So, Fred has just died, and Dobby earlier. I don't know if I can take any more death and destruction. It is also our last day in Sri Lanka. I can't say I'm not looking forward to returning to a place which is cooler outside than in, to giving my many bite scars a chance to heal, and also, believe it or not, to getting a bit of work done, but some unforgettable experiences have definitley been had (namely being snotted over by baby elephants in their search for food), and I'm sure time will edit out the small niggles from my memory and turn it into an adventure fit for Indianna Ford.

I am currently sitting in an Internet cafe in a small town called Negombo. It is on the west coast very close to the airport which we will depart for in the early hours of the morning. Heather has gone into town leaving me to write. She has taken the guide book with her and therefore I will be having wild stabs at the spellings of place names and perfectly normal, easy-to-spell words also. I'm sure you have gathered from my previous interweb bloggings that I don't plan things out before writing, this is entirely intentional and leads to enthralling articles of wit, humour and loathing for you, the reader. Here is another:

Elephants, that's right, and that was when we were staying in Kandy wasn't it? Yes, ok so after that I think we headed to a place called Sigiria which is further north and forms part of The Cultural Triangle, which seems to amusingly consist of far more than three places. Now, when we were staying at Adam's Peak we had a bit of difficulty booking a place to stay in Sigiria and I finally succumbed to letting one of the staff there book me into his friend's hotel. I had a quick look at their website and the photos of the place looked nice so I went ahead. Later on we got a phone call from the owner of this hotel who told us he was in Kandy on business and could give us a "free" lift with him to the hotel. Being this far into a Sri Lankan holiday we considered ourself now wise to this word "free" and realised that the two and a half hour journey would no-doubt be riddled with stops at museums and temples with small donations being lost into pockets along the way. We decided it was worth it for the air-conditioned car. We were picked up from outside our Kandy guest house at half eight and drove off. After turning down a couple of offers of stopping to look at temples we passed a Hindu temple that was, granted, very impressive looking, and we hopped out to have a look. We went inside and were told to leave almost immediately, I'm pretty sure it was my fault. We hopped back into the car and drove off. An hour in, Sampath (the name of the hotel owner) pulled in off the country road into a landscaped tree-filled garden with some buildings at the back of it. He exclaimed that he was here to get some tea at this renowned herbal medicine garden and that we could get out and have a look if we wanted, but of course we didn't have to if we didn't want to. We chose not to and remained in the car, wise to his plot.  About two minutes passed and two men came out under the premise of getting a bottle of water from the car for Sampath. The usual "where are you from?" and facts about his many friends in Nottingham swam into the car and then it came; the full blown sales pitch about herbal medicine and how we would undoubtedly die a horrible death if we did not get out of the car and have a look around his garden. Heather feigned car sickness and I got out and walked with a man around the garden as he showed me various plants and herbs. Some of it was actually quite interesting and I got to see what a cocaine plant looked like and how pineapples grow. Then I was lead into the shop where a more intrusive guy, a "doctor", talked me through all the medicines; from some gunk that could cure baldness to a small red bottle which guaranteed you and your partner's simultaneous orgasm during intercourse. Tempted by the small red bottle I bought a concoction of massage oil to avoid being thrown to the Tamils and left, after giving the man who showed me around the garden a tip, which I of course had the option of not giving.

A smug Sampath got back in the car, a nice commission surely on his mind, and we were off again. We pulled into the hotel an hour or so later and were shown our room. The room was nice and was part of an attractive building of four big bedrooms. As far as I could tell the hotel consited of two four-bedroom buildings and a restaurant building. Chatting to Sampath later I discovered he had grand plans for twelve more rooms and swimming pool. Sampath was the second former tour-guide that we have met who has saved up and built a hotel. Two tours should have done it.

That afternoon we were off to visit Sigiria (Heather edit: Sigiriya) Rock, a massive rock surrounded by ancient gardens, painted with ancient frescoes and topped with an ancient pleasure palace. Heather told me the story which involved two brothers, one of whom was very angry when the other was given the throne. He vented his anger by walling up his father and leaving him to die and forcing his brother into exile, then built an impenetrable fortress on top of a big rock. When his brother gathered an army and attacked he decided he would come down from his inpeneterable fortress with his army and fight them on a flat plane. He was clever one. The elephant he rode upon bolted and he ran away in shame and got a job in Tescos.

