Urban Reverie's Travels

Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka
Sunday, 17 February 2019

I am a somewhat slovenly and half-hearted collector of coins and banknotes. My collection consists of what is known in the hobby as a "job lot" - a random collection of cheap poorer-quality specimens, usually acquired by pure chance, with little attempt to collect a certain denomination or certain country or certain date in any systematic manner.

When I was a teenager somebody gave me some older Sri Lankan banknotes, I think they were issued in the 1970s. One of them featured a gleaming white stupa - "dagaba" in Sri Lanka - in a town called Anuradhapura. I was intrigued by this place - not only because of the giant spiked helmet, but because of how unpronounceable the name is. (For those watching at home: it's something like unna-RAH-duh-poo-ruh.)

It was time to finally visit this place. Landana, the tuk-tuk driver who took me to Sigiriya and Polonnaruwa the day before, came around at half past eight to pick me up. I told him yesterday that I was going to Anuradhapura and I asked if he could deliver my clean laundry (which I had dropped off at a commercial laundry that morning) and then take me to the bus station. He made me an offer I could not refuse - three thousand rupees all the way to Anuradhapura.

I told him that I would think about it but truth be told, I didn't have to think very long. Maybe fifteen seconds. The bus would have cost around a hundred rupees. Cheap, sure, but have you ever been on a Sri Lankan bus? I am only one hundred and seventy centimetres tall but even that is too lanky for Sri Lankan bus seats. My knees are always jammed right up against the seat in front of me and my feet are curled under the seat right up to the legs of the person sitting behind me. Nearly every bus plays loud Sri Lankan pop music that sounds like live pigs being castrated with rusty circular saws without anaesthetic. Most buses have 3+2 seating, the aisles are so narrow that my thighs are squeezed between every pair of grab handles on either side of the aisle, and the seats themselves are so tiny that if I share a triple seat with two others I am squashed into mushy pulp. Sri Lankan buses are poorly ventilated, often the windows are stuck closed, and I have yet to mention the drivers. I keep calling them psychopathic maniacs but I think that is being too lenient. A better description would be demons that have somehow escaped the portals of hell and have been sent to Earth as a divinely inspired reminder of what awaits you if you sin too much in this mortal life. Sri Lankan bus travel is dangerous, uncomfortable and absolutely terrifying.

Sri Lankan tuk-tuks are also terrifying, but they are like a ride in a battery-powered golf cart going twenty kilometres an hour in the grounds of a retirement village in Queensland compared to the buses. There is adequate ventilation, great views and decent photo opportunities, no annoying "music", and they don't have to stop every kilometre to let people on and off. So it is no wonder that I gleefully accepted Landana's offer. Twenty-four Australian dollars is nothing. It wouldn't even get me six kilometres in an Uber car in Sydney. Landana was offering me the same price for seventy-two kilometres. Also I have been so very good with my money, I had been sticking to my rough budget, and I have been such a good boy. Deal!

So Landana arrived with my laundry, I got changed into clean clothes, I settled my bill with Kumar and said goodbye to him and his wife and girls, and jumped into Landana's eight month-old Bajaj RE and headed north on the A9 highway towards Anuradhapura.

The A9 between Dambulla and Anuradhapura is the best road I have seen in Sri Lanka excepting the E03 expressway between Bandaranaike International Airport and Colombo. Unusually for Sri Lankan highways, it had a consistently wide shoulder, at least one and a half metres wide, even over culverts and bridges. The lane was at least four, possibly five, metres wide. The standard width of traffic lanes on Australian highways is three and a half metres. The highway was so wide that, assuming that slow traffic went onto the shoulder, there was more than enough room for one car to overtake another car, or a bus to overtake a tuk-tuk, without the overtaking vehicle encroaching upon the lane in the opposing direction. The surface was soo smooth too with such bright white lines. I was impressed.

Heading north from Dambulla you enter the North Central Province, the agricultural heartland of Sri Lanka, with its innumerable irrigation tanks covered in mats of lotus pads and blossoms, its rice paddies with scarecrows - not the scarecrows of children's books, merely plastic garbage bags fluttering in the breeze tied to timber stakes, the highway fringed with palm trees and small villages and banana trees and small market stalls selling whatever the smallholders can grow in their curtilages. The hills and rocky outcrops became less frequent until the tuk-tuk roared at 55 km/h through a landscape as flat as the Netherlands.

After about ninety minutes I arrived at the Senowin Holiday Resort guest house. I said my heartfelt goodbye to Landana and an equallt heartfelt hello to the owner of the guest house, Purmina.

Purmina ushered me in to the house, a large two-storey family home with the top storey converted to guest accommodation, and she offered me tea. She also offered to organise bicycle hire to explore the Sacred City of Anuradhapura which I accepted. While we were waiting for the bicycle she offered me tea and we sat and had a good chat.

Purmina is an interesting lady, a little younger than me, with impeccable English. She has a university degree in textile science and before she started a family she worked as an import-export agent in Sri Lanka's garment industry. She asked me what I thought about Sri Lanka. Rather than my usual "yes, yes, Sri Lanka is great," I decided now was the time that honesty was the best policy.

"I absolutely love Sri Lanka and I absolutely hate Sri Lanka at the same time," I said.

She didn't flinch. "That's great. What do you love about Sri Lanka?"

I comtinued with my honesty. "There is absolutely incredible natural beauty everywhere. The food is totally amazing, especially the fruit and vegetables, they are just divine! And the people are so warm and friendly and hospitable. I love the place."

"That's great," Purmina said. "Now what do you hate about Sri Lanka?"

"Well ..." I got nervous. Would I cause offence? Purmina with her education and fluency in English was the first Sri Lankan I felt I could open up to. I persevered. "There are a few things. I am Australian. In Australia, when someone asks you a question, and you don't know the answer, you say 'I don't know, sorry'. If someone asks you a yes-or-no question, and the answer is 'no', you say 'no'. But here, when I ask a question - like, directions to a bus stop or if some place is still open - people won't say 'no', they will never admit that they don't know the answer, they will make up some nonsense that they think I want to hear. You ask ten Sri Lankans the same question and you get ten different answers. It is absolutely infuriating!"

Purmina wasn't offended, or if she was, she didn't show it. "Yes, I totally understand where you are coming from. But in Sri Lankan culture, you can never say 'no'. If you say 'no', that is very disobedient. Sri Lankans are very honest people, but yes, we try to keep everyone happy and show everyone respect. They are not trying to mislead you or lie to you, they mean very well, but they are trying their best to give you an honest answer and keep you happy. Your culture is very different to ours but you are in a different country now."

I almost burst into tears of joy. I explained what had happened at Bandarawela station a week ago, where my train was delayed and the station staff kept saying the train would "definitely be moving in fifteen minutes" for hours on end, until the train started moving again after a six and a half hour delay.

"Yes, that's a common problem on Sri Lankan railways. They really have no idea. They are just trying to keep all the foreign visitors happy. The railways are terrible. They were given to us by the British but they haven't been improved at all ever since independence. They make people so ashamed to be Sri Lankan!"

I told her not to be ashamed. It's not the fault of the average Sri Lankan that the railways are stuck in the nineteenth century.

It is easy, so very easy, even for people who consider themselves intelligent and tolerant, to visit or move to a foreign country, be confronted by profound cultural differences, and ascribe those cultural differences to some moral failing of the citizenry. "Oh, those Ruritanians are a bunch of shifty lying buggers!" "You gotta watch out for them Lower Slobovians, they'll cheat you out of your life savings without turning a hair!" What cruel, needless misunderstandings, what bloody wars, what terrible genocides, what countless atrocities have happened throughout the history of the human race simply because people from one culture haven't taken the time and effort to sit down with people from another culture and tried to understand how the other culture works?

The bicycle man arrived with my hire bike for five hundred rupees added to my hotel bill. Purmina promised that she would organise a good bike. I do not doubt her intentions. It was a good bike by Sri Lankan standards. The brakes actually worked. Somewhat. The brakes would slow me down but not enough to come to a stop. To stop I needed to scrape the soles of my sandals on the road. The wheels weren't wobbly, rust hadn't completely consumed the frame and spokes, and I could maintain a speed of about ten kilometres an hour on flat ground. That makes it a good bike.

After my near-death on a bicycle in Tissamaharama caused by brakes that were not operational at all, I was nervous about getting on a bike in Sri Lanka again. But Anuradhapura is huge. The attractions are spread over several square kilometres. You cannot walk around Anuradhapura. I could have hired a tuk-tuk but I wanted to go at my own pace, and I was getting sick of tuk-tuks having spent a whole day yesterday in one and ninety minutes this morning.

I applied more sunscreen and pushed off at eleven o'clock. The Sacred City of Anuradhapura is a couple of kilometres west of the modern town. I needn't have worried about the traffic. Bicycles are probably the most popular way to see Anuradhapura and the roads were full of other foreign travellers on equally crappy bicycles. My bicycle wasn't squealing like a wounded fox with every turn of the pedal cranks and the wheels weren't wobbling like they were shaped like eggs so mine was obviously better.

Because Anuradhapura was so huge, there are three ticket offices scattered around the UNESCO World Heritage Site. This is my fifth World Heritage Site in four consecutive days, and my seventh in Sri Lanka. (There are eight World Heritage Sites here, the only one I didn't visit was the Sinharaja rainforest. For some reason, none of the huge numbers of travellers I have met have gone to Sinharaja. I kind of regret not seeing it.)

I tried finding one of the ticket offices. I came across two young German women who were just as lost as me, they pointed me in the wrong direction. It was only after looking at my Lonely Planet and Google Maps on my phone that I finally found an office. I paid my Rs. 4,525 entry fee, got my large cardboard ticket with perforated tabs that could be torn off for each area, and went off to find my first attraction, the Sri Maha Bodhi tree.

