Tennekumbura

I woke up early as usual and went into the bathroom and saw that there was a light on on the electric shower system, tested it for hot water and absolute result - there was hot water! I capitalised on this and after I shouted to Tom to get up to make the most of it too, I’ve never seen him get up so quickly...we both badly needed a hot shower after he climb the previous morning. We were showered and in the lounge area of the guesthouse by half 8, the agreed time we would have breakfast, and we waited ages for breakfast however they kept a constant supply of toast to the dining table behind us for a group of Sri Lankan “laaads”. We eventually got our mountain of toast, an omelette and jam, and it was pretty good actually. When we finished breakfast we played our equivalent of rock, paper, scissors, “squirtle, charmander, bulbasaur” to see who was going to drive today, Tom won for once so that meant that I would be doing the driving!

We set off for Kandy via Ambuluwawa temple which we had wanted to visit for a while now! On the way to the temple Tom found a viewpoint for us to checkout, 2km out of our way we found Ulupane bridge, or as the locals call it “Fools Bridge”. It was built in the British colony era, and gets its nickname due to its upside down look...we thought we would be able to drive over it but it turned out to only be a footbridge, so we drove over the adjacent bridge and got a cool view of it. Cool detour, but now back on the road to Ambuluwaawa temple, after almost getting our heads taken off by a guy chopping grass with a blade at the side of the road...if we were on a scooter we’d have lost our heads as this guy was swinging this machete blade thing all over the place!!

The famous spire at the top of Ambuluwaawa became visible from the road and I began to feel a little nervous about climbing it. It is essentially a temple, with a huge spire on top that you can climb up using sketchy spiral staircases. We drove up the steep hill to the entrance, paid 300rupees each and 100 for Greta (the woman at the till was eyeing up the change in Tom’s wallet that he avoided paying with) and before we knew it we were at the bottom of the temple parked up. It was a crazy experience climbing up this tower, the hand rails were low, the steps uneven and there were gaps in between each step allowing you to see the drop beneath, the occasional brass hand grip gave you a false sense of security and on top of all that each time somebody was coming the opposite way you had to manoeuvre round each other, hopefully you would go wall side but on the occasion where you had to go on the outside you were practically hanging off this tower! If you were lucky one of the ‘resting stops’ would be nearby so one of you could just slip inside and let the other pass, bad thing is these rooms stunk of rotten piss and we could’ve swore there were poo marks on the walls...*hand sanitiser*. Luckily there weren’t too many people climbing so we didn’t have to do this too often. Nevertheless, we made it to the top, enjoyed the view and started to climb back down before we realised we didn’t get any GoPro videos, so back up we went for that, and then went down passing an annoying American vlogger who practically interviewed us at the top and at the bottom of the tower (I’m hoping that footage never hits the internet).

On the drive to Kandy we stopped at a mechanics who TukTuk rental had recommended and got Greta greased. This was something you had to do each 1,000km and although we hadn’t hit 1,000 just yet, we didn’t know when the next good place to do it would be, so we got it done. We rocked up to a recommended garage where they pumped Greta up on some massive jacks. It took about 5 minutes and she was all greased up again. Whilst waiting to pay we met a man who said (or so we thought he said) was a doctor. After a bit more awkward conversation it turned out he was a dog trainer...or we think he was, he then asked for our emails...an oddball. We got through the crazy Kandy traffic and made it to our hostel at the top of an enormous hill through monsoon rain!! It was quite a cool hostel, and at just £2 a night great value. We stood around at check in for about 10 minutes, obviously wondering how we actually check in as two people were sat around very close. Turned out to be that one of them worked at the hostel...good start. We dumped our stuff in the room and headed our to explore Kandy. We walked down to the lake and were almost immediately confronted by an elderly man pointing out a water snake in the lake. He started on and on and on about how he was a teacher in a school and showed us his ID card which clearly stated he was born in 1959 but he somehow said he was 59...interesting. He then went on about The candy dancing started reading of millions of types of dancing including Peacock dancing, water dancing, Buffalo dancing, the list went on and on. He then tried to make us come and look at the brochure for the Kandy dance, at this point we realised this was an absolute scam and tried to get rid of him but, it was harder than it seemed. We had to walk fast and as he had an umbrella we were now wary of anyone with an umbrella trying to scam us, and there were lots of people now trying to drag us into this Kandy dance show...which just sounded awful. We walked round the lake and both of us got a pretty bad vibe from Kandy and weren’t sold at all...but we had already seen that food near our hostel was cheap so that’s a silver lining. We went to an old British cemetery of people who had died during the colonised years (usually died of tropical diseases) and we both decided that we’d go back to the restaurant we’d seen earlier for dinner. We got there and wanted simple rice and curry. They said that it wasn’t possible, but there were curries on the menu that we could have, and they were cheap. So I asked him how much rice was to which he said 150 rupees...somehow the same as rice and curry. I said that wasn’t possible for rice to cost as much as both rice and curry, but this guy was persistent. Nothing about the place made sense, so we got up and walked out to go next door. Even though this guy was more of a local place he still ripped us off as we got a minuscule piece of potato and a bit of dhal and rice. After this episode we were both done with Kandy...such a shame as it was quite a cool city. We walked back up to hill to he hostel and came up with a plan to leave Kandy the following morning and sacrifice a night here as it was only £2 lost.Read more