Sampath gave us a lift to the start of Sigiria Rock's gardens and gave us the choice of whether or not we wanted a guide. We really didn't and managed to shake a stubborn one from us eventually. Heather bought tickets which covered most attractions within the Cultural Triangle and weren't cheap, so we felt justified in not putting anything in any of the donation boxes seeing how we had probably just paid for a couple more hotels.

The Rock, I feel, was the most impressive man-made structure I have seen on this trip. I am referring to the stairs up it and the fortress on top, not the rock itself. I am always fascinated by the "nutter" urges humans have when they see a big mountain or a massive rock and think "I'm going to build something on that, it is big and high and must be somehow connected to God". We were forewarned that there had been some hornet attacks on tourists a couple of weeks prior, fatal I think, and so we were a little apprehensive about straying from main track. No hornets came our way though. Up a steep metal spiral staircase put in by the British were the remnants of paintings of topless woman. (Heather edit: the famous "Sigiriya damsels", which provide fodder for 99.6% of Sri Lankan souvenirs.) Very well-endowed topless women who would no doubt lead to much disappointment for teenage boys when they first managed to remove a girl's top.

Further up from the paintings were the remains of a giant lion which originally had a stone staircase leading through its mouth to the the top of the rock. The angry brother suffered from vertigo and had walls put in around the stairs when they were originally carved into the rock. Now, however, there were just flimsy metal railings. We climbed up and explored the top, which along with spectacular vistas consisted of many swimming pools (Heather edit: swimming pools?!) and ruined buildings.

That evening we did our usual trick of having dinner in a really fancy hotel and went to bed. The next cultural excursion was to a place called Polamanoora. (Heather edit: Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka's second great capital, which was at its peak around the 11th Century AD. ) Here were the remnants of many a temple. We were to hire bikes to cycle around, but first hopped on to a bus for a one-and-a-half hour journey there. We hired bikes from a small guest house. The bikes had seen better days. Mine was a couple of sizes to small and had over 60 gears; 59 of them did nothing and 1 stopped the bike from functioning. We cycled off along the main road for about 300m and hung a right into the park type place where all the ruins were. The roads in Sri Lanka are manic, to drive here you must master the art of beeping the horn as much as you can and overtaking anything regardless of what is coming the other way. If you spy danger you beep some more. We showed our tickets and cycled comically in. The paths were all sandy and uneven and the sun was beating down. The ruins were impressive, and to think that some were almost 1000 years old was thought-provoking. Giant decayed statues and vast ruined temples, all of which you took your shoes off at before you entered. This was fine except the stone of some of the floors was so hot I'm sure you could have fried a poppadom on them. Heather had grasped the concept of forward motion better than me and was airily cycling between the ruins. I was drenched and throwing jealous looks at people in air-conditioned taxis. Eventually the cycling in the heat up and down hills got the better of us and we had had our fill of ruins for the day. We returned our bikes, grabbed some lunch and got back on a bus.

Our bedroom smelt a bit musty, the bathroom was one of those wet-rooms, but the floor did not slope quite correctly so the water just gathered and stagnated in pools on the floor. There was also a pungent aroma of filth in the air, this emanated from the remains of that massage oil I bought which was one of the foulest substances I have smelt. I don't know why I feel the need to tell you this stuff. The next day we were off to a town called Dambulla. Dambulla was only a short tuk-tuk ride away and is home to some cave temples. Luckily a guy accosted us for tickets early (the cave temples were not included on our all-inclusive ticket) and we bought a couple before heading up the many steps to our destination. An important person in Sri Lankan history (Heather edit: King Valagamba) once hid out in these caves when he was overthrown, and then when he regained power he made the caves into temples by having them painted ornately inside.

The low hung ceilings of the varying sized caves covered many statues of Buddha - we'd been told that if a big Buddha is lying on his side and one of his feet is flush with the other foot then he is resting; if one of his feet is slightly below the other foot then he is dead. 

This Buddha is a dead Buddha, his feet tell me so.

We came back down from the caves and started back down the stairs, where we came across a French couple who hadn't been lucky enough to find the hidden ticket booth and faced having to climb all the way back down to get some tickets. We gave them ours in true Sri Lankan style.

