Sigiriya —> Polonaruwa

I slept amazingly with the air con set at a perfect 23°C. Tom on the other hand didn’t, he said that he woke up in the middle of the night freezing cold, as his bed was situated directly underneath the air conditioning that was blasting away....he even had to switch it off for a little while to allow himself to warm up. I woke him up by tickling his feet as it was getting warm due to the air con being off because of the now familiar power cuts. We got up brushed our teeth, ended up brushing for about 15 minutes as there was only one bathroom and it was in use. We checked out said goodbyes to people in the hostel and hit the road, stopping the Tuktuk “bread man” (who was playing a different tune this morning) for a sweet pastry filled with jam for 30rupee to eat on our way to Polonnaruwa. On the drive we saw our first wild elephant on the road that we stopped for a minute for as we weren’t sure how to handle the situation and then slowly drove past him with no problems. We got to our guesthouse in Polonnaruwa at around 10:45 but we’re allowed to check into our room straight away. We ended up having a “deluxe villa” that had 3 double beds in it...not sure how but it was for the same price as a double room so we weren’t complaining. We chilled for a while and tried to get a plan of action for the day as we didn’t really want to pay the £20 to enter the ancient sites and we had heard that there was a large section of the area that we could enter for free.

We got in our TukTuk and headed to the archeological centre where there were some ruins just behind for free. They were quite cool and were from nearly 1000 years ago, as was the reservoir next to the town. We walked around this part for a bit and some local lads wanted a selfie with us, so we obliged. We heard of a back entrance where you could gain access to the park, so we headed a few kilometres north and wiggled round before finding the secret entrance. It wasn’t really for vehicles, but we went down anyway trying our luck. Eventually we got to a massive puddle, and turned the Tuktuk into a temporary boat and we were in!!! Immediately we were on edge...we had no idea if there would be ticket checks or not. We headed to a couple of the big monuments, the second of which a monkey was banging on the roof scaring eveyone inside the ruin, and then we came back out to the Tuktuk to find we had been mugged by the monkeys again!!! After this we called it quits. It was far too much to handle, especially knowing how dodgy Asian police could be. We were on our way out (the same way we came in - through the bog) when we got a bit stuck and then low and behold a bloody police car drives behind us. We must have looked ridiculous, two white guys stuck in a bog in a Tuktuk. The police didn’t stop though and we eventually got free and raced back down this path to freedom and a proper road. We saw a big monkey, one we hadn’t seen before, sat on a post. We tried to get it’s attention by clicking at it...aggressively it turned to us and showed it’s enormous fangs followed by a hissing noise, we thought it was another dog episode like at Sigiriya, so I gunned the throttle and got us out of there. After all this we had seen enough ruins and monkeys so headed back to the guesthouse to chill out and look at some things for our upcoming trip to India.

We went out for some dinner and along the river there were steps where all the locals we either having a swim, having a shower or doing their laundry. For dinner there wasn’t much around, so we walked until we found the cheapest place, Kottu again but it was amazing as usual. We headed up to the reservoir for the sunset, which actually turned out to be amazing. We were both scared that the rocks we sat on had snakes and other creatures living under them, so we couldn’t fully relax during the sunset. After what seemed like a long day, we headed back and as we were going to the coast tomorrow we had decided to get good nights sleep before the long drive.Read more