I would be lost without my Lonely Planet. I am equally as lost with my Lonely Planet. The quality of the maps in Lonely Planet travel guides is absurdly risible. Whole streets, even major arterials, disappear into the ether on Lonely Planet maps. A street that you think is only two blocks away is actually nine blocks distant. Street name labels are placed on the wrong streets, attractions are shown hundreds of metres away from their true locations, and many are the times when I have navigated to the exact location of a feature of interest shown in a Lonely Planet map only to find myself staring at a stormwater drain or a sporting goods warehouse or a hardware shop car park. I don't expect maps in travel guidebooks like Lonely Planet to be at the same level of quality as, say, Ordnance Survey topographic maps from Britain, but a bit more care and attention to detail would not go astray.

Not helping matters was the terrible signage in Anuradhapura. Signs to attractions at major intersections were either completely absent or only in Sinhala. I pick up new languages quite quickly, I have learned the Sinhala alphabet so I can pronounce Sinhala words without knowing what they mean, but I still couldn't read most od the signs. Occasionally I would stop at an intersection and pronounce each Sinhala character syllable by syllable. Sri ... Ma ... ha ... Bo ... Yes! The Sri Maha Bodhi tree! Got it!" Only to miss a turn off the road because it wasn't signed at all.

I finally reached my first major attraction of the day at midday, the Sri Maha Bodhi tree. This is one of the oldest known trees in the world, planted from a cutting brought from India 2,200 years ago. It is a bo tree, an attractive fig-like tree with broad, venous shield-shaped leaves, that through longevity had branched out into several mutually supporting trunks. Buddha achieved enlightenment while meditating under a bo tree, and this tree being the oldest bo tree in Sri Lanka, it is the object or veneration. A polite young Sinhalese man who was there to pray told me he was grateful that he had passed his university exams and was making offerings, coins wrapped in a handkerchief tied to a railing surrounding the tree, out of gratitude and asking for blessings for exams to come.

Next to the Sri Maha Bodhi tree was a large rectangle of hundreds of closely spaced columns, the remains of the Brazen Palace. Anuradhapua was the royal capital of the Anuradhapua Kingdom which flourished for over a millennium from roughly the introduction of Buddhism to Sri Lanka in around 300 BC to the fall of Anuradhapura after the Indian Chola empire invaded in around 1000 AD. The Brazen Palace was one of many royal residences.

A short, though still appallingly signed, distance to the northeast was the Jetavanaramaya complex, dominated by a large brick dagaba (stupa) and a dizzying complex of ruins - walls, gates, water tanks. About ten minutes to the northwest is the Citadel, the inner sanctum of royal power. Not much remains of this, the citadel was razdd long ago and much of it is now small farms and shops and houses. The remains of the royal palace can be seen, and on the other side of the road are two symmetrical guard houses that once protected the main entrance to the palace. A short distance north are the ruins of the Mahapali alms hall. A very long deep trough where citizens donated rice and other goods to the Buddhist monks was still clearly visible two thousand years later, as was the alms house's s very deep water well shaped like an inverted pyramid. Next door were the remains of the Sacred Tooth temple. The most remarkable thing was that a whole bunch of primary school-age boys who live in the neighbourhood were playing a stick-and-ball game called elle among all the ruins. Why not? This was their neighbourhood, after all, and their ancestors have lived in this area for thousands of years.

Next to the Sacred Tooth temple was an active archaeological dig, protected from the elements by a large galvanised steel shelter on which monkeys were playing. Brick foundations and cellars of some building were clearly visible in the giant soggy pit. New ruins get found in Anuradhapura all the time. For centuries this place was lost to the forest. It is only since British archaeologists rediscovered the ruins in the tangled greenery in the nineteenth century that conservation efforts started and the monuments restored to their proper glory.

Another painful ride - the bike only had one gear, not low enough to climb even the tiniest inclines without getting off and pushing but not high enough to go any faster than about fifteen kilometres an hour - brought me to the Abhayagiri Monastery in the far northwest of the Sacred City of Anuradhapura. But not before my bike broke down. The chain got thrown off the gears. I turned the bike upside down and got to work. But the chain was encased within a metal guard, I rarely see this on Australian bikes but it is common in the Netherlands. I couldn't figure out how to remove the cover. There didn't appear to be any sort of clip or pin I could remove. I stuck my finger in the small hole around the bottom bracket and tried to feel where the chain was. My finger became smeared with a very thick layer of soot and grime. This bike had never been cleaned or serviced in its life. I was about to scream "damn this blasted country where nothing ever works!" when a tuk-tuk driver went passed. He got out, expertly removed the chain case (there was a small section at the back that could be removed with some force), put the chain back on, refused to shake my hand because his hands were now filthy, and went on his merry way. What did I say about how when this country sends you to despair, someone comes along and makes everything right once again? How many times have I found myself stranded on an Australian road due to a flat bicycle tyre or a bus that has been cancelled or a flat battery in my car? And how many people have stopped to help? Hint: it's not a very high number. In Australia, and the West generally, you're on your own. In Sri Lanka they haven't totally lost that spirit of helping a stranger in difficulty.

Thanks to this anonymous stranger ai reached the Abhayagiri Monastery. On the way there were some more sights - the fourth century AD Samadhi Buddha statue, the Twin Ponds where monks would bathe. The Abhayagiri Monastery was a massive complex of several residential compounds for monks - their living quarters, their classrooms, their refectory halls, their administrative offices, their water tanks. I cannot describe the scale of this. The centrepiece is yet another giant brick dagaba. There is the Elephant Pond, a very large tank used to supply the monastery with its water needs. Walking around Abhayagiri it was all too easy to imagine the days when the streets were full of rows of chanting monks walking from the refectory to their theology classes, or from their dormitories to the dagaba to pray and chant in unison for the Anuradhapura kingdom to be blessed.

The sun was getting low in the sky. There was no way I was going to see all of Anuradhapura. It really needs two full days to appreciate, from dawn to dusk, such is the gigantic scale of the place. This wasn't like Polonnaruwa, a compact little town that could be seen on foot in a few hours. This was a true metropolis with hundreds of thousands of people. Not just royalty, not just monks, not just bureaucrats, but the many people who were required to service their needs - the plumbers, the cobblers, the tailors, the merchants, the bricklayers, the barbers, the carpenters, and all their wives and children and elders.

I checked out two more dagabas, the Thuparamaya Dagaba, a small white stupa, and the stunning Ruwawelisaya Dagaba. This snow-white dagaba was built on a scale greater than mere human beings. It took me fifteen minutes to dawdle around it on hot pavers (all visitors are required to remove hats and shoes before approaching1any dagaba or statue of Buddha. Make sure your dresses and shorts cover your knees).

These ruins are not just mere museum pieces for the benefit of travellers. They are active places of worship. A very large prayer meeting was being held in the forecourt of the Ruwawelisaya Dagaba, a saffrom-robed Buddhist monk leading a large assembly of white-clothed parishioners in a soothing, monotonous prayer chant.

It was after five o'clock and my bike had no lights or reflectors. The roads in Anuradhapura have no street lights. It was time for me to leave though there was a whole section in the far south of the Sacred City I didn't even touch. I quickly checked out the Basawkkulama Tank, a nearby irrigation dam where a brilliant sunset was starting, and headed east back into the modern town as quickly as possible. I rode past little farms and cottages where children in shady frontyards waved hello. I waved back. Because I am the coolest boy in the world, because I spent a day cycling through ancient monasteries and shrines and palaces, and there is nothing in the world quite so cool as a boy or a girl on a bike exploring the world, this amazing planet which has been granted to all living beinga for all of us to share in peace and harmony if we could all learn how to, and the best way to learn is to get on your bike and start exploring.

I arrived back at the Senowin Holiday Resort - a rather grand name for a modest guest house. I mean, with a name like that there should be swimming pools and banana daiquiris and deckchairs. I am not complaining, it is a very nice place with a very nice owner who introduced me to her very nice extended family. But it is not a "resort" in the word's natural and ordinary meaning.

The two young German women who had innocently given me the wrong directions earlier soon arrived, they were by coincidence staying here as well. They were dripping head to toe in sweat, just like me when I arrived back at the house; the first thing I did was have a shower. Wherever you go in Sri Lanka, every white person will be drenched in sweat, their clothes clinging to every part of their bodies, even if they aren't doing much, like just sitting at a hotel having a drink. The locals, even if they are climbing mountains or riding bicycles, will be dry as a bone. Do Sri Lankans not have sweat glands? I am certain, without seeing the scientific evidence, that people from ethnic groups originating in higher latitudes cannot genetically handle tropical climates.

We chatted for a while, shared some tips on what to see - I was finishing my holiday going anticlockwise and they were just starting their holiday going clockwise. The ladies gave me a restaurant tip, and one of them escorted me part of the way while she was going to an ATM to try to retrieve a swallowed bank card.

I went to the restaurant on modern Anuradhapura's main street. I sat down and ordered my meal, cheese kotthu (stir-fried strips of roti flatbread mixed with vegetables and spices) with fresh lemon and pineapple juice. My order took forever to arrive. I was very thirsty, almost dehydrated, after cycling in the heat and humidity all day. I had run out of bottled water. On each table was a stainless steel jug of water with several clean glasses.

Without really thinking about it, I made the assumption - which at the time seemed very reasonable but was actually very stupid - that no restaurateur would be so evil as to knowingly serve their patrons water that would make them sick. Surely killing your customere is bad for business? So I poured a full glass of water into one of the glasses and drank it in one big gulp.

I instantly knew I made the wrong decision. The water looked clean, it smelled clean, but it tasted muddy and stagnant, like water from a fish tank. It definitely was not bottled water.

I hoped it wouldn't turn out wrong. There was no immediate reaction. My order of cheese kotthu and the juice arrived and, starving, I devoured them. It was towards the end of my meal that it started. Massive stomach cramps with a fever-like sweat over my whole body. I paid my bill and walked as quickly as possible back to my room.

