Thursday, February 16, 2012

Day 227 Dambulla - Sigiriya - Elephants - Dambulla

Aaah, what a nice place. Our couchsurfing hosts served us breakfast and organized everything for us. Robert tuktuked us to the Buddhist cave temples of
Dambulla - the temples themselves were very nice but the location on top of a hill gave us a hard time: walking up the stairs in the heatv was pretty difficult after what we had done the last days. Beside the temples once again monkeys were an attraction on the hilltop.
Initially I had planned to go to Sigiriya by scooter. Robert had arranged something, but it turned out to be a full-grown motorbike. After a couple of minutes of trying we all got aware that Marek is not able to drive this thing. Robert organized a tuktuk instead and off we went to the famous rock fortress. Even though there were stairs again (and a lot of them !) the climb was hard but not as hard as expected - we knew that this would be the last stairs we would have to climb and the heat wasn't as bad as in the morning. Sigiriya is a beautiful place - a huge rock in the middle of the plain, surrounded by gardens and topped with many ruins. Of course it also offered splendid views. Halfway up the cliff a cave contained murals of very bosomy ladies, something we had also seen in the site museum before.
Once we got down from the rock we drove to a jungle road to make Anne very happy: Elephants! Wild Elephants! Usually you can just find them in the National Parks, but our driver knew a place where you can see them from a normal road. At first we only spotted some several hundred meters away. But eventually we found an elephant mother and here little child just next to the road. They were still well camouflaged in the jungle but we could clearly see them. Very very nice!

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