Over breakfast our host, working through a massive pile of curry (“Work hard, eat lots!”), told us his backstory. Joined the navy at 18, at 29 he was sent on a two week navigation course in South Korea. After ten days he went AWOL, then spent the next eight years working illegally, saving up enough money to return home, pay the fine for his desertion, and buy the homestead we’re staying in, along with the land on which he has plans to build another. Said he liked Korea a lot: lovely place, nice people, very clean (he’s very big on clean). The only problem was the weather. “Three months every year very cold – minus 5, minus 10…I didn’t like.”
The other thing you have to do while you’re here is go to the cave temple, so after breakfast off we trotted like the dutiful tourists we are. Again, it started a tad inauspiciously when we arrived to discover that as per, we’d arrived at exactly the worst time – just at the start of morning prayer time, when the whole place closes for a quarter of an hour, allowing a good backlog of coach party tick box tourists to build up. (Giveaway term for the TBT: “did”. As in (overheard y’day in an Aussie accent you could cut with a knife): “We did the Temple of the Tooth yesterday.”)
But as with Sigirya, once past the queuing nightmare you soon appreciate why it really does have to be ‘done’.
The caves themselves are tucked in under a shelf of rock, which proved to be right at the top of quite a substantial hill. “I thought caves were supposed to be underground,” I faux-grumbled as we hauled ourselves up a succession of flights of steps. Each cave (there are five) is filled with brightly coloured wall paintings, well preserved by the darkness though they’ve been there since 2-300 BC, and, of course, innumerable Buddhas. Despite the hoards, the overall scale meant it was actually perfectly possible to get a really good look at everything, and we wandered around in a happy daze. For all the Buddhas, the murals were perhaps the loveliest feature, painted direct on the undulating rock. And the whole place had a calm serenity, with little pools of water lillies, and busy little monkeys eyeing up your banana.
We walked back to town for another delicious plate of curry at a locals’ cafe (270 a pop – about 70p), then a tuk tuk to the homestead for a rest from the heat and the unfortunate discovery that the quick trip we’d planned to another rock, to view the sunset over Sigirya, would in fact be anything but quick, and, in the absence of an appropriate bus, really very costly, even by tuk tuk. So we’ve decided to cut our losses and head back into town for another beer at our favorite (the only) pub, and dinner somewhere nice. After all those stairs, a bit of quiet time will do us no harm.