Dambulla & Sigiriya

Leaving Kandy very early in the morning when there was virtually no traffic, one could see how magical a place it had once been and at such a time, still is.

We headed north to see the ancient Buddhist temple complex at Dambulla.  After bypassing mangy dogs, packs of monkeys, the ubiquitous vendors and a vast golden Buddha sited above the ‘Golden Temple’, which looks like something dreamed up by a video game or Hollywoood set designer, a climb of 160m. over boulders and up stairways, brought us to the temple forecourt.

Large numbers of lotus bearing worshippers and tourists like ourselves, crowded into the five caves, some very small, in which about 150 Buddha images have been sculpted.  The first of these was done some 2,000 years ago and decoration of the caves and statues has gone on more or less continuously since then.  There are some very fine pieces but perhaps one needs to be a Buddhist or a specialist in the art of this region, to appreciate fully the work in these crowded temples.

We continued on to Sigiriya, where in the relative cool of the following morning we walked through  landscaped gardens to climb the great rock.  This extraordinay place, first uncovered in the late 19th century and now a UNESCO heritage site, has all the elements of an Indiana Jones epic – jungle, wild animals, huge boulders and at the summit of the great rock, a lost city and and hidden frescoes.  The site seems to have been a royal fortress city in the 5th century AD and subsequently became a Buddhist monastic centre.  Long before either, it was home to early man, with protection offered by the caves and plentiful water.

In the event, we climbed only about halfway as I had a problem with one of my knees and so we slowly descended.  Fortunately there is a good museum on the site, where we were able to see excellent facsimiles of the frescoes.  There is no certainty as to what these beautiful female forms represent or when they were executed.