The Sri Lankan Police had set up a traffic checkpoint on the A12, Anuradhapura's main street. I walked past the checkpoint and a three-stripe officer, presumably a sergeant, motioned me to stop.

"Hello, sir. What's your name?"

"Urban Reverie."

"And where are you from?"

"Australia." I hoped to hell that he wasn't going to ask me for my passport, it was in my room.

"When did you arrive in Sri Lanka?"

"January the thirtieth."

"Mark Taylor is a good player, isn't he? He's my favourite cricketer."

So the policeman just wanted to chat with a foreign stranger. What a relief. "Yeah, Tubby Taylor, that's going back about twenty years or so," I said, feigning an interest in cricket, a sport that I, along with a large number of Australians, usually find about as interesting as watching grass grow. I was very sick, sweating all over, and anxious just to get back to my guest house.

"Yes. And Steve Smith. When is he coming back?"

It was probably not wise to tell the copper that I am not a board member of Cricket Australia and therefore have little knowledge of such matters. "Yeah, dunno, I heard he copped a twelve-month suspension after the sandpaper business in South Africa, I think that was in March last year, so maybe next month?" I swear that cricket is an elaborate practical joke the Australian people play upon themselves. We have to pretend to be interested in cricket, to do otherwise is to expose yourself to accusations of being un-Australian, but in reality most of us dislike the sport and it's really only the sad old obsessive-compulsives who remember every single batsman's score in the Third Test between Australia and India in 1985 who give a crap about cricket.

"Yes. Do you like Ricky Ponting?"

"Yes. Of course I do! He was a very good captain of the Australian team." All I know about Ricky Ponting is that he was the captain in the 2000s. Apart from that, I know nothing.

"Very well. What is crime like in Australia? Is it worse than here?"

This was worse than an actual real-life formal interrogation. At least in an interrogation I would have an idea about the issue I was being asked about. The copper was standing very close to me and his eyes constantly alternated between roaming over my entire body and staring directly into my eyes. "Well, I don't know much about crime in Sri Lanka. There is definitely more traffic crime in Sri Lanka, motorists in Australia are much more law-abiding and safer on the roads. But I think Sri Lankans are much more respectful to each other and to property. I have never seen graffiti on walls or on bridges here. In Australia, there is graffiti everywhere. Australia has a huge problem with drugs, also Australians get drunk very often and cause trouble. I rarely see drunks here or people affected by drugs."

The eyes continued to search into the very interior of my soul. "Very well. So, there are many Sri Lankans who try to go to Australia, illegally. Not legally, but illegally, why is that?"

Sigh. Now I was expected to give a concise answer to this question about the hornet's nest that is Australian asylum seeker politics. "Well, Australia is a very wealthy country. The minimum wage is about two thousand and two hundred rupees per hour. That's about the minimum wage for two days in Sri Lanka. Australia has much better health care, better education, better social security, more job opportunities, because Australia is so wealthy. So that entices a lot of people to try to come to Australia." All this is undoubtedly true; Australia's economic success and relatively generous social benefits do make it an attractive destination for asylum seekers. I could have also mentioned that nearly all of the asylum seekers are Tamils from the north of Sri Lanka, the tourism boom that has done so much to invigorate Sri Lanka's economy has yet to reach the Tamil north, the region has yet to fully recover from a desperate three-decade civil war, during that war the military seized a lot of land and has yet to repatriate much of it to its former owners leaving many Tamils landless and jobless, and the Tamils, despite efforts from the government to include them in the new post-war Sri Lanka, still face discrimination and inequality. But it would have been unwise to press these points with a Nosey Parker police officer

The copper seemed to be unable to think of another question. "Am I free to go now? I am terribly sorry but I need to go back to my hotel room."

"Yes. You can go now. Thank you, sir. Enjoy your stay in Sri Lanka!" He shook my hand and I walked as fast as possible to a supermarket to buy two bottles of water.

I was in agony by the time I got back to my room. It was going to be a quiet night for me, no listening to music or writing my blog. I stripped off, turned the ceiling fan on full blast, unfurled the mosquito net, climbed under the net into the sheetless bed with nothing but my phone and my bottle of water, constantly sipped from the bottle to keep myself hydrated, and writhed in agony, clutching my stomach, hoping that sleep would arrive soon and that the ceiling fan would relieve my febrile, delirious sweating fits.

Very wide A9 highway

Dodgy bicycle

Elephant Pond at Anuradhapura

Dagaba at Anuradhapura

Dagaba at Anuradhapura

Twin Ponds at Anuradhapura

Samadhi Buddha statue

Sri Maha Bodhi tree

Brazen Palace at Anuradhapura

Dagaba at Anuradhapura

Tank at Anuradhapura

Dagaba at Anuradhapura

Archaeological dig at Anuradhapura Citadel

Trough used for storing donations at monk’s alms house

Dambulla, Sri Lanka
Saturday, 16 February 2019

Kumar, the owner of the Vihangi Guesthouse in Dambulla, had arranged a tuk-tuk and driver for the day for five thousand rupees, and the tuk-tuk arrived at eight in the morning for a long and exhausting day checking out not just one but two UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

The tuk-tuk driver is a gentleman named Landana, a quiet yet friendly middle-aged man who stopped at places along the way to point out interesting sights. I felt at ease with him. There seems to be a world of difference between the greasy, untrustworthy touts who hang around bus stations and ATMs intrusively seeking my business, and the mild-mannered, professional drivers that are arranged for me by the guest houses I stay at.

The first site on our agenda was Sigiriya, about twenty kilometres northeast of Dambulla. Sigiriya is one of the more unusual places I have visited. It is a massive rock monolith with vertical sides that sticks two hundred metres above the northern Sri Lankan plain and on top of this unusual geological feature are the remains of a temple-palace complex.

I paid the foreigner's admission fee of a bit over five thousand rupees and entered the complex. First you cross two square moats, and then you walk through a symmetrical array of tanks, gardens, terraces, ramparts and walls all laid out on a perfect grid. After a few hundred metres you proceed through the Boulder Arch and up the first of many, many stairways.

At first the stairs are solid and made of stone. Soon you reach the sheer cliff face of Sigirya. The stairway becomes a tight spiral staircase inside a steel cage bolted to the side of the cliff. Terrifying enough but it is only a foretaste of what is to come.

At the top of the spiral staircase you reach the rock paintings. Ancient murals are still to be seen inside a small rock overhang on the side of Sigiriya. Here the walkway becomes a checkerplate steel platform cantlivered to the side of the cliff. With every person treading on the platform, it bounced up and down. I would like to say that I enjoyed the murals but I was too busy trying to suppress a panic attack.

After a bit more climbing you reach a large flat rock platform, the Lion's Paws. Here there is a Red Cross first aid station, drinking water, and some trees you can sit under while you catch your breath. There is still a little way to go. The top of the Sigiriya monolith towers over you, and you access the top by walking between two giant stone lion's paws and up more staircases.

These staircases aren't like the others. They are so steep they are more like ladders. The railings are so low, they are at about thigh height. Unlike the lower staircases were ascending and descending visitors are separated, on the final staircases at the top people going up and down push past each other. The stairs are made out of checkerplate steel treads with no risers between the treads. And there is no solid ground under the stairs; each step is cantilevered off the side of the cliff face. The whole assembly of stairs bounce like crazy with all the passing foot traffic and when you look down you can see the ground far beneath you between the steps.

I don't have an especial fear of heights; certainly none worse than the average human being. But I did on Sigiriya. All the signs warning about wasp's nests didn't help things. And while climbing these final stairs I had a panic attack. There were crowds behind me, crowds ahead of me, crowds pushing past on their way down. And I just had to break down into a hyperventilating wreck.

Suddenly I felt a man's hands gently pushing me from behind and a soothing Sri Lankan voice telling me it was all going to be OK. He told me he would take care of me and stop me from falling. He admonished me to not look down, just look at the steps one-by-one as they passed.

I didn't dare turn around to see him. I just concentrated on climbing up step by step and getting my panic under control. Eventually I reached the top. My guardian angel introduced himself and it is to my eternal shame that I forget his name. He was a guide, unofficial and unlicenced of course, and he asked me if he could be my guide for two thousand rupees. Deal.

He pointed out all the sights on top of this truly remarkable place. Over two thousand years ago the top of this rocky outcrop two hundred metres above the surrounding plains was an immense temple-palace-fort-monastery complex most likely dating to the era before Buddhism arrived in Sri Lanka. There were deep water tanks, a large flat expanse of grass that was a dance hall, the throne of the temple's king, remains of walls and stairways and gates. It was lovely and it obviously took a lot of work to build. It was also very hard work to get to. I hope the monks and courtiers and nobles who lived here gave huge tips to the Domino's Pizza delivery man.

It was soon time to descend back to the Lion's Paws. My guardian angel-slash-tour guide warned me that going down was much worse. He was right. I must have turned the colour of alabaster such was my terror. But I was going to be OK because my very own angel was holding my hand and steadying me every step of the way.

I reached the Lion's Paw and the angel-guide led me to the Red Cross station where there was free drinking water and a shady place to sit outside. I sat for a while and drank many litres of water and recuperated. This is the really stupid thing about living with anxiety and depression - you never, ever know when it is going to hit and the stupidest, most unexpected things set them off. I never knew I had a fear of heights but Sigiriya kortified me.

My angel-guide showed me down the rest of the way. He pointed out the queen's throne about half way down, a sheltered rovk overhang where her throne was carved into the stone and beside each of her feet was a large dimple in the stone where water and flowers were placed to keep the throne smelling nice. There was another area where the temple-king and his advisors met, and the Cobra Hood Rock, a natural rock feature that is exactly what it says on the tin. There are fragments of frescoes visible inside the cobra's hood.