That afternoon we did nothing, I read my book and whittled a small wooden elephant that I had bought in its rough form way back in Merissa. (Heather edit: Marissa.) Heather did some knitting and also read. Heather knitting has caused much fascination to Sri Lankans, especially to an army woman at one of the road side check-points.

This one is not my elephant, this is a photo from Heather's previous blog, when we went to that woodworking place. I deem it a more interesting photograph than ones of hills and things.

Off to our penultimate destination, Anahradapura. (Heather edit: close! Anuradapura.) We decided to take the bus again, and asked a tuk-tuk driver to take us to the bus station. He took us to an ordinary bus stop, which was highly annoying as it meant we would not get a seat. Heather joined a child on a fold down seat in the aisle and I sat on top of a pile of bags. As people filtered off along the journey we eventually got seats. An hour and half later we arrived in town and grabbed a tuk-tuk to our hotel. After a brief problem with the hotel not having our booking we were shown to a temporary room, and then to a more permanent room. This place was nice, we had a four poster bed each, carved out of a beautiful dark wood and even a separate room for our luggage. Heather had splashed out a bit for our last place of interest (not that Negombo isn't interesting, it does after all have an internet cafe). We chilled a bit after I performed my arriving-at-a-new place ritual of undressing down to my pants and turning the air-con up full blast. We went for a wander before tea amidst monkeys and dogs, around one of the big man-made lakes that the locals call tanks. Many people were bathing in the lakes and we felt a bit intrusive walking by. A Poya day, or moon day, had just passed, which is a day where people flock to a place of religious interest to celebrate something that Buddha did, I think this one was maybe the day he became enlightened. We were treated to the ever-familiar rice and curry in the evening and it was a very tasty version with some new exciting dishes.

I won't attempt to spell the name of the place we are staying in again but it was once home to an ancient city which now lies in ruin. (Heather edit: it was the first of Sri Lanka's ancient capitals, founded at some point between 10 and 5 BC.) We were to hire a couple more bikes and cycle around it. Learning from last time, we did it early in the morning to avoid the full heat of the sun, and the bikes we hired from our hotel were half decent; Heather's even had a basket. The hotel was slap bang in the middle of everything and we didn't have to cycle far before we came to the first point of interest. The roads were flatter here and the cycling pleasurable. The ruins of the city thousands of years old seemed in remarkable condition and the bathing pools looked as though they just needed a bit of clean before they could be used again. We walked through old monks' residences and around huge brick dagobas that would have originally been blazing white due to the plaster they would have been covered in. According to the guidebook one of the dagobas is the largest brick structure in the world and consists of enough bricks to build a three metre wall from London to Edinburgh. 

Ah ... I really am a twat.

We leisurely cycled back to the guest house and freshened up. We headed into town and got some lunch at a locally popular bakery come restaurant and treated ourselves to coconut cake and date cake for afters. We had a bit of a rest and then ate again back at the guest house. After photographing many monkeys we went to bed.

The trip from Anahrad..etc etc to Negombo was due to take four and half hours on the bus and would involve many changes. (Heather edit: one.) We thought, seeing how this was our last long journey, we would book a taxi for the trip. We bartered a price which I have no idea was fair or not and it picked us up at 8.30. This morning in fact. Nothing really of interest happened on the journey, it was a mix of rubbly rough road and decent coast road. We pulled into Negombo around lunch time and settled in, we will be awaking at 2am for airport fun.

Heather will be gallivanting off on yet another trip to Jordan in a few days with her Mum, and I will make sure that she keeps blogging about it, so please keep reading. I am a little travelled out and will be retiring back to Edinburgh and trying to make some money. I hope you have enjoyed reading our (I now realise) rather cynical blog postings about our Sri Lanka experiences and I hope also you will continue to read about any future selfless trips we plan.

Postcard worthy I feel, H took it on the drive back from Adam's Peak, thought it deserved a spot in the blog.

Ayubowan! (Are you impressed with my newly-expanded Sinhala vocabulary? I mean, "hello", that's advanced stuff. More on which later.) Sorry this installment's been so long coming; decent internet connections have been a bit thin on the ground recently.

