Dambulla is probably not the first place that rolls off most tongues  when it comes to naming UNESCO World Heritage sites in Sri Lanka.  I guess Sigiriya and Polonnaruwa are at the top of the list – simply because they have been more accessible over the last couple of decades than Anuradhapura, the largest and earliest of the major sites. 

The only reason, as far as I can see, why Dambulla isn’t right up there at the forefront, is because it is a smaller site, with arguably less diversity than the other places.  At Dambulla there are no ancient citadels, great dagobas or ruined palaces. There are simply five cave temples cut into a granite escarpment on the side of a mountain.

Simply? Let me rephrase that. There’s nothing simple about Dambulla.  I’m biased because I love it, although not all my experiences there have been wonderful.

My first visit was in 1969. It wasn’t a World Heritage site then (it was inscribed in 1991) –  not at all set up for tourists. My memories of the cave temples from that time bear no resemblance to those of my subsequent visits. All I remember from 1969 is one dark cave, with Buddha images lurking in the half-light.  The whole place infused with an air of mystery. That was, until we tried to leave the cave. Our way was barred by a monk shaped like a sumo wrestler, hand outstretched, demanding exit payment.  Enough to turn anyone off religion!

Back to the present. The drive to Dambulla from Sigiriya only took around half an hour – enough time to rest tired limbs that had just climbed the Rock: or putting it another way – enough time for tired limbs to stiffen and seize up!

Since my last visit in 1996, there has been an addition at the foot of the  Dambulla site. The Japanese, in their wisdom, have contributed a Golden Buddha, so massive that it can be seen from the steps on  Sigiriya. A pleasing addition to the landscape? Not to my eyes.  I have to remind myself to try and look through the ‘period eye’ – in other words, to see it through the eyes of a contemporary Sri Lankan Buddhist. It doesn’t help. This product of Far Eastern Mahayana Buddhism is a world removed from the refined art of Sri Lankan Theravada. The nearest I’ve seen to it in Sri Lanka, is the giant Shiva at the Hindu Temple in Trincomalee. But the latter is not out of place amidst its riot of Hindu eccentricity, whereas the Golden Buddha is a total incongruity in its setting at the base of gorgeous Dambulla.

The Golden Buddha is sat atop a new museum of Buddhism (you enter through a monstrous mythological creature’s mouth) , which apparently houses some information,  copied paintings and Buddhist images.  Any time spent there would have taken time from the caves, so I decided to give the museum a miss and began my ascent up the steps to  which Upali directed us after we’d purchased our tickets.

Something was different, unfamiliar but it wasn’t until we reached the temple complex,  , 350 feet up the 600 foot rocky outcrop, that I realised what had happened since my 1996 visit, and why Upali had made such a fuss about the difficulty of the climb.  Try as I might, I couldn’t actually remember having climbed many stairs on my previous two visits. Was my memory really that bad? Now I made my way slowly up the 800 or so stone steps . Hard work, yes, though once again the plateaux between flights gave respite. The flights were much wider than the narrow stairways of Sigiriya, so you were less in danger of clashing with other visitors!

The views were stunning – this time the reverse of the morning’s panoramas from Sigiriya. Now we looked over the jungle to the rock.

The difficulty of the climb was further alleviated by groups of macaque monkeys engaged on their daily chores. Mothers were particularly meticulous, grooming their babes on the steps, ignoring hordes of passing pilgrims and tourists. It all made the ascent less arduous and very charming.

Though I was disappointed when I reached the caves, to find no evidence of the dog-grooming activities I’d witnessed  in 1996. In fact, no evidence of the beautiful pariah dogs that had found refuge there. Perhaps they’d all gone off for lunch.  Or perhaps officialdom had seen fit to remove them. That would be a pity.

At the top we left our sandals before we passed through an entrance building into the paved courtyard in front of the caves.

Now the penny dropped. As I looked out from there I saw a wide, paved slope running up the side of the mountain parallel to the steps.  Of course. This was why I didn’t remember the steps. We’d come up the slope on previous visits.  

Groups of laughing barefoot schoolgirls in white ambled up the sloping track. In Sri Lanka the girls, not the boys, wear ties as part of their uniform. There’s so much white in Sri Lanka – school uniforms, temple visits – and yet it’s always crisp and clean. How do they do it, especially in the hot, damp climate?