We reached the bottom. I paid the angel-guide our agreed two thousand rupees but he asked for even more. Maybe he's not so angelic after all. I didn't have much small change so I think I gave him theonly another one hundred. He looked a little aggrieved. Maybe his modus operandi is that he carefully watches everyone who goes through the Lion's Paws, uses some sixth sense that enables him to predict who will break out into panic on those diabolical stairs, and follows them and pretends to be their guardian angel so they will be so grateful they will shower him with money. Perhaps I should have done likewise but I believe a deal is a deal. We agree on two thousand, that means I pay two thousand plus any gratuity I may decide upon, even if you are the Archangel Gabriel.

I met Landana among all the tacky souvenir stalls at the bottom and returned to his tuk-tuk. We took off slong some narrow yet well-built jungle road. Along one side was a tall electric fence. Landana explained that this was the boundary of the Minneriya National Park, famous for its very large numbers of elephants, and that the fence was to keep the pachyderms inside and prevent them from causing chaos to surrounding communities. When we rejoined the highway we stopped on the banks of Minneriya Lake, a very large irrigation tank that is famous for The Gathering, when over a hundred elephants gather on the shore to drink from the dam. But this only happens had certain times of the day and no large grey beasts were to be seen.

After I had a rice and curry buffet lunch at a thatched-roof open-air restaurant on the shore of another lake, I bought a ticket to Polonnaruwa National Park. Polonnaruwa was the royal capital during the Polonnaruwa period after the fall of the Anuradhapura Kingdom in the tenth century AD until the thirteenth century AD. The ruins of Polonnaruwa are remarkwbly well preserved.

I spent the afternoon bouncing from ruin to ruin in a state of amazement and awe. I will say this about the Sri Lankan government - despite its general incompetence and inefficiency and meaningless red tape and blatant over-staffing, they do a very good job of running national parks, both natural sites and cultural sites. The grounds are as well managed and maintained as anything in Australia, the rules protecting the parks are strictly enforced to the point of searching every bag and ruthlessly confiscating any plastic, there is plenty of informative and clear interpretive signage at every feature of interest.

The main feature of Polonnaruwa is the Quadrangle, the undisputed seat of royal power. Here there are the remains of a large Buddha statue that was formerly encased in a grand pavilion, a former temple of the Sacred Tooth (Buddha's tooth bounced from capital to capital across the island as the fortunes of the various kingdoms waxed and waned), palace halls and sundry other ruins. There are remains of water tanks, dagabas (the large bell-shaped shrines that are commonly known as "stupas" in English), council chambers, and a large rock with not one but four Buddha carvings in a row.

I was in awe. This place was far more advanced and civilised than Northern Europe a thousand years ago. Here in South Asia there were cohesive, relatively expansive nation-states with intricate professional bureaucracies, large standing militaries, codified laws, vast irrigation networks, sanitation systems and massive institutes of higher education.

My British ancestors a thousand years ago, as well as people from similar northern European cultures, lived in poverty in peasant hovels during the stupor of the Dark Ages. Northern Europe was a rabble of tiny, constantly warring principalities and dukedoms and petty kingdoms, there were no universities, not much infrastructure apart from mere donkey tracks and the occasional water mill, the bureaucracy consisted of an ever-changing coterie of whichever brown-nosing courtiers were in favour with the sovereign at the time, sanitation consisted of latrines that were emptied direct into rivers for the next village downstream to drink, water supply consisted of cholera-infested wells and weirs, the law was not so much a codified body of statutes but whatever string of brain-farts some capricious chieftain had uttered that morning, militaries were ad-hoc affairs consisting of small formations that shifted allegiances at the drop of a hat.

Where did it all go so wrong for South Asia and the East in general? And where did it go so right for Europe, and Britain and Northern Europe in particular? This civilisation at Polonnaruwa and its successor kingdoms became ossified, and only three centuries after the fall of the Polonnaruwa kingdom the Portuguese colonised the coastal parts of Ceylon to ruthlessly exploit the local labour force and natural resources, then the Dutch kicked them out and expanded the colonised areas and continued their exploitation, and then the British kicked them out and expanded their rule over the entire island for 133 years and kept on with the exploitation, throwing in some divide-and-conquer tactics for good measure that played the Sinhalese and Tamils off against each other, a tactic that contributed to the eruption of a three-decade civil war after independence.

I'm not a historian. I'll leave it to others to list the causes to which the success of Western civilisation over the past five hundred years or so can be ascribed. I will say, however, that Polonnaruwa gives the lie to this silly notion that civilisations are permanent, that one civilisation is destined to be superior to others for eternity due to some permanent innate quality, and that the areas of the world that are now poor shall always remain so, and that the areas that are now rich shall likewise always remain so. Walking around Polonnaruwa, the famous poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s kept ringing through my head:

'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains.

Shelley’s words don't just apply to fallen ancient civilisations. They apply to our own as well.

It was time to leave Polonnaruwa, I was exhausted even though there were still a few ruins I hadn't checked out. On the drive back to Dambulla in the late afternoon I had a good chat with Landana. I asked him about tuk-tuks and how much they cost and what it is like to be a tuk-tuk driver. He told me that a brand-new tuk-tuk, such as the Bajaj RE he was driving (by far the most popular model), costs eight lakh rupees - about six thousand Australian dollars.

Of course, few Sri Lankans have eight hundred thousand rupees stashed away in a biscuit tin at the bottom of the wardrobe. But it's OK, you can buy a Bajaj RE on hire-purchase. It only costs you Rs. 13,200 a month for five years, after which the tuk-tuk is finally yours. But of course tuk-tuks aren't the most robust and durable of motor vehicles so after five years of intensive use you need to lease another one and the cycle continues.

I have been in Sri Lanka long enough to know that a typical short taxi ride in a town costs a local about Rs. 50 or Rs. 100 (foreign visitors can expect to be quoted much more which they usually willingly pay). But there are far more tuk-tuks on the streets than there is demand for them. There doesn't appear to be a system of taxi plates that owners have to bid for at a government auction, the tuk-tuks all just carry ordinary vehicle plates. The barrier to entry for new drivers is very low, they just have to sign a hire-purchase agreement promising to pay the lease agreement every month. So men - it's only men - who find themselves out of work or bankrupted out of their farm lease a tuk-tuk and start driving a taxi.

Hence why whenever you leave a bus or railway station there are mobs of desperate tuk-tuk touts begging for your services. Most tuk-tuk drivers spend a huge portion of their days not in revenue service. It must take a large portion of the days of a month to do enough taxi trips to earn the Rs. 13,200 needed to pay the lease off, not to mention earn enough to pay for registration, fuel, insurance and maintenance. And only after those costs are met can drivers think of putting food on the family dinner table. No wonder so many tuk-tuk drivers are so pushy and intrusive and a few of them sometimes resort to underhanded tactics and lying and scamming tourists to get business. These are desperate men in desperate situations mostly just trying to give their families a decent life.

On the A9 between Habarana and Dambulla, Landana stopped the tuk-tuk on the hard shoulder and pointed off to the right. About a hundred metres away there was an elephant, munching away on shrubs, flopping its ears around. A whole lot of other vehicles had stopped too to admire the beast, both foreign travellers and locals. This wasn't a national park, just scrubland amongst all the farms and villages. What a magnificent noble animal.

Landana dropped me off back at the guest house shortly before six. The guest house owner called a tuk-tuk to take me to a nearby restaurant for another rice and curry buffet. Not only was I too exhausted to walk but the neighbourhood is teeming with vicious dogs that become even more aggressive at night. I can't ever get tired of rice and curry. Every rice and curry is its own unique symphony, no two are the same. Even at the same restaurant the kaleidoscope changes from day to day, sometimes massively, sometimes subtly. Just like Sri Lanka itself, rice and curry never ceases to surprise, to challenge, to inspire, to educate.

Sigiriya

Boulder Arch at Sigiriya

Sigiriya spiral staircase

Lion’s Paws stairway

Ruins at top of Sigiriya

Queen’s throne at Sigiriya

Minneriya Lake

Polonnaruwa

Dagaba at Polonnaruwa

Polonnaruwa

Stone Book at Polonnaruwa

Polonnaruwa

Dagaba at Polonnaruwa

Polonnaruwa

Moonstone (used for cleaning feet before entering sacred sites) at Polonnaruwa

Buddha carvings st Polonnaruwa

Elephant near Dambulla over man’s right shoulder

Dambulla, Sri Lanka
Friday, 15 February 2019

Before I left Kandy I decided to send a text message to Sisira, the tuk-tuk driver who rescued me after I got off the train at Katugastota because the platform at Mawilmada was too short. He had given me his number in case I needed his services again.

I had my last breakfast at Traveller's Home and said goodbye to incredibly polite Manik - her equally well-mannered husband Mahesh was at work so I bade him farewell him the night before - and waited out the front for Sisira and his ultra-wide tuk-tuk to appear at half past nine.

My train was scheduled to depart Katugastota at 10:41 so there was plenty of time to accept his offer of a quick tour. First, he drove me to the Polgolla Dam, a wide but not very high concrete dam with ten sluices on the Mahaweli River in Kandy's northern suburbs. This dam is used for hydroelectricity, the impounded water is fed by gravity through mostly underground penstocks to another lower river basin to the north at Ukuwela where there is a hydro power station.

I then asked if we could check out the Katugastota railway bridge. I had crossed this bridge on the train on Wednesday. It's as long and as majestic as anything built by John Whitton, Australia's greatest railway engineer of the nineteenth century.

The Katugastota railway bridge on the Matale Line is a long lattice truss bridge with arched braces over the structural gauge connecting the lattice truss on either side at regular intervals, very similar to the old Meadowbank railway bridge or the old Como railway bridge in Sydney. It is a magnificent old bridge still in regular service. Like all railways in Sri Lanka, the bridge does double duty as a footpath and the bridge had many pedestrians on it.

I was standing at the north end of the bridge at the level crossing taking photographs looking down the bridge. I turned around and right behind me was a train sneaking up on me from behind. I got the fright of my life. The crossing gates hadn't descended and the bells hadn't rung and I was not expecting a locomotive silently coasting along towering above me.