Having picked our way along the South coast we next headed for the Hill Country, Sri Lanka's lush, craggy heartland, crisscrossed by perilously narrow mountain roads and dotted with tea plantations. Our first stop was Ella, reputedly Sri Lanka's most beautiful village, which is only about 70 km from Tissa (going by the highly scientific method of measuring the map with my fingers), but the journey took us four hours and three buses. On the final leg our bus ground to an abrupt halt amidst confused shouts and we were asked to go up and identify our luggage - with the end of the civil war still less than a year ago, tight security occasionally rears its head.

Looking back at some of my earlier posts, I don't seem to be very good at conveying how striking, awe-inspiring or otherwise impressive something is - I have a feeling I made the Great Barrier reef sound like a mildly diverting swimming spot, and Ayers Rock seem positively disappointing. Let me say upfront, then, that the Hill Country is beautiful: verdant, varied and dramatic. It's the kind of place where monkeys cross the road in front of you, and you turn a corner only to see the landscape tumbling into the haze below.

Mike communing with nature.

Ella comprises a single street lined with hones, shops and cafes, as well as a handful of guesthouses perched on the slopes above. We stayed at the Rawana Holiday Resort (a name which makes it sound like a faceless, sprawling complex, rather than a family-owned guesthouse with half a dozen rooms), which I chose solely on the reputation of its garlic curry. Ella's meant to be one of the best places in the island to try Sri Lankan home-cooking, and it didn't disappoint - we even got to watch the cook at Rawana prepare the evening meal while he talked us through the various dishes, and he promised to email us the recipes (if you eat round at ours in the next couple of months, prepare to have a plate of curried garlic cloves inflicted on you).

The next morning, in an uncustomary fit of virtue, we decided to climb Little Adam's Peak, a vantage point with great views of Ella Rock, which dominates the local landscape. The path meanders through tea plantations (fresh tea leaves, it transpires, neither look nor smell anything like tea), past a ramshackle tea pickers' village, and round a slightly foreboding-looking green gate, which sparked much bickering over whether the instruction "pass the green gate" meant to go through it or to walk on by it. On the way back down again we were lured into a pretty guesthouse-come-cafe by signs promising passion fruit juice and lemon cake. The owner, an incredibly friendly man, was amused by our stab at a few Sinhala words (unchecked hilarity is a fairly typical reaction), and gave us an impromptu language lesson, with the result that we can now say such useful tings as, "do you have change for 1000 rupees?" and, "no, I absolutely, definitely don't want whatever it is you're trying to sell me, please be so kind as to b*gger off" (that may not be the direct translation, but you get the general idea). We ended up going back to his for dinner, another delicious take on rice and curry which this time included pittu, a coarse, almost couscous-like substance made from grated coconut and rice flour.

Speaking of Sri Lankan specialities, I thought I'd show you a typical breakfast, this particular one also having been eaten in Ella:

From right to left the bowls hold egg curry (soft-boiled eggs crushed into a deliciously savoury curry sauce), coconut sambol and dahl, while on the plate you can see hoppers, string hoppers (the ones that look like discs of noodles) and roti - this roti was exceptionally good; I think it might have had coconut in it.

After a couple of days of happily gorging ourselves thus, we waved goodbye to Ella and set off for a tiny village called Dalhousie. The views from the train were stunning - or at least, they were if you failed to get a seat and spent the four hour trip sitting in the permanently open carriage door (slightly less dangerous than it sounds, as most of the time the train chugs along fairly sedately, regularly outstripped by passing butterflies [I think I've stolen that line from one of the Harry Potter books; oh, the shame]). The route included half a dozen tunnels, and every time we went through one the local children screamed and whooped as if they were on a rollercoaster. (Have I mentioned how endearing most Sr Lankan children are? The little ones shout an enthusiastic "hello!" when we pass them on the street, followed immediately by "bye bye!", while older children stare wide-eyed at us on buses, smiling shyly if we catch their eye.)

About halfway into the trip Mike got talking to a local journalist, and they spent the next couple of hours comparing notes on respective cultures, societies and spice tolerances. Bandara (that being his name) also introduced us to train sacks (Mike's particularly taken with the breads stuffed with spiced potato, which rejoice in the unhelpfully non-descriptive name of "buns") and let us know when our station came up, which was handy as there are no announcements, and Roman alphabet signs are few and far between. By the time we pulled into Hatton Mike had landed himself a commission to write a short article for the Daily News - not bad for someone who's only bought a newspaper once in his life. 