I’m not going to go into huge detail on the caves – for that watch this space, for the eBook expanded version of this blog.  If ‘cave temples’ bring to mind Ajanta or any one of the many other overwhelming sites in India, you will have to switch to another mode when you go to Dambulla.  The Indian cave temples are true ‘rock cut’ temples, hewn out of solid rock, so massive that their construction is beyond comprehension.  Dambulla is not like that – in fact there is much debate about how much is natural cave and how much is man-made. The truth is that no-one really knows, but it’s thought that original natural caves may have been extended. Unlike the Indian ones they do  not imitate architecture.  In a sense that makes them equally enigmatic. There are five shrines in all, created and expanded over 2000 years. In the beginning they were probably sanctuaries for wandering monks. Over the millennia they were carved out and filled  with painted stone and wooden carvings of Buddha images, stupas  and kings. The walls and ceilings are also covered with paintings, ranging from simple repetitive flowers and patterns to the Jataka stories and representations of the Buddhist pantheon.  These paintings cannot be compared in their delicacy and skill with the priceless Gupta paintings at Ajanta, or the Sigiriya frescoes. They are, on the whole later restorations, many stemming from the eighteenth century.  The whole effect though, is delightful, particularly on the sloping, natural-looking ceilings of the shrines. The predominant colours throughout the temples are yellow, ochre, red and gold. Of course they are now restored, which is why they look so fresh and bright, unlike those of my fractured memories from 1969.

Some of the Buddha images are standing, some seated, and among the most impressive are those lying in Parinirvana. The images are all brightly painted, but somehow not garish. There’s a pleasing harmony to them.  Because they were carved and assembled over the centuries, some of them are clearly associated with rulers such as Vattagamini Abhaya (1^st century)  and  Nissankamalla (12^th century), as verified by  accompanying inscriptions and sculpture portraits of the ruler.

It’s a mesmerising place and it was hard to tear myself  away and head back down the steps to the waiting van.

Little did we know it when we left Dambulla, but we had one more climb in store before dinner. When we arrived back in Sigiriya the van turned off the main road and bumped down the little one-lane street to our hotel, passing the Sigiriya rest house and continuing passed a reed-and-lotus-covered lake in which the rock is famously reflected. Memories started to stir once more. It dawned for the first time that we had walked along this road – then an unmade track – in 1996, when my niece and I had expressed a desire to swim. The only hotel sporting a swimming pool in 1996 was the Sigiriya Hotel, some half a mile along the track, and beyond where our Sigiriya Village Hotel now stood. On the way we had passed a young elephant with his mahout. We stopped to pat the elephant, who caressed us gently with his trunk. Yes, that's me in white on the true left, and another of our party (not my niece) on the right.

Later, when we returned to the rest house darkness had fallen, and we had forgotten to bring a torch. The moon was new, and shed no light. We couldn’t see anything. The situation was frightening. We had no idea if there were wild elephants around, and we were even uncertain about Tamil Tiger insurgents, since nowhere in Sri Lanka was really safe, and we weren’t that far from the conflict proper. As we stumbled forward, a light appeared. The young elephant’s mahout had come to our rescue with his torch and led us back to the rest house.

So this was in the back of my mind, when returning from Dambulla, we noticed an elephant tummy-deep in the lake, bearing a couple of tourists. It looked such fun – for the elephant as well as the tourists, that temptation (and madness) reared its ugly head. Margot, Pam and I all decided that  we couldn’t miss out on this experience. In addition I couldn’t help wondering if this was my elephant from seventeen years ago. He was five years old then, so he’d be in his prime now. It made sense.

Upali established that a ride would last forty minutes, including the bath in the lake and would cost a small fortune. Heinz, being sensible, said that wild horses wouldn’t drag him onto the elephant, but if we insisted on such lunacy he’d wait for us and take photos.

I have issues with the domestication of elephants, which often involves cruel treatment and dreadful conditions. However, this one had the luxury of spending most of its day in the place elephants love best – the water. So I’m afraid I let my principles slip for the first, but not the last, time on the tour.

