Sigiriya and Ancient Things

So this is Day 3.

In the morning, my guide Aruna and I headed to the Lion Rock. A fascinating natural wonder in itself, sometime around 500 CE, an ancient king built a palace up on top of the rock. After some time, it turned into a Buddhist monastery. Since then, the palace is obviously gone, but you can see the remains and some of the gardens that were built.

It starts out with the moat, which allegedly contains crocodiles...


After that, there are several gardens that you traverse through before reaching the rock itself.







Now we begin the ascent up the rock. The Mirror Wall features prominently on the rock, and was constructed so that it reflects the sun and moonlight. There are also some ancient frescos painted along the interior along the side of the rock.






Here we're actually getting close to the top. This is the Lion's Gate. You can see that the lion's paws are still there, but the head is long gone...



Here's the top! You can see pretty far.











The Habarana Village tour was next. To be honest, I was a little skeptical at first, it was actually pretty good. I was somewhat skeptical that the farm would be a real farm, and thought it might just be some huts thrown together only for tourists, but it seems like they have a good mix of actual farm (why bother to rotate crops if it's a fake farm? or protect against elephant raids to eat all the rice?) and being welcoming / accommodating to tourists. I got some very fresh bananas, coconut flatbread, and tea. Yum. Didn't see any crocodiles, though.
I have to upload these pictures later because iPhoto is, as usual, being horrible and failing to integrate with Flickr, which you'd think would be a key feature that they'd want to work well.



Afterwards, we went to the nearby Habarana Inn for some relatively authentic Sri Lankan food, according to Aruna. Note that the "Sri Lankan" way to eat is just with your fingers, no utensils. I'm not quite that assimilated into the culture yet.





Next was Polonnaruwa, which is basically a bunch of ruins from around 1200 CE. There were some Buddhist temples and palaces, where destroyed and plundered by raiding Indians, and then also some Hindu temples that were built in their place.





Eventually we made it to the hotel. Again, a somewhat secluded location, though a little bit less so than yesterday. I took a walk through the "town", though admittedly only the outskirts. I didn't want to be even more conspicuous by taking pictures of people everywhere, but I did get a few of the area.