As luck had it, a bus bound for Dalhousie met the incoming train, and a scenic - if slightly nerve-wracking - 75 minutes later we arrived at our guesthouse. Dalhousie only really exists to provide a base for those climbing Sri Lanka's most famous mountain. Remember Little Adam's Peak? This is its big (BIG) brother, and although at about 7,500 feet it's actually only the country's fifth highest peak, its status as the home of Buddha's footprint ensures a steady stream of pilgrims during the dry season: this is Sri Laka's second most sacred Buddhist site. (Number one, in case you were wondering, is the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, which houses a relic claimed to be - logically enough - Buddha's tooth. Apparently tooth trumps footprint.) Incidentally, Muslim tradition holds that the footprint was in fact made by Adam - hence Adam's Peak - and the mountain is a holy place for them too, as indeed it is for Hindus and even Christians. Sri Lankans have got religious pluralism down to a fine art.

We'd heard plenty of horror stories about the Adam's Peak climb, not least from the guidebook itself, which paints it as a gruelling ordeal "which reduces even seasoned hillwalkers to quivering wrecks". Being about as far from a seasoned hillwalker as you can get without actually being bedridden, this did not fill me with enthusiasm. Nor did the book's orders that we rouse ourselves at 2am to get cracking. Even at this time in the morning there were already dozens of people making their way down - the pilgrims we passed were an eclectic mix of monks wearing hoodies over their saffron robes, families with small children, groups of teenage boys with beanies plled up high on their heads, making them look curiously like smurf hats (for someone who's only ever seen half an episode of the Smurfs I seem to reference it an awful lot), and people supporting the elderly or infirm - we even saw one (unaided) guy with what looked like a broken foot, which effectively quashed my right to complain. It wasn't actually that bad, though - not exactly a walk in the park (unless your local park features 5500+ increasingly steep, often crumbling steps), but it certainly never felt unachievable. It's undeniably atmospheric, too - the path is dimly lit and sprinkled with all-night stalls selling baffling useless tat (can you think of any circumstances in which you'd want to buy a luminous pink chihuahua toy before setting off up a mountain?), as well as plenty of tea shops - we stopped at one to refuel on rroti fresh from the griddle, and were plied with tooth-achingly sweet milky tea by the owners, who looked a bit taken aback to see us. Including stops, it took us just over two and a half hours to reach the summit (as opposed to the four stated in the guidebook - maybe it was written by the guy with the broken foot) , where dozens of people were already sitting huddled against walls, wrapped in towels, many of them asleep. As well as a small collection of buildings (one of which contains the distinctly anti-climatic footprint) the summit boasts two large bells, which visitors ring once for each successful ascent they've made. Having given our single rings (which sounded a bit feeble when a couple of people after us rang thirteen times apiece) we settled down to wait for sunrise. This, you see, is the reason most of the non-religious tourists make the climb: once the sun has risen, a mysterious shadow of Adam's Peak is visible for twenty minutes or so, seemingly floating in the air. I say "mysterious" because the shadow does't actually correspond to the shape of the mountain, a discrepancy I have yet to see a convincing explanation for.

The descent was easier-going, though not much quicker, and once back we spent the rest of the day just relaxing. The following morning it was straight off to Kandy, the country's second largest city. Unlike the rest of Stri Lanka, the kingdom of Kandy fell neither to the Portuguese nor the Dutch, and it wasn't until 1815 that the British finally got their hands on it (not through any particular merit of their own - Kandyans were apparently so dissillusioned with their brutish king that they stood aside to let the invaders past). The city's chief sight is the aforementioned Temple of the Tooth complex, but as visitors aren't actually permitted a glipse of the fabled tooth (which, rumour has it, looks suspiciously animal-like) we didn't feel compelled to go in. Instead we spent the afternoon checking out a few handicrafts shops, the highlight of which (as testified to by the fact that Mike didn't object to being in the shop for longer than tirty seconds) was a place called Rajanima Crafts, where you can see master woodcarvers working on the gorgeous custom furniture they sell (including, to the obvious amusement of the staff, a throne comissioned by a Dutch moneylender, who's even created a crest for himself to have carved all over it. Classy). Some pieces are painted using hues created from an extraordinary substance called rainbow wood: the sawdust is placed in water to which various natural materials (such as iron, lime juice or chalk) can be added to produce a startling array of vivid colours.