We were formally introduced to the elephant, whose name was Saman (after a Sri Lankan deity).  He looked well-cared for and healthy, and the chains were not hobbling his feet together, as is so often the case. Pam, Margot and I climbed the mounting ladder and settled ourselves on the howdah – if that’s what it could be called. Basically it was a flimsy wooden platform with a rickety bar to hold onto. If Saman decided to lean too far to one side we’d be hard-pushed not to slide straight out and onto the ground – or into the water, especially as we were placed with two of us on one side and one on the other.  Hardly makes for an equal load. At this stage we started to worry. This was not going to be a very safe excursion. We headed off up the road, gritting our teeth and hanging on for dear life. Pam and I suddenly had the distinct feeling that the howdah was slipping downwards.  We gripped harder and I drew one foot up onto the howdah to give me some grip.  Eventually we turned round and the elephant waded into the lake. This was meant to be fun? Pam and I were convinced that the howdah was slipping further – or possibly Saman was trying to roll? It was surely a matter of minutes before we would land in the lake with a large elephant rolling on top of us…

Suddenly the elephant’s owner called from the lake-edge. An exchange of shouts and much to our relief, we headed back to home base, where we rapidly, and angrily, disembarked. We had had twenty minutes of the forty minute trip. Why were we sent back? Not because the owner feared for our lives, but because some more tourists had turned up and the scoundrel thought he’d fit in one more ride before darkness fell. 

They demanded a tip on top of the disgraceful price we’d had to pay up front, and were very sullen when we refused to give them one, since we’d only had half the promised time. We kept quiet about the fact that we were actually very relieved to get off. We left with bad feelings so I never did find out if Saman was ‘my’ elephant.  But looking at the photographs that were taken of our ride, I can see quite clearly that the howdah was indeed slipping. (that's me at the back with my leg drawn up - trying to stop myself from sliding and trying to look nonchalant!)

This was our last night at the Sigiriya Village Hotel.  A meal out, an early night, a feeling of satisfaction that we’d proved that we could indeed tackle Sigiriya and Dambulla in one day. Suddenly the Elephant Incident didn’t seem to matter so much.  It would be something to talk about when we got home.

Tomorrow we would be moving on to Kandy.

 

I remember the first time I went to Sigiriya in 1969. We were young and carefree and we tramped around Sri Lanka on buses and in trains, when we visited my sister there on our way to spending a year in Australia. It was late in the afternoon when we turned up at the rest-house in Sigiriya, filthy and exhausted from climbing the rock. In those days there was nothing there except the rock itself and the rest-house. No grand resort hotels discreetly tucked into the jungle landscape as there are today.  It was the rest-house or nothing. Luckily my brother-in-law had booked for us from Colombo. At least he thought he had.  The rest-house manager had never heard of us, denied any such booking had been made and refused to give us even an inch of floor on the veranda to sleep on. No option but to head back out in to the elephant-infested jungle and… and what? There was nothing around. It was a hairy situation.  As we turned to leave, the manager relented. ‘There  are some Australians,’ he called after us, ‘leaving here soon in a taxi. Perhaps they will take you.’

The Australians did indeed take us with them. An middle-aged dentist and his wife who were heading for Kandy.  I remember the formal introductions when we set off.   

‘I’m John,’ he said, ‘and the old cow in the back’s Mary.’

An auspicious start. My other half was in stitches. Mary was philosophical. I was speechless. Mary went on to tell us about their family. Their daughter, she explained, was at university studying egg science.

I mulled this over for a while, then opened my big mouth and made an idiot of myself (not unusual). ‘Three years seems a long time to study eggs,’ I ventured.

The taxi exploded with mirth. ‘Egg Science,’ Mary repeated, ‘You know, eggricultural science.’

Well, at least I had a year to learn to understand the accent.

It turned out that they lived near Melbourne, where we would be living. We would later stay with them many times in their beautiful bungalow in the bush, and their beach house down the coast towards Geelong.  I wonder what happened to them. So many people pass through our lives and then we lose touch.

I went to Sigiriya again in 1996 when I was in Sri Lanka for my nephew’s wedding. It was a family trip. This time we did stay at the rest-house and I remember the constant drum-rolls of monkey footsteps on the roof.  We all made it to the old fortress ruins at the top of the rock.  It’s a 370 metre climb so not for the faint-hearted.

Sigiriya, the  ‘Lion Rock’, is a volcanic plug that erupts out of the jungle.

Apart from its sensational appearance, its claim to fame is that it was the citadel of nasty King Kassapa from 477 to 495, who usurped his brother’s throne, murdered his father and needed to hunker down somewhere impregnable.  Legend has it that the ruins at the top of Sigiriya are the remains of his fortress-palace, though these days it’s acknowledged that they are more likely to have been a monastery.  Halfway up the rock face beneath an inaccessible rocky overhang is a series of remarkable frescoes depicting unidentified female beauties.

