We had french toast with treacle for breakfast, a nice break from eggs and toast. Our B&B in Kandy varied the breakfast every day, which was also nice.
We had arranged for a driver to take us from Kandy to Habarana, stopping en route at Dambulla to see the rock caves.
The drive to Dambulla was straight, which was better for Heather's carsickness after the winding roads in Hill Country around Kandy. We stopped for some quick pics at a Hindu temple in Matale, just before Dambulla,which was on the road so we didn't have to make a detour to visit.
The parking lot at the cave temples was large, but not too many cars / buses yet, which boded well. Paid our $15 USD each, and climbed up 166m on a wide staircase where it was easy to pass the slower people.
Just before the cave entrance we removed our shoes (it's a religious site) and left them with the shoe check stand. (The shoe check is primarily for tourists - locals just leave their shoes on the pathside.)
There are five caves, all beside each other on a stretch of rock face. They were all very impressive, filled with large Buddhas over the centuries. Cave II was the largest and most spectacular. This is what I had pictured the caves in Pindaya (in Myanmar) to look like. The Dambulla caves were well worth the visit.
It was only a 30 minute drive from the caves to Habarana. It's not a very big town - more like a junction town that has sprawled out due to its central location to ruins and national parks / safaris.
We stayed at Mutu Village, which our driver had to stop for directions to find. It's down a small road in the forest (as are most places in Habarana). We switched to an upgraded room in the newer wing, which was on the upper floor with a big balcony. Monkeys and squirrels roamed about the trees and roof of the hotel. Mangoes and papaya were in season and were literally falling from the trees. Seriously, it was a concern not to have one fall on your head walking from our room to the dining area.
So as you can imagine it was a great place to relax for the remainder of the day. We only had two errands, quickly completed: go out for lunch, and buy beer. The hotel folks suggested we have the tuktuk driver stop for us to pick up water and beer, which we could store in our mini fridge, and have with dinner.
Dinner was small (the norm in Sri Lanka). The beers were excellent - the freshest we've had in Sri Lanka. Our tuktuk driver had insisted on stopping at different places to buy water and beer - it looks like he knows his stuff :)
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Breakfast at Mutu Village our first day was a local breakfast, but it did include hoppers (a rice flour and coconut milk crepe-like bread) and omelette, which we ate.
We left the hotel at 8:30am with our tuktuk driver to start our touristing of Pollanaruwa. It was about an hour by tuktuk to the ticket office. Our driver was great at explaining how to avoid the would-be guides and touts, and exactly where to go and what to see.
Tickets were $25 USD each, but well worth it as we found out.
The ruins are spread out over a few km, and follow an easy south-to-north path. The ruins start of in the south with relatively minor ruins, and get progressively more impressive as you head north. I had no idea, even with the research I had done booking the trip, that the ruins in Pollanaruwa were so great. They rank up there with the top ruin collections in the world, not in the top tier with Angkor Wat or Bagan, but definitely in the next tier, with say Jerash. They're really cool.
Anyways, five hours later I was duly impressed. We had lunch at a tourist place overlooking a rice field, and then back to the hotel, exhausted from the day of touring in the heat. Heather was so tired she managed to fall asleep in the back of the tuktuk.
Dinner was good, and we finished our beers and went to bed.
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