoe hold area with no intention of paying for them and then head into the temple. It was a cool temple that had been built into the cave and preserved very well, apparently the best preserved cave temple in the whole of Sri Lanka. As we had got there early we were the first in (apart from a few locals) so it was nice and peaceful. We admired some of the sculptures of Buddha and the murals before relaxing in the courtyard until a herd of Chinese and Russian tourists arrived - our worse nightmare! Shortly after they arrived we left, retrieved our shoes (without paying of course) and made our way back to the TukTuk to find that monkeys had ransacked it. They had stolen our after sun, Vaseline and hand sanitiser- strange! We got it back though after a temple guide come running over to return them. We previously ignored him as we thought he was trying to charge us for parking...oops. We then briefly checked out the Golden temple that was just behind the cave temple and was a little underwhelmed by this so didn’t stay long before heading to pay up and checking out.

After moaning about the place, it was only £2 each per night...so decent value to be fair. We got in Greta and made our way to Sigiriya, of course stopping along the way at a bakery for a veggie roll and sweet bun and then drove 5 minutes down the road to stop and eat it out of the busy town centre. In the time we had stopped we had decided to change our travel plans slightly (again) and added another night onto the east coast after removing one previously as people were saying it wasn’t the season up there, however the weather looked fantastic! We got to Sigiriya and found the hostel, aptly named ‘One More Night hostel’ and were welcomed with a British girl shouting from the balcony of the hostel/restaurant in amazement of our a TukTuk and how we had rented it. We were bombarded with questions before we could even get our stuff out! We did manage to get checked in and actually spoke to the loud British girl for about an hour, she turned out to be really nice and from Coventry! After dumping our bags in our room we drove to find a viewpoint of both Sigiriya and Pidurangala rocks from a lake that the British girl had just told us about, we manage to find a different lake with views of both lakes which was down a dirt track, the view was awesome but we continued to the next one which was equally as amazing, a little further away from the rocks so could see them both which seemed closer together. We chilled at the second viewpoint, we even saw a water snake and about 2 minutes later asked by a local guy why we weren’t swimming... after enjoying the view of both rocks for a while we decided that we should get back to the hostel and get ready to climb Pidurangala rock for sunset this evening. On the drive back I must have looked at a dog in the wrong way, as the dog jumped up howling at the TukTuk and started sprinting towards it with a gang of his friends joining him! I twisted the throttle as far as it would go, catapulting us down this dirt track until we were clear of the dogs...thank God the road didn’t have any potholes in like the previous road otherwise the dogs would’ve definitely caught up with us. Nevertheless, Tom was ready with a bottle waiting to smack any dog in the nose if it came close to the TukTuk! Rabies jabs narrowly avoided for another

We had been to’ing and fro’ing whether or not to climb Lion Rock and we finally decided against it. We would save ourselves a decent amount of money and also from Pidurangala we could enjoy a view of Lions rock and the sunset, or so we’d heard. We got there and parked up, getting stuck in a huge pothole in the process, a bit of pushing from me and some revving got Greta free. We paid our 500 rupees entrance to the temple where you could gain access tk the top of the rock. The climb up was pretty easy over big boulders, and we finally made it to the top. The view was really something and got even better as the sun began to set. We both gave home a quick FaceTime for the first time in a few days and then we sat in prime position and enjoyed the sun dipping below the horizon. Safe to say this was one of the most scenic/iconic sunsets we’d get in Sri Lanka. We headed down the rock (now in pitch black) guided by Tom’s torch.

We got back to the town and stopped at a local place and ordered Veggie Kottu, the place we went to was nice and definitely had a local feel about it. You could see into the kitchen where it appeared the entire family were preparing the food and customer reviews were handwritten on the walls in marker pen. With our meal we got a free Coca Cola which went down a treat for both of us, however we wanted to save some of the drink for the food...which was difficult as the food took forever to arrive! However; when it did arrive it was a bloody good Kottu, so we let him off and accepted that it was just “Sri Lankan time”. We made our way back to the hostel and chatted to a German girl, Indian guy, Dutch girl and 2 Swiss guys who had been waiting for their taxi to arrive for the last hour and a half... we chatted about various different topics mainly relating to systems in each other’s countries. After a while we went to bed and enjoyed the air conditioned room, our first taste of AC since Colombo!Read more