This time I decided not to climb all the way up to the top. For a start, I’d done that twice already. I’m not masochistic enough to have to do it again ‘because it’s there.’  Pam had also been to the top previously, and she elected to stay down in the boulder garden at the foot of the rock. Margot and Heinz were determined to reach the summit. I made a compromise choice. I wanted to climb up to the frescoes and then carry on past the mirror wall to the Lion’s Paws. Then I would return to join Pam and explore the archaeological sites at the base.

Sigiriya posed one problem as far as I was concerned: the predators stationed at the top of the first few short flights of steps leading through the gardens to the base of the rock. Gangs of men wait there for foreign tourists and grab hold of them, to ‘help’ them up the steps. If you get caught by one you’re stuck with him all the way to the top and back down again, however much you attempt to shake the nuisance off.  And this annoyance ends at the exit with an exorbitant demand for money.

My 1996 climb up the rock was blighted by one of these individuals, who tried to latch onto me. I told him firmly that I did not require help. Still he trailed me. I lost my temper, told him to go away, stayed back in the hope that he would go ahead, hurried on in the hope of putting distance between us. The message eventually got through, but he followed a couple of bends behind me during the whole of my climb. Back down at the base, sure enough, he demanded money for ‘helping’ me. He hadn’t helped me. I hadn’t allowed him to touch me. Not once. I refused to pay him. Much to my fury, my Sri Lankan brother-in-law forked out the money. He wanted to avoid a confrontation, he said.

I told Upali about this as we headed for the first flight of steps. I could see the gangs of ‘helpers’ waiting. I explained to Upali that my last experience had been so unpleasant that if any of these men attempted to grab me or to follow me I would not go up. Upali was my knight on a white charger. Whenever we came across groups waiting to pounce, he shouted ahead that under no circumstances were they to touch me. Quite what else he said to convince them to keep away from me – and by extension my three group members – I don’t know, but it worked. This time I could enjoy the climb unencumbered by unwanted attention.

I fail to understand how a UNESCO World Heritage site can allow this very unpleasant trade to exist. At the very least it should be properly regulated and policed.

Luckily our ploy to swap the Polunnaruwa and Sigiriya days around paid off. The rain stayed away as we headed through the symmetrically laid-out, rather bare water gardens towards the rock at 8.30 in the morning. We had decided to come early to avoid the midday heat during our climb.

Pam settled herself in the boulder garden – so called because of the giant boulders scattered at the rock base. She was intending to spend the time reading: Pam is rarely seen without a novel tucked into her bag. Waiting time is never wasted time as far as she is concerned – turn your back for a minute – nose in another novel. She brings a suitcase full – well, half a suitcase full, the other half being full of  biscuits. Once she’s finished a book, she leaves it for the hotel. Now you can’t do THAT with your Kindle!    

The remaining three of us began the slow steady climb up the rock. We were quite spread out and I was essentially on my own and could progress at my own speed. Yes, the steps are steep and narrow, but as long as you take them slowly and concentrate on where you are putting each foot, they are perfectly manageable, and are arranged in relatively short bursts with nice plateaux in between each flight where you can catch your breath while pretending to admire the view. How many are there? Difficult one to answer as reports vary but the consensus seems to be that there are around 1200 to the top, which would make about 900 to the Lion’s Paws. Oh yes, add another 100 or so for the vertical detour  up to the frescoes, a spiral staircase in a wire cage – luckily one way only – one takes you up and another next to it leads you back down.     You can see them in the photograph, leading off from  the  orange-coloured ‘Mirror Wall’, partway up the rock.

These frescoes of revealingly-clothed women are a marvel of the ancient world. They bear some resemblance in style to the famous Buddhist frescoes in the rock cut temples of Ajanta in Maharashtra, India, and indeed, they are thought to be from the same era – around the fifth century CE, when the Gupta dynasty ruled much of India. It was the Golden Age of Indian art and culture, and Gupta influence spread to far beyond India, including Sri Lanka.         

The frescoes are amazingly fresh and vivid and a must-see. Along with the Buddhas of Gal Vihara in Polonnaruwa they are unofficial emblems representing the country. The women in the less revealing blouses are thought to be servants and those wearing tops that are so fine as to be transparent, princesses. It’s notable that the servants are generally darker-skinned than the royals. Possibly a case of local tribal women serving their high-caste Indian-origin mistresses. 

 

I climbed back down the spiral staircase, making sure I heeded the warning notice.

Then I carried on alongside the ‘Mirror Wall’, which is said to have been as shiny as a mirror when it was constructed, supposedly in the era of Kassapa. Medieval pilgrims etched their love poems and messages on it, so it became known as the ‘graffiti wall’ and was a source of much information to later art historians. The graffiti isn’t exactly obvious and when it’s pointed out by  the guards protecting it, you’re likely to nod your head but probably, like me, you won’t be able to make out a thing among centuries worth of scratches and erosion.

