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Sigiriya
Saturday, July 5 2025
location: room 27, Fox Jaffna, Jaffna, Sri Lanka
The past couple mornings, we've been awaken in the early dawn by a persistent pecking outside our windows. The culprit was a golden-backed woodpecker, perhaps the same one we'd seen the other day on a palm near the uncomfortably warm pool. This morning I snuck out several times in an attempt to get a photograph of him, but he always flew off before I could do so. It was hard to see anything a woodpecker might peck on on the wall of our building, which was made of concrete. Gretchen had caught a glimpse of him pecking, and it was on a small black square that might've contained the remnants of some wooden scaffolding dating from when the building was constructed.
While I lay in wait in a failed effort to catch the woodpecker arriving at the the wall, I noted a street dog sleeping nearby behind a bush. Another came strolling up on the path and lay down near me. Both looked to be very pregnant.
During breakfast this morning, we were witness to a protracted photographic session involving what looked to be wealthy young Sri Lankans preparing for or otherwise involved in a wedding. I couldn't tell who was the groom and who was the bride, because numerous couples dressed in finery (much of it traditional) were being posed and photographed in front of various things, including the spray-painted palm fronds. Seeing all this photographic activity, I was sure a drone would make appearance, and sure enough one did.
Meanwhile, a tiny, friendly, and very pregnant black cat was demanding affection from whoever seemed likely to provide it. She probably would've also liked food, but her mistake was hanging out at a table full of vegans. (I know from experience that feral cats have no use for any of the food I eat.)
After breakfast, we all loaded into the bus and began a long road trip to our next destination, the city of Habarana towards the middle of Sri Lanka. I had trouble finding motivation to do much other than stare out of the window during the drive, though of course my mind was finding interesting patterns in what I was seeing. At some point we passed somewhere where the words "Allahu Akbar" had been written out in Roman characters, which is not something one normally sees. Immediately my brain recognized the similarity between "Allahu" and "Aloha," and of course it caused me to come up with an idea for the name of a business. It would maybe be a Lebanese restaurant in Honolulu and it would be called "Aloha Akbar." Sure, it was a dad joke, but Gretchen and the Australians from Cambodia agreed it was hilarious. And Gretchen's father seemed to think it could get me in trouble if told to the wrong people.
Our destination was The Other Corner, a retreat with individual bungalows in the jungle. Gretchen and I love those sort places, so we had hopes that our Sri Lankan expedition had finally turned a corner. The lunch was pretty good, at least by the standards of this trip, and served buffet-style, which meant we could better curate what we were putting into our bodies. And there was nary a banana leaf in sight!
Immediately after lunch, Gretchen and I went to the pool to see if it had any of the problems of previous pools. It was in the shade and refreshingly cool, which was pretty much all Gretchen cared about. And added bonus was that nobody seemed to be using it. Soon after we arrived, an almost apologetic staffer showed up and began removing fallen leaves from it while we played a half-assed pool-based version of Sri Lanka's national sport (volleyball) with a ball but no net.
On arrival at The Other Corner, we'd all mysteriously been given a leaf instead of the usual drink. This was a betel leaf, which, I learned over lunch, has narcotic properties. So the first thing I did after swimming was chew one up and swallow it. It had a slightly mouth-numbing quality with some unpleasant bitterness, but it's a small price to pay if it fucks you up.
And for a little while I felt like I might be getting a little fucked up. Oh no, I thought, what if I get really fucked up and need to throw up while on the bus to wherever we're going next? But at least some of that feeling was the placebo effect and ultimately the most I got from that betel leaf was a mild buzz.
Our afternoon outing was to one of the massive rocks we'd seen jutting up from the geneally rolling landscape of central Sri Lanka. The rock in this case was Sigiriya, the site of a castle-cum-sex-palace set up by the son of a king who had killed his father to sieze power back coincidentally around the time of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. It's a World Heritage Site, and, unlike most of what we'd seen of Sri Lanka, a real draw for tourists; the roadsides as we approached Sigiriya began to increasingly resemble Tulum, Mexico, and we occasionally saw white people, the best indication there is that a place (outside of Eastern Europe, I suppose) doesn't suck.
