Polonnaruwa Sanctuary

Polonnaruwa has been a major religious site, city and, for a few hundred years, the capital of a now long-gone empire. During its approximately 2500 year history it's seen many changes and developments, leaving behind a plethora of remains.

Polonnaruwa area contains just under 30 different main structures, ranging from small temples to 50 foot high solid brick Stupas, surrounded by innumerable smaller buildings whose only lasting remains are their foundations. Impressively one stupa still has it's original lime plaster intact, unscathed despite centuries of jungle growth on and around it.

All can be seen in a day, with a lot of tourists opting to cycle around them given their relatively close proximity, however as Beth didn't want to go through a crash course we felt most comfortable walking around them. This wasn't the wisest decision, but I'll come to that later on!

From our past experiences of ancient temples like Angkor in Cambodia, we had high expectations of what are considered to be the best temples in Sri Lanka. People we've spoken with rate them very highly and some of the photos we'd seen made them look absolutely incredible!

We made an early start for the southern group of temples, in fact just one temple and a carved stone Buddha. It was a great introduction to the ruins, however it was a 45 minute walk to get to them, made longer by the monsoon rains we had to keep hiding from and the humidity was getting higher by the minute! Today we'd learnt our lesson though and were prepared for the rain with coats and an umbrella, but it didn't stop us still getting pretty damp by the time we were back at the main entrance and museum.

At that point we realised it wasn't going to be possible to walk the remaining temples - partly due to the distances involved but the main reason being we couldn't avoid the rains all day unless we had more cover, so we hired a tuk tuk and driver for the rest of the day.

As we went from structure to structure the rain didn't abate, meaning we were able to get only glimpses of the ruins from under the umbrella. We still made our way around the sites and we saw all of them that we had hoped to by about 3pm. The museum had helped us to imagine what the area would have been like before the jungle reclaimed the land surrounding the sites, with thousands of people living and working in the area. We found ourselves thinking 'if these bricks could talk; the stories they'd tell.'

Frustratingly the rain had changed from heavy downpours to a constant deluge, leaving us diving in and out of the tuk tuk and overall it did take away from the experience as we weren't able to walk around some of the sites fully, take as many photos as we'd have liked or to simply amble around as we hoped we would. The day was still filled with impressive sights and it was enjoyable all the same, but won't hold a top spot in our minds we don't think, but perhaps with different weather we may have thought differently.

A further 65 miles north would have taken us to another site of ancient temples at Anuradhapura, however the monsoon rains had a strong hold there and we'd heard that the sites were somewhat underwhelming compared with Polonnaruwa so instead we opted to travel 9 hours south by train.

With the temperature back above 30C and the sun visible in the sky again, the thought of rain was long gone out of our mind as we arrived in Bentota.

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