A further climb led me up to the Lion’s Paws, a flat platform behind which the rock soars upwards, metal stairways clinging onto it for the final ascent to the top.   The first part of this last climb is another steep stairway, cut out of the rock between two gigantic sharp-clawed lion’s paws, all that remain of the lion, who also used to have a head, but this fell away long ago.

This is where I turned back. No amount of cajoling from Heinz and Margot could persuade me to go on. I wasn’t tired. There were simply other things I wanted to look at and, in any case, I had told Pam I’d be back and I was a bit concerned in case the pesty touts were annoying her.

I look my time, treading carefully and enjoying the view down onto the gardens and across the jungle to the hills surrounding Dambulla.

At the bottom of the rock, where the steps continued down into the garden, there was a parting of the ways, one path leading back to the boulder garden where Pam was waiting and another to the exit, where most tourists re-join their buses.  

Here I encountered a succession of  ‘helpers’  clearly unable to believe that I was of sound mind and body and was deliberately heading back the way I’d come in. I was stopped half a dozen times with the same message. ‘That way to the buses,’ pointing along the other path. By the sixth time I snapped back ungraciously, ‘thank you, I know where I’m going, I do not want the buses!’ By the time I found Pam, exactly where I’d left her, I had acquired a little group of these chaps, who kept their distance but were intent on following me, presumably to pounce when I eventually realised I was lost. They looked crestfallen when they realised I actually did know what I was doing.

We sat for a while, watching (and surreptitiously filming) the ‘helpers’ lurking at the top of the steps near us, choosing their prey. A young girl, an older  woman, someone with a stick – you just knew they were going to grab an arm. You also knew what would happen next. The helped person would say thank you, thinking that was the end of the encounter. But no, once they’d grabbed the arm, they laid claim to the person, and off they went with the victim, who, I knew from experience, would be stuck with them for the duration and the encounter would end with unpleasant demands for money. In case you think I’m being unfair, try doing a bit of research online, or reading the Lonely Planet guide. This scam is infamous. The nuisances appeared to have a leader, a good-looking, long-haired young chap, who was watching and organising them, when he wasn’t glued to his mobile phone. 

A French family came along, studied the ascent and decided that Grandpa, who looked very frail,  wouldn’t be able to manage it. He was quite happy to wait there for them, just as Pam had done.  Then his daughter made the mistake of saying that he needed a bottle of water. Immediately a couple of ‘helpers’ appeared. No water here, they told him, you have to go to the place where the buses wait. They pointed along a path with a wall at the end. We will help you.

The family went on their way, leaving Grandpa in the ‘safe’ hands of these two scoundrels. We watched, aghast, as, one on each side of him, they manoeuvred him along a very narrow, difficult path across the boulder garden. We couldn’t quite believe what happened then. When they reached the far side they propelled him up and over the old stone wall we’d seen, that separated the garden from the bus park. It was almost too disturbing to watch.

We decided to explore the boulder garden for a while, do a bit of lizard-spotting and then Margot and Heinz came down with Upali, so we made our way out through the water gardens, hoping the old man would return safely to where the family had left him.

A short visit to the recently completed Sigiriya Museum followed. Very nice, but not quite the show-stopper the Lonely Planet Guide had led me to expect.

When we came out, it was around lunch time. No problem, we had the usual supply of delicious  little bananas filched from the breakfast buffet. We weren’t going to waste precious time with a sit-down meal. But what now? Upali had suggested a ‘village safari’ but that turned out to be expensive and sounded rather like a round of ‘shops’ disguised as local crafts.

I know, I said. Let’s go to Dambulla. I’d been secretly worried. Upali had said we could stop at Dambulla on the way to Kandy when we left Sigiriya next day. I’d mulled it over and decided it wouldn’t work. Not if we were to have time to do the magnificent cave temples justice and then arrive in Kandy with enough time to visit the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens and do them justice. Dambulla is only 9 miles from Sigiriya and, much to my relief (my group is volatile) my suggestion was greeted with unanimous enthusiasm. Well, not quite unanimous. Upali was aghast. He’d been worried about us climbing Sigiriya and Dambulla on consecutive days, now we were planning to do both climbs on the same day.

We, however, insisted, and there was little he could do about it except look shocked! So we piled back into the van and headed off to our next adventure.