Polonnaruwa and Ritigala

Monday 2nd June 2003. Nuwarawewa Hotel, Anuradhapura
We were woken at 6.15am this morning by three grinning young men banging on the door to serve us tea in bed, as all English people like! Funny the customs that are left over from colonial times. The tea turned out to be a strange, sweet mixture of tea, cocoa, palm sugar and spices. It’s known as “bed tea”. Just about the last thing we wanted in the suffocating heat! Once the happy team of tea boys had left we poured it down the sink. A nice thought though.

After breakfast we walked from our hotel to the nearby twelfth century Potgul vihara or library monastery, part of the ancient city of Polonnaruwa, where the monks would take palm leaf books from the library shelves and transcribe them. It looked to have been a huge complex but is now no more than ruins.

The sanctuary where books were stored

The monks’ reading rooms or Potgul vihara

The site of Polonnaruwa is huge and we used the coach to travel to the different parts. The heat was unrelenting and our feet were burnt from leaving our shoes outside as we walked around on the hot stones of the ruined temples.

Our first stop was at the royal palace of King Parakramabahu. Constructed in the twelfth century it was originally seven stories high with very thick walls. All the monasteries we have visited are constructed in brick and then plastered. There is a round relic house with four statues of the Buddha, each with its moonstone. Sunil, who is a devout Buddhist, claims that the statue at the top of the steps spoke to him.

Royal palace of King Parakrama Bahu

Audience hall of Parakrama Bahu

We saw the "stonebook”, a twenty-five ton slab representing a palm leaf book with texts about the achievements of King Nissanka Malla who was very attached to the caste system and stated that nobody from a low caste could ever attain high office.

King Pakramabahu 1153- 86

Gal Pota – the Stonebook

Vatadage - Round Relic House. 12th century

Sunil's Buddha and temple steps with moonstone

Stele of Nissanka Malla 1187-96

Pakramabahu Lankatilaka temple

We were perpetually pestered by very intrusive souvenir sellers offering products ranging from rain sticks to masks, wooden boxes and carved elephants. It’s not at all nice and will do much to harm the tourist trade. It's horrible that we are thought of only in terms of what profit can be made from us and we’d be far more likely to buy if we’d been free to look without being hassled.

At the end of the morning we drove to the bank where it took best part of an hour to change travellers cheques for six of us. The paperwork beggars belief!

We then visited a wood carving enterprise where the different woods, ranging from balsa through rosewood, tamarind, mahogany and ebony, were shown and explained to us. We watched Buddhas and Asian Hindu gods being carved, sanded and polished. Next we looked around an incredibly overcrowded sale room filled with thousands upon thousands of carved artefacts, including masks and elephants. All were quite expensive and not in the least the kind of ornament we would ever want. The furniture however was wonderful. Delicate and light in appearance it generally consists of a carved wooden frame with woven bamboo inserts for the backs and seats of the chairs, settles and lovers' seats. I liked them enormously but they were incredibly expensive.

For lunch today we again ate a wide selection of curries with rice under an outside awning to ward off the heat. Fans turned ineffectually but the cold beer was fantastic. The temperature, even in the shade was 35 degrees! Why did we have to eat hot pumpkin soup followed by thirteen different curries?

Fortified by this we drove for two hours down badly metalled roads (curious they hadn’t melted) until we turned off down red, dusty dirt tracks for several kilometres into the jungle. It’s forbidden to leave the track unescorted or enter the forest where many herbal medicines can be found, including antidotes to snake bites.

The trees touched the coach on either side. There was nobody else around which was just as well as there was no possibility of passing places. We parked in a clearing and, accompanied by the staccato grating screech of hundreds of unseen cicadas, we followed Susantha along a rough path into the jungle in search of the ruins of Ritigala. In the trees high above our heads, monkeys swung, a giant three-foot long tree squirrel passed from branch to branch, a Sri Lankan hornbill – a kind of grey toucan, with a huge, hollow, yellow bill – perched and huge creepers, with tendrils like tree trunks, twisted over and around the high branches and back down to the ground again. Lizards, large and small, scuttled or lumbered amongst the rocks and a water snake twisted its way along a shallow mud channel.

The ancient ruined site of Ritigala was once a monastery for contemplation hidden deep within the jungle. It has recently been proposed as a World heritage site – of which seven already exist in Sri Lanka – and dates from the third century BC. We clambered up for some time before seeing our first ruins – ancient tanks constructed to conserve rain water as this is in the northern, dry zone of the country. There was a certain, peaceful, almost mystical charm about the entire site which is spread over two separate areas of jungle with a contemplation path linking the two. It would not have been difficult for a peaceful ancient Buddhist monk to find inner tranquillity here. There is one area that appears to have been a hospital and pharmacy, where drugs and medicines were produced from the jungle plants and sick people treated with herbal baths. We saw too, unusually, the remains of the monastic latrines. Sanitation seems to have been quite sophisticated with completely separate facilities for urine and faeces.

Ritigala hospital complex

Ruins of Ritigala in the jungle

Ancient latrine

We scrambled back to our coach and the dusty, bumpy ride along the dirt track back to the road. We had intended going on to Aukana to see the most beautiful, twelve foot high, Buddha in the country but realised that unless we gave it a miss we’d not reach our hotel until 9pm at the earliest. With baby Anya it would have been too much and anyway we were all exhausted and longing for swims and showers.

As it was it took one and a half hours of driving through fairly arid countryside interspersed with huge water tanks feeding rice plantations before we reached our hotel. We passed many poor quality rural homes, shabby and rundown, set back from the road within the forest, or shaded by palms and banana trees. Children played in red dusty earth. Women in saris pumped up water and carried it home in round clay pots balanced on their heads, straight backs and hands at their sides, exactly as illustrated in my school geography book nearly fifty years ago! Men swam in pools and tanks, washing their bodies and their clothes. Many of the homes seemed little more than shacks with mud walls and coconut leaves for the roof. Women sometimes sat on the step in the doorway, or men stood in small groups by the roadside talking together. Sometimes a child would wave as we drove past in our air-conditioned coach enroute for a shower, a comfortable bed and a meal cooked for us. Two worlds, side by side but destined never to meet. Were these people perhaps the very same who had tried so fruitlessly to sell us souvenirs? They must find us very strange.

We are now in Nuwarawewa just outside Anuradhapura. We have individual apartments set in attractive grounds with a pool. Around 8pm, long after dark which falls suddenly around 6.30pm, the temperature registered thirty two degrees.