Elephant Corridor Hotel Sigiriya

... mais il ne pleut pas, il fait meme un peu chaud. L'entree est a 25 dollars, ils se font pas chier quand meme, alors que pour les locaux ca doit etre 2 dollars...
Au debut du site, des deux cotes de l'entree, se trouvent 4 bassins royaux, destines aux 500 femmes du roi. Y vois des varans, un crocodile, un serpent. Ici il ya des cobras, pithons et viperes, les serpents les plus dangereux ici. Les bassins sont toujours en etat de marche, ainsi que les fontaines, et ...

... suggest that there was never any fortress or palace here, but rather a school of Buddhist monks, studying Buddhism. Either way, the gardens are quite spectacular in design and I don’t think I’ve seen any Buddhist locations with such amazing gardens!

King Kassapa needed somewhere new to live after overthrowing and killing his father, Dhatusena, and set about designing unique features of the place: water gardens, cave, boulder and terraced ...

... ruins. The entrance is guarded by a big rock that looks like a lion. There used to be 2 palaces: one on the top of the rock and one at the bottom and where the King of Sigirya lived depended on the season. The rock is a huge round orange coloured boulder with 1200 steps up to the top, plus 2 random steps to nowhere on the very top. The 2404 step round trip took us about an hour and a ...

... intricate wooden designs and beautiful colors. They are pretty huge, about 12 feet tall, and are all hand pulled during the festivities. A little extra money to the monk will get you into the closed "garage" and provide you with up close views of them (we had to pay extra money to some staff member or another a pretty much every single sight, argh!). Aluvihara- This was our first lying down Buddha in a cave so it's probably the most special for me. Greg ...

Sri Lanka has this area called the cultural triangle. Within this area there are 3 main sites that most people visit. The only problem is that these sites are not that interesting for the 55 U.S. dollars they charge! So instead of paying that outrageous price I decided to poll other tourist to see which was the best. The clear winner was Sigiriya. For some reason I thought there would be a town around Sigiriya (forgot to do ...

... the reign of King Kasyapa (477-495AD). It is one of the seven World Heritage Sites in Sri Lanka and is one of its most popular tourist destinations. Having climbed the rock, encounter the remains of the Palace and its environment and see the world famous frescoes - then continue to Polonnaruwa the second capital of Sri Lanka in the 11th and 12th centuries and visit the ruins of the Lankatilleka, Thuparama and Gal Vihare.

... indeed done us proud and the four of us tucked into another wonderful Sri Lankan meal - the highlight was the deep-fried flower petals. If you finished a bowl they'd refill it unless you said you were done. I said that everything was mild so they brought out some coconut sambol - coconut laced with chilli, lime and spice.....yum. Mix it in with a mild curry to heat things up. Had a couple of beers (3 Coins ok, Lion nicer, Irish dark nice - same price, double ...

... burnt badly! I couldn't buy any before leaving due to the carry on luggage restrictions and there was none in town. The next few days were not fun so if you can, take some with you before arriving to save the pain!! Once back in town we checked out and quickly moved next door to the Gajeba guesthouse. We had stopped there for a coke the day before and it seemed much nicer. It had a nice lazy restaurant area with some good gardens and more ...

EN: On our way to Sigiriya was a full day visiting some really interesting sites. Our first stop was at Matale to visit the Aluvihara Rock Temple. The temple is very nice and it is built over a huge rock and inside some caves. Here we saw some really cool centuries old paintings showing the Buddhist hell. Next we stopped at a spice garden, this was not so interesting and the guy showing us around was really boring. After that we made a quick stop at ...

Wednesday to Sunday!! Wednesday, Today was reading day for the after-schoolers. Ideally this is a time when all the books that the school has are left out for the children to read quietly together. In practice, this means that the children pick up a book, pretend to read but are really plotting some mischief to carry out later in. Then by 4.00 the place is in chaos! Still meant I had nothing to do for the afternoon, so I messed around with the ...