I needn't have worried, the train was only going at walking pace, stopped, and then reversed back to Katugastota yard. It was a neat, very European-looking engine, a Class M5C diesel-electric locomotive, hauling several wagons of concrete sleepers, and it was just shunting onto the passing loop at Katugastota to make way for the next down passenger train at 10:41.

Sisira explained that his tuk-tuk wasn't a taxi, strictly speaking, it was actually a private tuk-tuk for personal use. The tuk-tuk served as his famiky car. But he said nothing was really stopping him from hiring his vehicle out. I got the feeling that he was out of work and looking for a second income. He kept asking me to take a longer tour for a bit of extra money. I looked nervously at my watch and said we didn't have time, but he kept pestering me.

I asked Sisira to just take me to Katugastota station, there was only half an hour until the train and the things he wanted to show me were quite far away. I paid him the agreed price of Rs. 1,500 - quite generous for forty-five minutes' tuk-tuk hire; a whole day typically costs five thousand - and then he pleaded for even more. I got the feeling he was a desperate man, and that the thousand rupees I had given him out of gratitude the other day had gotten his hopes up. I tipped him another couple of hundred but he didn't seem satisfied.

I paid my thirty rupee fare, waited at Katugastota, filmed some of the shunting manoeuvres of the train carrying sleepers, and waited for the 10:41 local train to Matale. There weren't many other passengers. I think we were outnumbered by the three station staff. The over-staffing you find in all government workplaces in Sri Lanka is just ridiculous. Three station staff for a very quiet suburban station that gets six trains a day in each direction is self-evidently absurd. Yesterday I went into the administrative office at the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic to ask for directions to a particular pavilion. Inside were six public servants at their desks and every single one of them was just reading a newspaper. National park ranger's offices are the same. Maybe it's all a government make-work scheme to reduce the unemployment rate, or maybe strong unions force the government to never retrench staff in any circumstances. I am an active trade unionist and a socialist but I also love efficiency, productivity and the work ethic. When workers are productive, and compensated fairly for any productivity gains they make, and profits shared with workers in the form of increased pay and conditions, everyone benefits. I fail to see how featherbedding government workplaces like this is good for taxpayers, good for government finances, good for economic growth, good for effective service delivery or even good for the mental health of the workers themselves who do nothing but read newspapers all day. Such a job would drive me insane.

The 10:41 down Matale Line train arrived, an M7 hood-unit locomotive hauling four ancient red carriages. I boarded, the train was nearly empty. I said goodbye to Kandy. Yes, the city centre is an unmitigated dump, truly a hell on earth, and the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic and its museums were disappointing. But I did find some redeeming features - the Udawattekelle Forest Sanctuary, pleasant and prosperous outer suburbs, a beautiful old railway bridge, green hills surrounding the city and a really nice but hard-to-get-to guest house up high on a ridge with soothing breezes.

The train rattled through the outer suburbs of Kandy and then through scattered pieces of farmland and small villages. The train then climbed into hilly country covered with tall rainforest. It passed under two giant silver pipes, penstocks that carry water from the Polgolla Dam to the Ukuwela hydroelectric power station, and called at various tiny unstaffed halts and larger stations in small towns.

I arrived at the line's terminus at Matale at about 11:37. I looked at Google Maps, there was a bus station only a few hundred metres north. Excellent!

I exited the station and found myself in a congested, dreary town at the bottom of a long valley. The street the station was on was the usual Sri Lankan melange of racing tuk-tuks, honking buses, shelves full of merchandise extruded from shop doors onto the street, nonchalant street dogs and concrete drains. I later learned that Matale's claim to fame is that it is the geographic centre of Sri Lanka.

After about ten minutes I reached the bus station - or not. It was actually a construction site, it looked like the station was being rebuilt. There were a whole lot of buses parked on the street outside preparing to depart, so I asked the conductors and passers-by where buses to Dambulla leave from but I either got no answer - English is surprisingly poor in Sri Lanka considering the country's lengthy history in the British Commonwealth and its free universal education (on paper, at least) - or conflicting useless answers. The bus to Dambulla leaves from the other side of the street! From the railway station! From the next street west! Yes, yes, I know that the inability of many Sri Lankans to give a straight, accurate answer is a cultural difference and that I should try to be more tolerant and understanding yada yada yada. But that doesn't make it any less infuriating.

Eventually one old guy sitting out the front of a shop took pity on me and offered to show the way to the Dambulla bus. I thought he might be looking for payment but he refused to accept a tip, he did it out of altruistic love of humanity and hospitality towards foreigners. Sri Lanka is like this - just when the country sends me almost to the brink of despair, the universe will send someone who restores my faith in the country and its people.

The old man with his Muslim cap couldn't come all the way, but he walked with me for about fifteen minutes and showed me to the street and pointed to a radio tower and banyan tree where the bus stop was located. I thanked him profusely and walked another ten minutes to the stop at a major intersection.

It was still very confusing. Many buses left from inside the acute angle formed by two main roads, more buses left from a yard to the west, and some more left from a stop on the street. I tried asking people where the bus to Dambulla left from but got either blank stares - don't count on English being spoken in towns where tourists never go - or even more conflicting information. I should have just caught a bus all the way from Kandy to Dambulla like a normal person. But I am not a normal person.

Finally a helpful young man who looked like a betel nut-chewing thug but actually had a heart of gold showed me the stop I needed and even hailed a bus for me. Long may he prosper.

I got on the crowded bus. One of the few seats available up towards the front where I stored my backpack was on the left side on the second row. This meant that I got a full view of the road ahead while the bus swerved, honked, sped and overtook overloaded vegetable trucks with three millimetres to spare. I was too busy making the Sign Of The Cross repeatedly to take note of the scenery along the A9 highway. I am not religious at all. But you know what they say - there are no atheists in foxholes or on Sri Lankan buses.

After nearly an hour I hauled my luggage off the bus and stood on the dusty shoulder of a busy highway outside a gleaming golden stupa. It was a walk of about a kilometre to Vihangi Guesthouse on a back street on the south side of Dambulla. On every street I took there were dogs, quite aggressive ones. I find that dogs in large cities are quite harmless and indifferent but in small towns and rural areas they can be quite vicious. My guess is that dogs in rural areas are frightened by the presence of unfamiliar people.

I had to make a very lengthy detour to avoid all the dogs in the early afternoon heat to reach the guest house. I finally reached my accommodation, a large single-storey family home on a generous lot with a smaller building divided into three hotel rooms in the frontyard. Only a girl aged about twelve and her younger sister aged about nine were home, their parents were out of house. I introduced myself and said I had a room booked for the night but they knew very little English and just stared at me blankly.

I also needed a bathroom quite fiercely. I tried communicating this using mime to no avail. I tried Sinhala but had forgotten the word for "toilet". Was it "valikisi"? "Salaviki"? "Vakisili"?

Hopping around while my bladder was about to burst, I ransacked my daypack to find my Sinhala dictionary. I could find everything else except for that. I eventually found it buried under everything else, flicked through the section beginning with T, and found it - "vasikili".

"Vasikili! Vasikili! Vasikili - NOW!" I shouted.

"Ummm, wait. Wait for father. Father coming soon," the older girl said.

"I can't wait. Vasikili - now!" I saw that some of the doors to the accommodation rooms had keys in the door. "Come on, can't I just go into a room and use a toilet?"

"No. I don't know which room for you."

"For bloody hell's sake, I need to go now!" I defied the girl and went into room 1 - I reasoned that a room with a key in the door was not currently in use by a guest. I was right.

Suitably relieved, I waited outside the rooms for about twenty minutes until the owner and his wife had returned from errands. Kumar greeted me and showed me into my room, room 1. I went into the air-conditioned room, my first since Tissamaharama, and rested a while before I tackled my next UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Dambulla Temple Cave.

I took a tuk-tuk to the ticket entrance a couple of kilometres away on the other side of the highway and bought a ticket. There was a very steep rock staircase up to the top of a rock monolith. Dambulla lies in the intermediate zone between the Hill Country to the south and the pancake-flat plains of northern Sri Lanka, and the terrain around here is mostly flat country with rocky outcrops poking through the ground like a particularly severe outburst of acne on a teenager's face. Many of these stunning monoliths were used for religious and military and political purposes in Sri Lanka's early history.

After a very steep walk with a vertical gain of about one hundred and twenty metres, I emerged onto an expanse of barren rock near the top of the monolith. There is a little booth where you have to store your shoes for twenty-five rupees and after leaving my shoes there I showed my ticket at the gate and entered the temple complex.

The Dambulla Cave Temple consists of five separate caves, really just rock overhangs. The caves are walled off from the exterior by a long white colonnade; you access the caves through portals inside the colonnade.

If you feel like overdosing on Buddhas, come to Dambulla. The Buddhas were magnificent works of art, some up to two thousand years old, and there are magnificent murals on the ceilings of the caves too. Some Buddhas were standing, other Buddhas were sitting, and I think three very large Buddhas were reclining on their sides as if they were watching Masterchef on Channel 10 after a particularly tiring day at work.

Outside the caves there are great views of the surrounding district, flat green forests, farms and dams studded with soaring rocky outcrops. I descended by a different staircase and ended up at the Golden Temple where I had gotten off the bus from Matale on the A9 highway.

The Golden Temple is very new, I think it was built in 2000. The centrepiece is an enormous golden sitting Buddha statue sitting on top of a white two-storey temple building, the entrance of which is shaped like a dragon's mouth. It all felt very tacky, like a theme park. On the bottom floor was a Buddhist Publication Sales Centre, nearby were the studios of a Buddhist television station, there was a family of fibreglass elephants in a garden next to the temple, there was a walkway through a fake cave grotto lined with hundreds of fibreglass orange standing Buddhas, and out the front was a giant golden stupa to attract passing traffic. The hundreds of howling schoolchildren and a whole fleet of tour coaches in the car park added to the theme park feel. This wasn't a temple. This was Buddhaland. I tried to come up with a marketing slogan. "Come to Buddhaland - Nirvana in just one day!" All that is missing is a ferris wheel in the shape of a chakra and a whitewater rapid ride with vessels shaped like pink lotus blossoms.