That evening we'd arranged - with a certain amount of trepadition - to go along to a so-called "cultural show". These are staged by a few venues in town and are basically a showcase for traditional Kandyan dancing and drumming, witha couple of low country dances and a bit of firealking thrown in for good measure. Approximately one hundred and ninety three people attempted to sell us tickets in the street: clearly the thought of a tourist slipping through the net and not going along is unthinkable. Overall, though, we were a bit underwhelmed by the performance - most of the dancers didn't seem particularly professional, and the promised spectacular acrobatics never really materialised. The Mask Dance was probably the highlight - originally an exorcism dance, the performers wear huge demonic-looking painted wooden masks, smaller versions of which have become a quintissestial Sri Lankan souvenir.

The next day - yesterday, in fact (yes, oh patient ones, the end is in sight!) we hired a driver (I feel very swish typing that) and drove about forty kilometres west of Kandy to - drumroll please! - Pinnewala Elephant Orphanage. This, those of you who know me well will not be remotely surprised to hear, was one of the main reasons for coming to Sri Lanka in the first place. I'd originally been planning on working as a volunteer at the orphanage for a couple of weeks, but eventually decided against it because a) I worried I wouldn't get to see much else of the island, b) they stopped offering accommodation, and c) they placed rather too much emphasis on dung-shovelling duties for my liking. Still, here we were as visitors, having carefully timed our trip to tie in with the morning feeding session, which we thought would be the least busy of the three - maybe it is, but it was still packed. Our guidebook had promised that for a small extra payment you could bottle-feed a baby elephant yourself, and signs up at the ticket desk confimed this - I'd been looking forward to it for weeks. When we tried to buy feeding tickets, though, we were baldly told that we couldn't, with no further explanation. This wasn't going according to plan. The feeding session wasn't what we'd expected either - rather than alll of the orphanage's 70-odd elephants, only two calves were present, chained inside a pen (apparently even the elephants in the national zoo here are chained), and, gallingly, we had to just look on as people who had mysteriously managed to procure tickets took turns feeding them - our driver later told us that tour guides buy up all the feeding tickets for their groups before anyone else can get a look in. Hmmph! Luckily, though, he managed to bribe one of the supervisors into letting us groupless scum take a turn (finally, the system works in our favour!) - mission accomplished! And I've never seen anyone so excited to get an extra serving of milk.

After the feeding we got to see the rest of the residents roaming around, a couple of pachyderm celebrities among them: Raja, an enormous blind tusker, and Sama, who lost a foot when she stepped on a landmine and has been making her way around on three legs ever since. Here only the working elephants (many of them help out around the orphanage) or the particularly mischievous ones were wearing chains, and you could get extremely close to many of them (staff would head you of if it looked like you were actually going to touch an elephant, which I originally assumed was for safety reasons, but it turned out it was so they could charge tips from anyone wanting contact. Business as usual). We then headed across the road to to banks of the Ma Oya river, where the elephants take their thrice daily baths. Watching them being driven, three or four abreast, along the road to the river is quite a sight - more than once we only got out of the way just in time, as a huge elephant lumbered onto the spot of the pavement where we'd been standing seconds before. Many of them pressed right up to us, their trunks searching the crowd hopefully for food.

Having watched the elephants in the water for half an hour or so I reluctantly said goodbye, and we drove a few kilometres back towards kandy to the Millennium Elephant Foundation, which is home to a handful of retired working elephants, as well as a couple of young 'uns. (By which I mean teens and twenty-somethings rather than calves.) There's a small but absorbing museum stuffed with facts about elephants, including a chart showing the 90 or so pressure points an elephant will respond to and the twenty words which working elephants are taught. (Erm taught to understand, that is, not to speak. Obviously.) The guidebook had told us, somewhat vaguely, that we'd be able to "interact" with elephants here - it turned out that this means being taken for a quick (and decidedly uncomfortable) elephant ride, and then helping to give our steed (can an elephant be a steed?) a bath, scrubbing his skin with coconut husks. His contribution to the proceedings was to spray us liberally withwater every now and then.

Phew! It took me well over an hour to type all that; does that automatically disqualify me from 95% of temp jobs?