Day 13 – Polonnaruwa

Last night we had dinner with two Danish ladies from Aarhus in the Amarantha restaurant. It has a small choice of mediocre food which is relatively expensive, but it is close!This morning our alarm went off at 6.15. Our noisy neighbours had gone, so we had got a good night sleep. Nihal picked us up at 7 to drive us to Polonnaruwa which was an hour and forty five minutes away. That’s a really long way in a tuk tuk. On the way he got pulled over by the police for overtaking on a double white line, he wasn’t happy.Polonnaruwa is a ruined city which was at its height in the twelfth century . It is a huge site that is too big to easily walk round, so tourists travel on bikes, buses or tuk tuks. There are remains of temples, a palace and library built mostly out of brick. Some of the other remains have been rebuilt, some remain ruinous. One temple had numbers painted on each stone, so it was completely re-erected And some of the stones clearly didn’t start off together.

When we emerged from one site to meet Nihal, he said that an elephant had tried to jump over a fence, and in doing so bashed it down and destroyed a table.

We spent about four hours looking around, there was lots to see. Some of the ruins are still sacred to Buddhists, so we had to take shoes and hats off to enter those. There were lots of monkeys around, sometimes it looked like a scene from The Jungle Book!

 On the way back the tuk tuk got a punctured rear wheel. Nihal got out his spare wheel and loosened the nuts. Then he asked a couple of blokes  walking down the road for help, and the pushed the vehicle over so he could take the punctured wheel off and put the spare on. The whole repair took five minutes.

Nihal dropped us off in Dambulla and we went to a local restaurant for curry and rice. It was very tasty, but very hot. I was almost a greasy puddle on the floor, but i amused the other diners. Two enormous meals and two mango juices cost 650 rupees, about £4. At our hotel a plate of seafood noodles costs 1000 rupees,  not such good value.

Back at the hotel we chilled by the pool and read books on the Kindle app on our phones.