After checking out Dambulla's very modest town centre choked with trucks headed for Sri Lanka's main wholesale fruit and vegetable market, I returned to Vihanti Guesthouse too exhausted to do anything except enjoy a yummy rice and curry dinner put on by the hosts.

Polgolla Dam

Katugastota railway bridge

The train that snuck up on me at Katugastota

Train at Matale station

Dambulla Cave Temple complex

Ceiling mural at Dambulla Cave Temple

Meditating Buddha at Dambulla Cave Temple

Standing Buddha at Dambulla Cave Temple

Boddhisatvas in Dambulla Cave Temple

Reclining Buddha at Dambulla Caves

Scenery from Dambulla Cave Temple

Stupa at Dambulla Golden Temple

Golden Temple at Dambulla

Cave grotto walkway at Golden Temple

Fibreglass elephants at Golden Temple in Dambulla

Buddha statue at Golden Temple

Dambulla Clock Tower

Kandy, Sri Lanka

Thursday, 14 February 2019

I started the day with another tiring, uncomfortable walk down the hill to Katugastota Bridge to catch a bus into town. The sub-arterial road the guest house is located on has some buses but they don't seem to be very frequent. I saw some coming in the opposite directions and committed their route numbers to memory so I would know which buses to catch back to my lodgings in the evening.

A fifteen-minute bus ride crowded with commuters along a busy dual carriageway with deafening traffic brought me to Kandy's city centre. On the eastern edge of the compact city centre was my next UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic.

This temple is one of the most sacred sites in Buddhism, one of the world's major religions and the majority religion in Sri Lanka. The temple is the home to one of Buddha's teeth, somebody told me it was one of his molars.

I walked up to the temple gates on the northern shore of Kandy Lake shortly before ten o'clock. I paid the entrance fee, went through a security screening station, and when I emerged some official-looking man in a uniform came up and greeted me and shook my hand.

"Welcome to the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic. Here, you respect Buddhism," he admonished.

"Yes, yes, I know, I respect all religions," I answered.

"Good." I walked on and he followed me. "And this temple was built during the Kingdom of Kandy era and has been home to the Sacred Tooth since--"

"OK. So you are a guide?"

"Yes, I am."

"Very well then. How much do you charge?"

"We can talk about that later."

"No, I would rather settle the price first. So how much do you charge?"

"Three thousand rupees."

That was about twice the entry fee. "No, thanks."

He got desperate and wouldn't leave me alone. "Please, sir. Please. You need a guide. You can't enter without a guide. Please!" Eventually he gave up after he got the hint that my silence meant I didn't want his services.

There is another counter off to the side in front of the temple moat where all visitors are required to leave their shoes, visitors are given a card with three handwritten digits to claim their shoes back later.

I entered the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic. There is a large open-air central hall surrounded by galleries and in the hall there is a timber two-storey shrine. Outside the closed door at the bottom of the shrine drummers and a piper were playing some traditional temple music. Everyone went upstairs to the top gallery where there was already a massive queue.

The queue kept growing longer, fatter, denser. The temple was hot and airless. The body heat from thousands of people pushed up against each other made the conditions even worse. It was so bad that even the normally dry and clean Sri Lankans were dripping with sweat.

I joined the queue at ten past ten. The Sacred Tooth Relic was open for viewing at half past ten. I watched the second hand on my watch tick down ever so slowly. If it went any slower it would have been going backwards.

Then on the dot at half past ten - the aperture in the shrine opened. There was a crush. It made the Boxing Day sales at Myer on Pitt Street in Sydney look like a paragon of order and decorum. Such was the devotion among the Buddhists in the crowd, their anxiety to prove their veneration to Buddha's sole bodily remains, that I and all other non-Buddhist visitors were kicked, pushed, tripped and shoved. Even eighty-year-old ladies showed no restraint as I was subjected to what in any other context would be called "aggravated assault" in a court of law.

The torrent of humanity carried me up to the shrine. For all of three seconds - lomg enough for me to throw forty rupees into the offering tray and clasp my hands together in a gesture of respect - I got to see Buddha's tooth.

Or rather, a container which held the tooth. Nobody ever gets to see the actual tooth. It is contained within a golden casket shaped like a Prussian spiked helmet, perhaps a metre tall, with gold threads hanging off it and embellished with gemstones. This casket contains another casket, which contains another casket, and so on, like Russian dolls, and it is only the smallest casket that contains the tooth.

It was underwhelmingly underwhelming. Have you ever heard from people who have visited Copenhagen about how underwhelming the Little Mermaid statue is? The Sacred Tooth was even more underwhelming by many orders of magnitude. I came to Kandy, giving up two nights in a place that I might actually like, for this?

There is, however, more to the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic than the sacred tooth relic. At the back of the temple is a long hall, Alut Maligawa, with a large Buddha statue, and the hall is lined with dozens of smaller Buddha statues donated by Thai devotees. Behind that hall on the upper floors is a museum, the Sri Dalada Museum, full of dull yet worthy exhibits relating to the history of the Sacred Tooth.

In a separate building behind the temple, a nineteenth century law court building erected by the British, is the World Buddhism Museum. This museum contains all sorts of artifacts amd reproductions from around the Buddhist world, with each room dedicated to a particular country. All the exhibits were accompanied by dense explanatory notes full of Buddhist jargon that might have made sense to the devout, to the people who have studied for seven years to become a Buddhist monk. But my knowledge of Buddhism is rather introductory level, and consequently the museum bored me out of my wits.

The only thing I found interesting at the temple was a little pavilion off to the side containing the stuffed remains of Raja, a tusker elephant who was captured on the east coast in 1925, sold to the temple in tje 1930s and became a much-loved resident of the temple until he died in 1988. Raja was so popular that when he died the hat was passed around and enough money was raised to preserve him for the enjoyment of future generations.

I spent a long time on the temple grounds not because I enjoyed it, but because the museums and pavilions were quiet, cooler and a respite from the madness outside. It was well into the afternoon when I put my shoes back on and went back out.

I walked a little while along Kandy Lake, past the Queen's Bath, a bathing pavilion built on the lake shore for the personal use of the Queen of Kandy, and back into the city centre.

How could I possibly describe Kandy's city centre? "Lunatic asylum" doesn't even come close. It's a heaving, roaring, dusty, blazingly hot cacaphony of motor vehicles, blaring horns, touts, hawkers, people arguing on the pavements, exhaust fumes and grotty, ill-kempt buildings. Kandy's town centre is about as pleasant as a visit to a council rubbish tip. Being in a valley surrounded by hills, the air pollution here is the worst I have seen in Sri Lanka.

I had some lunch in a food court and I went looking for a bookshop. I wanted to buy an English-Sinhala dictionary. I am falling in love with the Sinhala language and wouldn't mind learning a little bit more of it before I leave. You can't find Sinhala dictionaries in Sydney for love or money.

I found a bookshop, on the top floor of a building down a narrow corridor and up a flight of stairs between a church and what looked to be some sort of service club. I entered a little tiny bit of paradise. With its dark, heavy timber shelves and soft, cool air and soothing paper smell, Expographic is the kind of bookshop they have in heaven.

I found some perfect pocket dictionaries that would fit easily in my backpack without adding much weight. I paid for my purchase and got an unusual coin in my change. I remarked upon it and the young woman behind the counter said she collected coins too. She opened the till and found more older coins that have been superseded by newer designs or alloys. She smiled and I was forever grateful.

I decided to go for a walk to check out the railway station. This is harder than it sounds. Kandy is impossible to walk around. The city council has installed pedestrian barricades along the kerbs of every street in the city centre. I suppose this prevents pedestrians from getting killed. It also prevents pedestrians from participating in simple activities like reaching their destination or getting into a tuk-tuk taxi.

I got lost. The shockingly poor cartography in my Lonely Planet guide conspired with all those stupid pedestrian barricades to send me well off course. I felt like I was a sheep in a shearing shed's pen, unable to go anywhere except where supposedly more intelligent beings determined I was allowed to go.

I ended up in this neighbourhood west of the railway station, lost in a labyrinth of blind alleys and Escher-like staircases that went nowhere. I was walking down one staircase when I saw about one metre in front of me a dangling wire. I looked at it, it was an electrical connection from a nearby power pole to a house on the other side of the staircase. It was at about forehead height. A live wire, strung across a public stairway at forehead height. Seriously, do they hire electrician's apprentices in Kandy from the graduate pool at schools for the intellectually challenged? I watched what others were doing, they all just ducked by instinct, they all long knew the wire was there. If I survive the remaining week of this holiday, I shall be doing well.

I emerged from the stairway into one of Kandy's three bus stations and the main one for longer-distance services, the Goods Shed bus station. I have never seen a bus station like it. It was a logjam of buses going left, going right, going forward, reversing, but with no bus able to move because too many other buses were in the way. The only way pedestrians could move through the station was to wriggle their way between the buses. This is what I was doing when a bus driver decided to chuck his gears into reverse and start moving back even though there was another bus a few inches behind him, with me between the two vehicles. I jumped out just in time.

I took some photographs of the station from the outside and then went to a nearby tourist information centre. I had two questions which I assume would be quite common queries from visitors:

(1) What bus routes go to where I am staying and where do they leave from?

(2) Where can I top up my mobile SIM card?

There were four employees in the tourist information centre. I had committed the bus route numbers I saw outside my guest house that morning to memory but I had forgotten them. It was that kind of hot, sultry, intense, tiring day where my brain starts short-cifcuiting. When I asked about the bus routes, I got four different answers. Try the 691 from the Goods Shed! The 538 from Senanayake Street! The 632 from the Clock Tower!

