Dambulla Cave Monastery Tour

 

Feb.13

            We had another yummy breakfast and got ourselves packed up to move on to our next place.  Our host, Bernard, was also to be our transport and guide for the next 5 days.  We left one of our bags at his place and the others came with us.  We picked up John and Devi and headed out of town with Bernard in his car.

            Driving in Sri Lanka is very much like being in a video game.  The lanes are merely guidelines and everyone is super aggressive.  The big trucks and busses just plow through where they will and it’s on the smaller vehicles to get out of the way.  The tuktuks and motorbikes weave through all of this, dodging the larger transports while trying to get ahead themselves.  Roundabouts are a game of chicken, with vehicles whipping around while they can and everyone else slowly edging in until those going around need to let them in, at which point their row bursts in as quick as they can around the other edging vehicles.  What’s amazing is that there’s almost no road rage.  Everyone is constantly cutting off everything else on the road but there’s nearly no honking and few drivers got mad.  Any one of these actions would have sent a Toronto motorist into a blind fury, but not here.  In India, people were constantly yelling and honking at everyone else on the road while they themselves drove like lunatics.

            Instead of heading to our hotel, we went right to the Dambulla cave monastery site which started off with about 15 minutes of climbing stairs.  It was a hot day so we took many breaks while hopeful flower and doodad sellers offered their wares.  At the top we had to hand over our shoes since this was a holy Buddhist site.  Those of us wearing socks were glad for this condition as the stone on the ground had been baking all morning.

You can see the cave structure in this pic.

            Dambulla is a World Heritage site with apparently 80 caves.  The 5 that we could visit were set up like Buddhist temples, having many Buddha statues and paintings inside. The way they were hollowed out used the organic lines of the cave nicely  and the images were all very well-looked after.  The decoration of the caves started around 100 BCE and the monastery is still active.  It’s really one of those places where photos don’t do it justice, the space has a presence and just by being there you feel like you’re somewhere special.  The larger caves were more impressive but they all were worth checking out and people were generally quiet in spite of many large school groups visiting.  Many signs were around, advising tourists of what they were not allowed to do.  They were repainting some of the figures in one cave and told us it was because a tourist had posted a disrespectful picture of herself with the statues online.  I guess by changing their appearance they were trying to nullify what was put on the internet.

        

What the cave complex looks like from the outside.

    Back in town we stopped at a local place full of families for lunch.  You basically ordered what kind of meat you wanted and had it over rice and curry.  It had a big open kitchen so that we could see it was clean.  Our waitress wasn’t confident in English and hurried away several times when we tried to order drinks, which was odd because two of our party could speak Sinhalese.  The food was still delicious with my fish being amongst the best that we had during our trip.

            The rest of the day was ours to relax at our hotel.  The place was hard to find as Google Maps didn’t have many of Dambulla’s street names but after asking around we got there.  We made good use of the swimming pool, which went well with our beer and chips. 

When it was dinner time a local staff member told us of a good place on the main road.  He even offered us a lift in his car as he said he was going there himself.  It was a buffet where you chose a starch and three curries and we took our time choosing.  The staff was really friendly and allowed us to go back into the serving area to check out what was on offer.  The food was great and they had lime sodas for us, which became our signature drink for fighting the heat of the country.  We called our car guy afterwards and he drove us back for a few rupees.  By this time jetlag had set in and we fell over and went to sleep as soon as we got to our room.