This is a follow up of my previous post: @jordan-tainan/1st-tuck-tuck-day-negombo-sigiriya
Traveling with @stoodkev and @balourdos95
We started the day by visiting Sigiriya rock.
According to the ancient Sri Lankan chronicle the Cūḷavaṃsa, this area was a large forest, then after storms and landslides it became a hill and was selected by King Kashyapa (AD 477–495) for his new capital. He built his palace on top of this rock and decorated its sides with colourful frescoes. On a small plateau about halfway up the side of this rock he built a gateway in the form of an enormous lion.
The capital and the royal palace were abandoned after the king's death. It was used as a Buddhist monastery until the 14th century. The place is still guarded by the Monkeys. It seems that they didn’t want us around…
Going up is quite challenging if you are not in good health or afraid of height. We saw some people who were using both hands and feet on the stairs to climb up. This is why a lot of locals are on site to push your fat butt upstairs (they literally do it).
But then once you arrived upstairs the view is breathtaking.
We then headed to Kandy. A city very important for Buddhists as the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic or Sri Dalada Maligawa is located there. This temple hosts the Buddha tooth. We could not directly see it though as it was covered. My phone battery was dead so no pic on my side.
We arrived at night in the temple, quite lucky as we could attend a ceremony. Some of the costume and music plawed made me feel like in the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It was actually a special feeling to visit this massive temple at night. I usually get to visit them in daytime.
This was followed by a nice dinner at a place where we met some fellow tuktuk Adventurers. This ended in a British colonial style bar.
The following day we went to the nearby Gampola area to visit the Ambuluwawa Kanda tower. Again not really something you can climb up if you are afraid of height. The highest you go the smaller are the stairs. We could not go at the very top due to some paint works.
There is another smaller tower next to it.
Surprisingly the site hosted a buddhist temple, a mosque and a christian church. Even though I know there have been fights between people from different religion in Sri Lanka I actually get the feeling that they can live quite well with each other. And the common treat with every locals met here is that they are all very nice, welcoming and smily.
All the rewards of the posts will be distributed to the Cool Earth charity.