A Glimpse of The Past.

Besides old forts, tea plantations, old colonial towns and cool train rides, Sri Lanka has some incredible ancient cities that had been long forgotten until the turn of the 20th century when British explorers found them and started excavation. We visited two of the more famous sites: Sigiriya and Anuradhapura.

Sigiriya Rock (Lion Rock).

Ruins at Anuradhapura.

The history of these cities is a bit hard to follow (mainly because of the really long names of all the kings that are hard to pronounce and so hard to remember!) but here's a very brief summary:

6th century BC: A North Indian prince is cast away and ends up in Sri Lanka. He settles in Anuradhapura; this becomes the first known kingdom of the country.

3rd centry BC: An Indian emperor sends his son and daughter to spread the word of Buddha's teachings. They end up in Anuradhapura where the King accepts them and integrates state and religion.

103-89 BC: Tamil kings from India invade Anuradhapura and rule for 14 years. The original King flees south to Dambulla.

4th century AD: Buddhism becomes more popular in Anuradhapura after the sacred tooth relic of Buddha is moved here.

5th centry AD: After a fellow named Kassapa kills his father, who is the King, and has a fight with his brother, who is the rightful heir to the throne, he flees to Sigiriya where he builds his rock fortress and becomes King. After something like 18 years, the brother attacks Sigiriya, killing King Kassapa, and then becomes King.

After that the center of the kingdom moved around a lot, eventually ending in Kandy and then completely falling when the British showed up in 1815.

Our first ancient city was Sigiriya which surrounds this large rock and where the palace was built right on top! Entering the site you make your way through some gardens with old water features.

Then the rock gardens, where some really big boulders created little caves and cool features. These areas were typically used by monks for meditating.

Meditating platform.

Cobra Hood cave.

What's left of some frescoes in the Cobra Hood cave.

Then you climb up to view what's left of the frescoes found in this cave about 50m up from the ground.

There are only a few frescoes left but you can imagine how beautiful it must have been with it covered. Although, I question the anatomy on these women; those boobs are just way too round!

Then you walk through the hallway of mirrors, which is a 3m high wall that is built on the outter edge of the cliff edge and then buffed so smoothly that it actually shimmers. Turns out people engraved some poems on these walls in the 5th century, and then in the 20th people added their names over top...

Right before you start up the last set of stairs to the summit, you are faced with two large lion paws, Sigiriya after all means "Lion". From what I read, archeologists suspect that there used to be a huge crouched lion carved here and the stairs would go up through its mouth!

The rock is about 200m high and when you stand on top of it, you realize how flat the surrounding area is and truly appreciate the uniqueness of this geological feature.

At the top, there are some more ruins from the old palance including an old water reservoir.

Click HERE for an aerial photo of the palace.

As we were climbing up we kept wondering how this place was originally built and we found some interesting features on the rock face of what look like little steps!

The next day we continued north to visit Anuradhapura. Because this ancient city is very large and very spread out we rented some pretty cool retro bikes to do the tour.

What we didn't truly appreciate until we arrived here was the number of pilgrims we would encounter. This is, after all, where buddhism started in Sri Lanka and there are a number of stupas built around the city that have been rebuilt.

One of the busiest spots was the Sri Maha Bodhi. This is the site of the first Bodhi tree in Sri Lanka; it was brought here from Bodhgaya in India as a little sapling and is claimed to be the oldest tree in the world. The Bodhi tree is very important in Buddhism because it is where the first Buddha sat and reached enlightment.

And once again, where there are temples, there are monkeys.

Our favourite part of our visit though were the random sites filled with ruins of old monasteries, palace buildings and houses. These sites were very quiet and usually a bit farther into the forest off the main roads. We ended up just cycling on these very small cattle tracks through the forest to explore.

It's incredibly hard to capture how large Anuradhapura is in pictures. The core of the ancient city is probably about 100km2 and filled with thousands of these old buildings now in ruins. Our guide book says that you would need a few days to explore every corner and we agree.

Both Sigiriya and Anuradhapura were really memorable and unique experiences. We loved wandering around imagining what it would have been like to live there 2000 years ago. For example, we found aquaducts and would follow them around to come up with its purpose.

Aquaduct.

Water would then flow over this mural?

Into this bath?

The irritating part though are the fees...both of these sites were $30 USD per person for foreigners, again. What is up with that?! In other countries, when visiting museums for example, we had run into this type of different pricing but never has the difference between local and foreigner been so extreme. Sometimes the price for a foreigner here is 100 times more than a local, at times the locals are free while foreigners are paying $10 USD?! In other countries the difference was much less and we didn't mind paying it. We figured that the locals pay taxes and a portion of them must go to national museums or parks. What is worst, is that it is unclear how our money is being used. We had heard from fellow travellers that Polonnaruwa, another ancient city which also costs $30 USD, has litter all over the place. So what exactly is the money being used for if not to install waste bins or have cleaners? We actually had originally planned to visit that site but after hearing that we felt that we didn't want to contribute to a site that may not be properly managed. Sigiriya and Anuradhapura were both "clean" (any garbage was either in nice neat piles or in bins as expected for this part of the world) and did have crews working. Anuradhapura is also an active archeological site, which we saw several excavations in progress. We like to think that our money went to something here, at least. Although $30 USD does not sound like a lot from your living room in Canada, it is a HUGE amount of money here (Median monthly income is 12,000 Rupee = $85 USD). This two tier pricing for sites and parks has got to change. The result of this is that it inflates all prices related to the tourism industry, encouraging locals to abandon their other jobs and switch to opening a guesthouse, restaurant or gift shop. We just don't think it's sustainable and good for their economical development in the long run.

While on the topic of sustainability, we went on another safari at Minneriya national park. In August and September there is the event here called "The Gathering", because this is the dry season, all the elephants congregate around this large lake. I read that up to 300 elephants can be seen here at a time! We were very excited, and along with some new friends (Two German guys, a Dutch couple and a retired French teacher) we went off to the park. We expected that we would drive slowly through the park, looking for any wild animals or birds but nope! Our driver drove as fast as he could flanked by other jeeps speeding through the park to get to the large field with the lake to see the elephants. We were shocked at what we saw: a herd of about 50 elephants surrounded by a ring of 60 jeeps!!!

We then spent two hours driving slowly around the field in a jeep congo line, which made it feel more like a zoo than a wild safari. We were all very dissapointed and wondered how this will affect the elephants over time. They didn't seem too disturbed by us but they were definitely making sure that they kept us in eye sight and that all the little babies were well protected. We did manage to get a few good photos and we did see two males play fight.

Unfortunately looking back at these photos I feel dissapointed that we were part of this spectacle.

Click here for more photos.