As we approached, the monolith of Sigiriya rose ever larger, revealing impressive sheer cliffs of various colors. Eventually we'd arrived at the parking area, and were assigned a local guide. Clearly Sigiriya is a major tourist attraction for Sri Lanka, as not only were there an impressive number of white people clustered into guide-led groups, but there were a fair number of east Asians as well. Interestingly, though, few of these white people were heard speaking English, and the few who spoke English were not Americans. By contrast, the amount of American English being heard spoken on the streets of say, Lisbon, makes an American feel right at home.
As we approached Sigiriya on foot, we were warned about the monkeys, which here were a pink-faced species of macaque. We were told not to give them eye contact and that they could tell who were tourists and who were locals and would be more likely to steal things from the former. And if they grabbed a phone or a camera, it might be impossible to get back (although perhaps the monkey thieves could be bribed with food, though the results might be as unpredictable as bribing Donald Trump). We saw a smattering of these monkeys along the way, as well as a kingfisher and a monitor lizard. As we drew close to Sigiriya, we passed some old ponds and gardens that had been unearthed.
By this point, our group had divided into two: the people such as me, Gretchen, and the Australians from Cambodia who were eager to climb Sigiriya and the mostly-older people who didn't have it to go up so many stairs. This latter group included both Gretchen's parents as well as Myra the Patchouli Lady (that surprised me) and an older Australian woman.
Somewhere on our from the bus to the base of the mountain, I pointed at the top of Sigiriya and asked Gretchen, "Are we there yet?" She thought that was funny.
When those of us who would be doing the climb arrived at the base of Sigiriya to our climb, we started on flights of stone steps that led past and around boulders. Eventually, though the path had to continue on sections of metal stairway installed in modern times, climbing past a section of stone that had once featured huge pornographic murals that were scraped away by the killjoy Buddhists monks who took over Sigiriya after its playboy king was inevitably vanquished.
Rising from a horizontal section of walkway was a modern spiral staircase taking visitors up to a small section of remaining mural that is now over 1500 years old. Most of the signs we'd seen had been in a Sri Lankan language, written in one of their curly letter systems, though accompanied by depictions of handcuffs, perhaps because they were warning people that doing certain things is a crime. In the small area where the remaining murals were we saw signs in English telling us not to take pictures. So I held my camera low near my belly and snapped pictures at random, hoping to get some good shots. But there was a staffer assigned to that area and he could see that I was taking pictures. He called me over and I was like "oh shit!" When he asked if I'd been taking pictures, I lied and said I hadn't been. But then he demanded that I show him the last photo in my camera. This would've been a great moment to have some feature on my Nikkon superzoom camera where I could hit a secret button and it would flip to a separate microSD card with pictures from back in the Catskills. But I had no such feature. So when I hit the button to show the guy my last picture, it was a poorly-framed photo of the murals we're not supposed to photograph. In heavily-accented English, the staffer told me that the fine was something like 45000 Sri Lankan rupees per photo. "Oh, I don't want that," I said without too much contrition. At that point he just waved me on, so I didn't end up spending the night in a Sri Lankan jail. That guy probably busts dozens of photographers every day, but tourism is too valuable to Sri Lanka to crack down on it.
Eventually the walkway led to a wide terrace on the north side of the mountain. Here, the official entrance to Sigiriya had been built. It was in the form of a stone lion lying on his belly. Back in heyday of Sigiriya, one entered through his head somehow (perhaps the lion had an open mouth). But that entrance collapsed and disappeared in ancient times and all that remains are the two outstretched front paws. So again we were climbing up a sheer face of stone on sections of steel stairway, some jutting out far from the rock face. At some point along the way, one of my flip flops (yes, unlike everyone else I could see going up and down Sigiriya except our guide, I was wearing flip flops) came off and I had to quickly grab it with my toes. Had it fallen through the staircase, I would've had to go a long ways down to retrieve it.
Finally we made it to the top, where a hundred or more tourists walked around, looking out at the stunning views of mostly jungle below. There were also a couple street dogs, who must've come up those same steps as we had, since there is no other way to the top. We the walls of old gardens and buildings and eventually got to the south end of Sigiriya. There we saw a number of macaques perched in various places on or near the vertical escarpment above a several-hundred-foot drop. (Presumably there are many ways for a monkey to get to the top of Sigiriya.)
