Holiday pics, part 1
Feb. 3rd, 2013 12:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
graculusSo, as promised here they are - it was a bit of a whistle-stop tour of Sri Lanka and has given me a good idea of where I might want to go back to (nature reserves, for starters) and where I'd avoid like the proverbial plague (beach resorts, which came as no surprise...).
First off, what I'd say about Sri Lanka is about the two D's - driving and dogs.
I'm reliably informed that it's quite difficult to get a driving licence in Sri Lanka and certainly if I ever go back there I will not be driving myself! There's lots of honking (meaning 'I am going to pass you' or 'I am passing you', for starters) and the marked lanes are a suggestion rather than anything more. A normal road can easily become a 4-lane highway, what with tuk-tuks and all.
As for the dogs, Sri Lanka has a massive stray dog problem - our guide said he thinks it's about 2 million dogs at the moment - and while I never saw anyone actively being cruel to any of them (which may be partly because this is a predominantly Buddhist country) there's a lot of very thin, very sick looking animals wandering about.
Anyway, those are two things to take into account if you're thinking of going there - on the plus side, the food is fantastic (the only place that was disappointing was the first one where we stayed, other than that the curries were amazing) and the people also incredible and made us feel very welcome to their country. However if you don't like curry then this is not the destination for you.
So, the first place we stayed was right by the Indian Ocean on the west coast of the island and it looked like this for all of about 2 hours before the torrential rain started:
The following morning, with just drizzle instead of rain it was off to a series of Buddhist temples at Dambulla, which is a UNESCO world heritage site, carved into the 5 caves on the side of a hill:
Inside, pretty much every surface was either covered with wall paintings (all natural colours, done in the 12th century) or filled with Buddhas:
Outside, we encountered first the national flower of Sri Lanka:
and then a creature we were going to come to know better than we wanted to, the toque macaque - at this point he's still a handsome novelty rather than the massive pain he's going to be later in the trip:
Wherever there are Buddhist temples you also see these relic temples:
Traditionally they're built around a relic of the Buddha and an offering of either gold or jewels, so the walls are 15-20 feet thick with no entrance - this one is much more recent though and the surface covering is paint rather than gold leaf.
The next day we travelled to Sigiriya and this was the view from our hotel garden (otherwise titled 'my life is so hard you don't even know...'):
Sigiriya is another UNESCO world heritage site (we visited 6 of the 8 in the country on this trip) and was originally used as a Buddhist monastery from about 500BC till it was taken over as the capital in the 5th century AD (at which point the monks apparently moved out because the king in question had killed his own father and they didn't want to associate with that sort of behaviour).
Here's another view of Sigiriya from the extensive water gardens at its' base:
I went about two-thirds of the way up, to the point where the stone steps ended and the only way to the absolute top was via a rickey-looking metal staircase:
At the bottom of that pic are the lion's feet that are all that's left of what was apparently a huge lion statue - to get to the top, you had to go through the lion's mouth.
Okay, that's it for today - next we're off to the site of my unfortunate bike accident and the ancient city of Polonnaruwa (another UNESCO site), which Wikipedia feels it needs to say was once used as the background for a Duran Duran video... ;)
First off, what I'd say about Sri Lanka is about the two D's - driving and dogs.
I'm reliably informed that it's quite difficult to get a driving licence in Sri Lanka and certainly if I ever go back there I will not be driving myself! There's lots of honking (meaning 'I am going to pass you' or 'I am passing you', for starters) and the marked lanes are a suggestion rather than anything more. A normal road can easily become a 4-lane highway, what with tuk-tuks and all.
As for the dogs, Sri Lanka has a massive stray dog problem - our guide said he thinks it's about 2 million dogs at the moment - and while I never saw anyone actively being cruel to any of them (which may be partly because this is a predominantly Buddhist country) there's a lot of very thin, very sick looking animals wandering about.
Anyway, those are two things to take into account if you're thinking of going there - on the plus side, the food is fantastic (the only place that was disappointing was the first one where we stayed, other than that the curries were amazing) and the people also incredible and made us feel very welcome to their country. However if you don't like curry then this is not the destination for you.
So, the first place we stayed was right by the Indian Ocean on the west coast of the island and it looked like this for all of about 2 hours before the torrential rain started:
The following morning, with just drizzle instead of rain it was off to a series of Buddhist temples at Dambulla, which is a UNESCO world heritage site, carved into the 5 caves on the side of a hill:
Inside, pretty much every surface was either covered with wall paintings (all natural colours, done in the 12th century) or filled with Buddhas:
Outside, we encountered first the national flower of Sri Lanka:
and then a creature we were going to come to know better than we wanted to, the toque macaque - at this point he's still a handsome novelty rather than the massive pain he's going to be later in the trip:
Wherever there are Buddhist temples you also see these relic temples:
Traditionally they're built around a relic of the Buddha and an offering of either gold or jewels, so the walls are 15-20 feet thick with no entrance - this one is much more recent though and the surface covering is paint rather than gold leaf.
The next day we travelled to Sigiriya and this was the view from our hotel garden (otherwise titled 'my life is so hard you don't even know...'):
Sigiriya is another UNESCO world heritage site (we visited 6 of the 8 in the country on this trip) and was originally used as a Buddhist monastery from about 500BC till it was taken over as the capital in the 5th century AD (at which point the monks apparently moved out because the king in question had killed his own father and they didn't want to associate with that sort of behaviour).
Here's another view of Sigiriya from the extensive water gardens at its' base:
I went about two-thirds of the way up, to the point where the stone steps ended and the only way to the absolute top was via a rickey-looking metal staircase:
At the bottom of that pic are the lion's feet that are all that's left of what was apparently a huge lion statue - to get to the top, you had to go through the lion's mouth.
Okay, that's it for today - next we're off to the site of my unfortunate bike accident and the ancient city of Polonnaruwa (another UNESCO site), which Wikipedia feels it needs to say was once used as the background for a Duran Duran video... ;)
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no subject
Date: 2013-02-04 05:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-05 10:29 pm (UTC)I love curry and we had all sorts of lovely varieties, even without the meat and fish that everyone else also said was great. The more touristy places also do Western food and there's even quite a lot of Chinese food as well (vegetable fried rice seemed to be a standard option) and omelettes too, so you wouldn't be completely bereft...
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Date: 2013-02-06 08:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-05 04:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-05 10:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-11 05:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-18 11:51 pm (UTC)Even though the Buddhas and the temples are gorgeous, I'd be pretty uncomfortable going into those temples--the rock it's carved out of looks too looming to me. Obviously, they've been there for hundreds of years, but it's still a little scary looking!
I'm with you on the rickety stairs. I wouldn't care how great the view is! Having that many people on them seems overly optimistic! I wish the lion statue was still there. It must have been amazing.
Monkeys are cute and all, but they can be quite dangerous. My sister, the zookeeper, has made sure we're all quite well educated on the subject! :)
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Date: 2013-02-22 06:16 pm (UTC)As for the stairs, the top section there are actually two sets of stairs beside one another, supposedly so there's a one-way system in place, but it didn't particularly seem to work. I was already not convinced by the stairs just from the description our guide gave of them in advance, but when I'd actually seen them it was definitely not going to happen!