It was the same with my mobile phone recharge. My Sri Lankan mobile provider, Dialog, is one of the largest and most popular. Usually in most towns you can find a place that has a Dialog sign on every street corner, but I hadn't seen any in Kandy city centre. I thought the tourist information centre might help but I got the same useless, conflicting, inaccurate information. There's a Dialog kiosk opposite the Temple! No, there's a newsagent on Dalada Vidiya! There's one at the Clock Tower bus station! I decided to try the Clock Tower bus station right behind the information centre but I couldn't see anything. I propose that we rename that office the Kandy Tourist Disinformation Centre. Absolutely bloody useless.

I went back east trying to find a place that sold Dialog mobile phone recharges but all I could see was useless junk of the sort you find at weekend flea markets in suburban Sydney - beads, mobile phone covers, plastic booby pins and the like. Eventually the heat got to me and I had to go and sit down for a long time in a bakery with an ice cold bottle of water. The temperature in Kandy wasn't that hot, 29 °C, but combined with the humidity, the exhaust fumes, the unrelenting sun and the sheer mass of people on the streets, it was too much.

I eventually found a Dialog retailer, a watch repair joint. I went up to the counter. "Hello, I'd like to top up my Dialog SIM card, please."

"No, we do not sell SIM cards here, we only sell recharges."

"Yes, and I would like to recharge my SIM card, please."

"I am sorry, but we do not sell SIM cards here."

"No. I don't want to buy a SIM card! I just want to recharge my SIM card with more data."

"I said, we do not sell SIM cards here."

I snapped. "Listen! I. Do. Not. Want. To. Buy. A. SIM. Card! I. Only. Want. To. Buy. More. Data!"

"Very well. Ninety-nine rupees for two gigs."

I had turned into the very thing that I hate - the ignorant tourist who shouts condescendingly at the locals. But you would understand if you went through what I go through when communicating with some of the locals.

I headed even further east. About a kilometre east of the city centre is a forested hill, the Uduwattekelle Forest Sanctuary. I paid my admission of nearly seven hundred rupees and entered into the cool, moist rainforest. This is just what I needed. There was a large pond, the Royal Pond where the King of Kandy used to bathe, and a lookout over the city - from a distance Kandy is very pretty with its jewel of a lake and its temple complex and its situation in a bowl of jagged green hills fringing the urban area - as well as an extensive network of forest paths.

I stayed in there until closing time at half past five. My Lonely Planet warned me about muggers in the park but the only scary thing that happened was some monkey high up in a tree dropping something heavy that landed on the ground right behind me - I think it was a breadfruit.

I left the park and caught a bus back up the Katugastota Road. I got off before the bridge to have a burger dinner - I crave Western food every now and then - and buy some water, fruit and snacks at Cargills. I waited for a bus back to the guest house but every time a bus came the conductor would say it wasn't going there. I tried asking other waiting passengers which bus I needed but they couldn't help me.

In some respects public transport in Sri Lanka is far better than in Australia. During the day at least, buses are so frequent that wherever you are in the country you do not need to wait longer than ten minutes. But in most respects Sri Lankan public transport is far worse - antiquated, uncomfortable and unsafe buses; shocking driving standards; no disability access; and perhaps most importantly for the traveller, bugger-all public transport information.

No maps. No timetables. No lists of routes. No websites. No displays at bus stops showing which buses go where. Nothing. All one can do is ask other people at bus stations which buses go where and hope that they are telling the truth.

The only information I have been able to find is one website, routemaster.lk, which I presume is the personal project of a public transport enthusiast. It lists the major destinations of each route with a low-resolution Google Maps screenshot zoomed right out. But even it is missing many routes, the search function is sketchy at best, and it doesn't tell you which bus station or stand a route leaves from.

After waiting twenty minutes I gave up and waved down a tuk-tuk.

Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic

Drummers and a piper playing at entrance to Sacred Tooth shrine

The shrine that contains the Sacred Tooth on the upper foor

See that bright golden bell-shaped thing? The Sacred Tooth is in that.

Buddha statue in the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic

Raja the tusker elephant

Queen’s Baths on Kandy Lake

Kandy Lake

Kandy railway station

This is why pedestrians can’t have nice things

Royal Pond in Udawattakelle Forest

Udawattakelle Forest Sanctuary

Kandy from Udawattakelle Forest Reserve

I don’t think that’s how “Colgate” is spelled

Kandy, Sri Lanka
Wednesday, 13 February 2019

It would be boring if the whole world was perfect. If every place was good, how would you determine if it was good? What would the yardstick be that you could use to measure the goodness of a certain location? If every town in the world had pleasant, brisk cold weather, pure mountain air, invigorating winds, moody skies, verdant parklands, beautiful pine trees and twee Merry Olde England architecture, why would you even bother going on holiday? You need to have unpleasant places in the world and you need to visit them. It's only after visiting cesspits that you are able to truly appreciate those places that are nice and quantify how nice they are.

Well, that's how I am rationalising my decision to visit Kandy, a truly horrible town whose main redeeming feature is that there are several trains a day that leave it.

I had heard horrible things about Kandy and only decided at the last minute that I would definitely visit. Nearly every traveller I had met was going there or had been there. Even the most independent of travellers succumbs to peer pressure and I am not immune. Besides, there is a UNESCO World Heritage Site there, the Temple of the Sacred Tooth, and I doubt I could live with myself if I knowingly skipped the opportunity of ticking another World Heritage Site off my list.

First, I had to get to Kandy. I had my final breakfast at Sapu's Mountain Breeze guest house, said goodbye to the men who ran it - I appeared to be the only guest, which is a shame because it is affordable and has large rooms with comfortable beds and decent breakfasts and helpful staff and it is only one block from the main street - and got into the tuk-tuk the staff had arranged for five hundred rupees.

The tuk-tuk driver turned the engine off as we went down the hairpin bends of the A7 from Nuwara Eliya to Nanu Oya. Turning the engine off when descending a hill is quite common even for large vehicles like trucks, I guess drivers do it to save fuel. It might be good for fuel economy but it is terrifying when you are walking along a hilly road and a truck or car races past you and you are frightened out of your wits because you couldn't even hear it coming.

I arrived at Nanu Oya station at about ten to nine, about half an hour before the scheduled arrival of my train, the up Udarata Manike ("Hill Country Maiden") from Badulla to Colombo. I bought my reservedfirst-class ticket to Kandy for a thousand rupees and spent a pleasant half an hour photographing the station, the yard, signals, rolling stock and the gorgeous scenery of tea terraces and forested hills.

The Udarata Manike was another Class S12 push-pull diesel train. It consisted of various first, second and third class carriages. Only the first-class carriage was air-conditioned. There was no restaurant car like the one on the Super Secret Weekend Express but there was a loud and cheerful man who walked up and down the aisles selling tea from a large Thermos flask as well as various snacks from a large plastic tub.

The scenery was stunningly beautiful, as was my travelling companion in the seat next to me, Marta. Marta is from the Czech Republic and works in the film industry back home. She had a short break in between film jobs and took the opportunity to have a ten-day short break in Sri Lanka. She was travelling from Ella to Colombo to catch her flight back to Europe. We had a long and interesting conversation about life, the universe and everything. Do you remember what I wrote earlier about how independent travellers are either the most interesting and admirable of people or the most annoying and tiresome of people? Marta is definitely the former. It is very strange how I sometimes struggle to find like-minded people I can have an intelligent conversation with during my normal daily life in Australia but whenever I travel, they are everywhere.

Marta and I enjoyed the views while we were chatting. The railway line clung to the sides of ridges as it descended from the Hill Country plateau. Off to our left, a broad valley of tea plantations and vegetable gardens was framed by a blue-tinged jagged mountain range in the distance. There was one mountain that stuck out of the range like a tent where only one pole has been raised. This is Adam's Peak. This is the most famous mountain in Sri Lanka, and climbing it in the early hours of the morning to watch the sunrise is a popular pilgrimage for devout Buddhists and Western backpackers alike. I have heard that it isn't that great, nine times out of ten the mountain is shrouded in fog, and the five thousand steps are uneven and absolutely kill your knees when you are coming down. No thanks. Little Adam's Peak was enough for me.

We slowly descended and the weather got warmer. Though our carriage had air conditioning, enough warm air came in through the open doors that I had to take our jacket off.

After four hours the train arrived in Kandy a bit earlier than anticipated. I hurriedly said goodbye to Marta, put my jacket back on because I didn't have the time to stow it away, quickly sent her a Facebook friend request, and as I disembarked from the train I knocked on the window and we excitedly waved to each other. I do hope our paths cross again.

Kandy is one of the most important cities in Sri Lanka and has an important station to match. The long platform shelters featured elaborate cast-iron support structures and the station hall was a large and impressive Art Deco building.

When I visited the National Museum in Colombo, a group of tourism college students studying to become licenced tour guides asked me to do a quick survey about my visit to the museum. I told them my travel plans, said I was still undecided about whether I would go to Kandy, and one of the guys, Malinda, told me that his brother or father or uncle or whatever owned a guest house in suburban Kandy. I thought he said it was called Traveller's Home and he showed me where it was on the map, on the western side of town right near a bridge over the Mahaweli River.

So a couple of days ago I booked two nights at the Traveller's Home guest house. In any case, I was sort of getting sick of staying in noisy, bustling town centres and felt like enjoying some suburban peace and quiet for a change. So many people had also told me that Kandy city centre is a dump (spoiler alert: it is) and advised me to get a place just outside Kandy (pro tip: they were right).

At Kandy station I got out my phone so I could show where it was to a bus conductor or tuk-tuk driver. I had a closer look at the map and saw that there was a railway station not far away, Mawilmada.

Needless to say, I changed my plans. I went to the Matale Line ticket counter and bought a third-class ticket for ten rupees. The Matale Line is a short branch line that meets the Main Line services at Kandy. There are only about six services a day in each direction but there was one leaving soon at two o'clock.