After passing a respectable rectangular pond that contained water (we'd been noticing lots of shallow trenches carved into the stone no matter the slope to gather rainwater), we began our descent. At the wide terrace, our guide pointed to a huge rock that appeared to be sitting atop multiple sloped poles. He said that this rock had been positioned there by the ancient defenders of Sigiriya to be tumbled off a cliff onto an army of attackers. But, obviously, it was never used.
Further down, I happened to see a pied hornbill, which is a large bird with an additional "scope" mounted atop the bill. We all pursued him quietly in an effort to see him better, but I couldn't get a photo before he disappeared.
Then we came to a massive rock that had split and fallen over while Sigiriya was occupied (one could see a staircase carved into it that was no longer oriented in a useful way. Supposedly this was a place where the king Sigiriya would hold audiences with people who had come to see him.
A little down from that was a towering vertical rock that was sitting atop a cantilevered section of bedrock, and near its top was more rock cantilevered off that. It seemed impossible for it to remain that way, but it seems it had been this way for thousands of years. Even so, I was nervous as I hurried past it (which required some walking beneath it), fearing it could break loose at any moment.
After the path disgorged us into a tacky retail zone, we returned to the bus, where an anxious Zach was pleased to learn nothing bad had happened. This outing, our first one in nature on this particular expedition, was perhaps the first Gretchen and I had actually enjoyed.
Back at THe Other Corner, Gretchen and I got some use from the pool before dinner. We'd somehow missed the announcement, but there was a happy hour just before dinner, which meant there would be alcohol with dinner. I had most of a big Lion beer and then some Sri Lankan whiskey with my food, which was consistently a cut above the food we'd eaten in other places.
During dinner, Panchali, a woman who runs an advocacy group for elephants in Sri Lanka gave a PowerPoint presentation about elephants. She tried to keep it informative and upbeat, though tomorrow we'd be learning more about the many human-related challenges Sir Lankan elephants face.
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A coucal, a kind of cuckoo, which I found this morning. Click to enlarge.
One of the dogs who came to hang out nearby while I was stalking the woodpecker this morning. Click to enlarge.
A yellow-billed babbler this morning. Click to enlarge.
The friendly pregnant cat at breakfast this morning. Click to enlarge.
A street dog with (on the right) Danielle and John, the two nice Australians from Cambodia (on the left is one of the Americans in our group) on our big drive today. They gave the dog crackers, and the dog happily ate them. Click to enlarge.
Mountains during our big drive today. Click to enlarge.
More mountains during our big drive today. Click to enlarge.
A macaque on the grounds below Sigiriya. Click to enlarge.
A white-breasted kingfisher on the grounds below Sigiriya. Click to enlarge.
A monitor lizard on the grounds below Sigiriya. Click to enlarge.
A pond on the grounds below Sigiriya. Click to enlarge.
A mysterious sign about wasps just before the climb to Sigiriya. Click to enlarge.
Beginning our climb up Sigiriya. Click to enlarge.
A view of a walkway against the cliff face at Sigiriya. Click to enlarge.
One of several not-great illegal photos I took of ancient murals. Click to enlarge.
The view west from halfway up Sigiriya. Click to enlarge.
Here you can see the huge rock that was never pushed down upon invaders on the terrace on the north end half way up Sigiriya. Click to enlarge.
Flights of stairs going back and forth up Sigiriya. Click to enlarge.
Some kind of insect nest. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen reaches the top of Sigiriya. Click to enlarge.
A dog at the top of Sigiriya. Click to enlarge.
East Asians and white people tell you that Sigiriya is a genuine tourist destination. Click to enlarge.
A cliff monkey near the top of Sigiriya. Click to enlarge.
Monkeys near the top of Sigiriya. Click to enlarge.
A square pond in the grounds atop Sigiriya. Click to enlarge.
Looking down at the lion claws of the old entrance to Sigiriya on the terrace at the north end. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen in front of me as we descend the metal steps to the north terrace. Click to enlarge.
That scary double-cantilevered rock mentioned in the text. Click to enlarge.
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