I boarded the leading carriage of the four-car train consisting of battered old red carriages. The train was nearly empty when I got on but shortly before departure it filled up. The driver blasted the whistle of the tiny diesel-hydraulic locomotive and we pulled slowly out of Kandy station on the single-track branch.

The train stopped every kilometre or so at tiny, dusty little stations that didn't even appear in Google Maps or the Sri Lanka Railways timetable search webpage. After about ten or so minutes the train arrived at Mawilmada. I had already put my backpack on and was standing at the door thinking I was well prepared. But I saw the tiny platform sail right past me. The train came to a halt and beneath the door was nothing but long grass and a drainage ditch.

In ordinary circumstances I would have been capable of climbing down the ladder underneath the door to ground level. But I had a ten kilogram backpack on my back, a five kilogram daypack in my hands, and I was facing forwards out the door and the door and vestibule were too narrow for me to swing around and climb backwards down the ladder. The ground looked very rough and uneven so I didn't want to jump out. I also considered ripping my backpack off, throwing it down onto the ground, doing the same with my daypack and then climbing down the ladder underneath the door, but the train was on a very sharp curve and the guard wouldn't have been able to see me. I was terrified that the train would start moving with all my valuables lying on the ground behind some railway track used by hundreds of pedestrians as all railway lines in Sri Lanka are.

A schoolboy on the train told me to run back through the train and get off at the platform. I bolted down the train but it was so crowded I could barely squeeze through. It was too late, the train started moving.

I got off at the next station two kilometres away on the other side of the Mahaweli River, Katugastota. This was a proper station with a proper long platform and proper gardens and proper staff (three staff, for a station with only twelve trains a day). I explained what happened to the friendly staff, they said it was a fairly common problem at short platforms. The New South Wales railways have plenty of short platforms but they are clearly advertised as such in the published timetables and in any case, the guard announces on the PA system in the train well before arriving at the station which carriages alighting passengers need to be in. Sri Lanka's railways are still stuck in the nineteenth century so I don't think we will be seeing on-board PA systems any time soon.

It was a good thing that my ticket entitled me to travel as far as Katugastota. I left the station and found myself in a whisper-quiet middle-class neighbourhood of two-storey houses and new Nissans in driveways and neat gardens. There were no shops, no restaurants, no buses and no tuk-tuks.

Disheartened, I tightened the straps on my backpack and steeled myself for a lengthy walk in the lowland heat and humidity. Kandy claims that it is the capital of the Hill Country, and the city is indeed surrounded by hills, but it lies at the bottom of the Mahaweli valley only 528 metres above sea level. All other things being equal, temperature decreases by 5.5 °C for every one thousand metres of elevation. This would mean that Kandy is only 3 °C cooler than sea level. But Kandy is in the middle of the country well away from the cooling influence of the ocean so it is just as hot as Colombo or Galle, but perhaps slightly cooler at night and drier. In any case it was a shock to the system after spending nearly a week in the Hill Country above a thousand metres.

I had walked maybe four hundred metres when a tuk-tuk stopped. It was a larger tuk-tuk, the back seat was easily large enough for three people. There was a young adult female passenger in the back, presumably the driver's daughter. I explained to the driver what had happened and he told me to hop into the back seat, and he refused to discuss payment.

He dropped the young woman off at some shops without getting any payment. I then presumed that this might be a private tuk-tuk. Some people own tuk-tuks as their own private vehicles, not as taxis, and it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference. I have gotten into a waiting tuk-tuk once in Galle only to be told to get out, it's not a taxi.

After about ten minutes I reached Traveller's Home. The driver, Sirisa, didn't want any payment but I didn't think that was fair. The smallest note I had was one thousand rupees. He apologised and said he didn't have any change. I told him to keep it. He looked like he had just won Lotto.

I walked up the steep driveway and met the owner, Mahesh, and his friendly wife Manik. Traveller's Home is the upper story of an immaculate two-storey family home in a wealthy neighbourhood on a breezy ridge above the Mahaweli River. Mahesh and Manik are a successful middle-class family. Mahesh is a hotel office manager and Manik was a financier before she had children. The family had that very day bought a brand new Honda Fit and they went to the Temple of the Sacred Tooth to pray for the car to be blessed.

"Oh, by the way, Malinda said to say hello," I said to Mahesh.

"Malinda? Who is Malinda?"

"You don't know Malinda? Now lives in Colombo, he's studying tourism?"

"No, I don't know anyone studying tourism."

"Oh."

It turns out that Malinda had recommended a whole other guest house called Traveller's Lodge near the next bridge south on the Mahaweli River. My goodness, I feel so stupid. In any case, every cloud has a silver lining because this family is very helpful and friendly and my room is comfortable and immaculate.

I spent a few hours sitting on the upper balcony enjoying some water, leftover hiking chocolate and a punnet kf strawberries I bought from a hawker at Nanu Oya station. Being on top of a ridge over the river, this house does get a nice breeze for which I am grateful.

At five o'clock I decided to head into Kandy. More regular buses stop at a complicated intersection at the Katugastota Bridge about a kilometre away. I walked down there along the hilly, busy sub-arterial road.

Australia is not perfect when it comes to facilities for pedestrians. There are so many things road authorities and local governments can do to improve the pedestrian experience back home, chief of which would have to be changing the absurdly long time it takes for Australian traffic lights to change. Then you have those stupid pedestrian crossings, quite common in Queensland, where pedestrians are forced to wait on the median strip of a six-lane highway for another three minutes for the lights to change again. Seriously, who came up with that nonsense? The last thing I want to do is to be forced to spend another three minutes in the blazing Brisbane sun on a 33 °C day with 70% humidity with buses, trucks and cars roaring past me on either side. Heads must roll.

Anyway, as bad as things are for Australian pedestrians compared to, say, the Netherlands, Australia is a pedestrian paradise compared to Sri Lanka.

I don't think the horrible pedestrian experience in Sri Lanka is due to the failure to provide facilities. I think it is worse than that. I honestly think the Sri Lankan government actually wants pedestrians to be killed. There is no other explanation.

Footpaths rarely exist, forcing people to walk on the road. Where footpaths do exist, shopkeepers expand their shelves and goods onto them, so you still have to walk on the road. Where shopkeepers haven't invaded the footpath, cars, trucks and tuk-tuks park on them, so you still have to walk on the road. Where vehicles haven't parked on the footpath, groups of friends congregate on the footpath in one impenetrable mass while having conversations, so you still have to walk on the road.

It wouldn't be so bad if you could walk on the shoulder, which you usually can't. The shoulders here are places for people to light rubbish fires, dump builder's rubble or where road crews keep their piles of gravel for road repairs. Even when the shoulders don't have such obstructions, there are so many open drains, broken concrete driveways that crumble under your boots, and large expanses of uneven ground hidden under long grass just waiting to break someone's ankle, that you are better off walking on the road.

Walking on the road is tiring and dreary. You have to keep your wits about you at all times. Much of the time you will spend stationary in front of a parked tuk-tuk waiting for a large enough gap in oncoming traffic so you can safely go around the tuk-tuk. There might be just enough space between the edge of the bitumen and motor traffic for one person, but when two pedestrians come from opposite directions, there is a stand-off as one tries to get through first. Then there are the homicidal bus drivers who will not stop for anybody. The bodies of these buses will swing out around the bends. There is no alternative to jumping out of the way onto the shoulder and broken ankles be damned. There are also all the short bridges and the culverts where the road narrows. You have no choice but to wait for a gap in traffic to walk over these bridges.

A person who averages four or five kilometres an hour walking in an Australian city can count on achieving two or three kilometres an hour in Sri Lanka. Many Sri Lankans are too poor to own cars and their main mode of transport is on foot. Are they even aware that a better deal is possible, that there are many countries where you can walk in safety and efficiency on concrete footpaths separate from traffic on all major urban streets? I know Sri Lanka is poor, but if the government can afford to build a massive port in an isolated area that nobody needs, surely a program to build a network of footpaths piece by piece in, say, a ten-year or twenty-year planning timeframe isn't unrealistic? The savings made from the reduced number of deaths and disability should pay for it, surely.

It took me over tweny minutes to reach the Katugastota Bridge a kilometre away. I caught a bus into town and grabbed some dinner. Even though it was the evening, Kandy is the most intense and overpowering and comfronting city I have ever seen with the possible exception of Seoul. Intense traffic, intense noise, intense dust, intense litter, intense lights, intense faces, intense pollution, intense eyes, intense arguments. Colombo is many times larger than Kandy but it was nothing like this. Colombo is like a garden suburb in the English Home Counties compared to Kandy. Kandy reminds me of what I imagine a typical Indian city to be like.

One nice thing about Kandy is the lake. There is a large and ancient reservoir in the heart of town. The Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic was brightly lit in yellow light, its reflection dancing on the little waves. Kandy Lake is just large enough that there was a sea breeze coming off it which was quite welcome.

Still, even around the lake, Kandy had a menacing air. The people here in the city centre seemed loud, argumentative, aggressive. Though many of the shops were shut the city centre streets were still a torrent of honking cars and buzzing tuk-tuks. The touts in Kandy are the most persistent I have experienced so far on this trip. While trying to find my way to the bus station I found myself on an unlit street with individuals loitering in the dim shadows. I got the hell out of there.

Buses in Sri Lanka are extremely frequent during the day but as soon as the clock strikes at seven in the evening they nearly all disappear. The Clock Tower bus station was desolate. It was with some relief that I hopped into a tuk-tuk. I couldn't have even been bothered bargaining his first quote of six hundred rupees down.

Tea pickers between Nuwara Eliya and Nanu Oya

Nanu Oya station

Tea seller on Udarata Manike train

Adam’s Peak

Don’t go to the toilet while a train is at a station in Sri Lanka!

Udarata Manike train at Kandy station

Matale Line train at Kandy station

Katugastota station

View from Traveller’s Home

Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic

Kandy Lake at night

Kandy Clock Tower