We had a sleepy start to the day. This is a sleepy town and that is just fine with us. The owner of our hotel, Nimal, is a really great guy. We seem to have fallen into taking his advice and following his lead pretty easily. Beth checked in with a "are we ok with not really checking how much everything is?". It is in stark contrast to our first few days in Kandy. Here, he chooses our food, drives us places, arranges things and we are just going with it. What could go wrong?
The whole operation is pretty fun. The whole family is here - Nimal's kids are in and out, as are their younger cousins who are extremely cute and loving the girls. His wife does the cooking and laundry, and they have a tiny, twenty year old man (?) named Vipul who hustles around doing pretty much everything else - cleaning, serving at the little restaurant etc. We love family run businesses - we feel like we are helping people to a greater degree by staying there and we get much more local interaction at smaller places like this.
Nimal arranged some bicycles for us to tour around the Ancient City of Polonnurawa and he whisked us over to the heart of the huge enclosed area in his Tuk Tuk. When we got there, our four, well used bikes were waiting for us. Nimal gave us his recommended route and he was off.
It was bloody hot and though we were trying to stick to the shade, it was still oven-like. We filled the kids up on some lentil street food snacks, force fed everyone some water and we were off.
The whole area of the city feels like a tiny version of the Angkor architectural park. There are ruins, foundation walls and structures in varying degrees of decay over a huge area (though tiny compared to the breadth of Angkor).
There are many foundational remains of stupas - basically the round brick foundation of the bottom section of the stupa. Some of them are quite big and one of them had been restored with the top of the stupa and a stucco covering.
There was relatively little information on the structures that did remain (even on the inter-web :-)) so with less heat and perhaps without two kids, a guide may have been worth it. For us, being on the bikes was great. It was amazing how good it felt to be on a bike again - even if it was a single gear, rusted chain, extra small mountain bike - I was loving it. Being in motion helped us stay cooler, so that was good too. I miss my bike(s)!
There was a lotus flower shaped dry pool that was pretty impressive, given it was made one thousand years ago...
After an hour or so, we made our way to the big thing to see in Polonnurawa - the carved reclining and sitting Buddhas at the Gal Vihara temple. In the side of a curved rocky hill, the architects of the ancient city decided to create a massive masterpiece carving that is still in pristine condition, which probably indicates how tough it must have been to carve the extremely hard rock. The reclining Buddha Is massive - just over 46 feet long and beautifully depicting the last days of Buddha as he rests. The layers of stone running in the direction of the body of the statue really adds to the magnificence of the carving.
On the other end of the hill, there is a beautiful carving of a sitting Buddha with a cityscape in the background. This one is over 15 feet tall. Amazing. I couldn't help staring at the carvings for a while, wondering how long it would have taken to create these so long ago, and how they would have managed the artistic direction of the design of the images while obviously having to use so many people to get the work done. Incredible.
We hopped back on the bikes, deciding to take in the remaining structures down the main road by bike rather than getting off and melting. Eventually, we popped back on the main road to town, just a few hundred meters from the first set of buildings marking the beginning of the Main Street.
We stopped at the first place that looked like it had cold fruit drinks. Success! Delicious mango/pineapple drinks for Beth and I, mango for Rob and lime juice for Abby. A nice way to cool off.
We got back to the hotel in time for shower two of three for the day. The little kids glommed on to Robin and before she knew it she was teaching English and hanging out with them for the next hour or so. At one point she came into our room with two of the kids in tow and gave me a look which was half exasperated, half loving it that they were following her around like really young siblings would follow a teenager. I suggested if she wanted to "lose them" she would have to drop them off with her mother and tell them she was going to have a nap. That seemed to do the trick!
The kids had "short eats" as a snack to keep them going until dinner - delicious lentil treats and prata bread. We were going to go out for dinner, but by 6:00, seemingly on queue, a thunder and lightning storm came out of nowhere. We opted to stay for dinner and had a massive, delicious chicken Kottu dish. Wow, so good.
We ended the day with some well earned Netflix-streaming Walking Dead. I'm not sure which is more horrifying, the zombies or the prospect of fending off more "what's happening" questions from the kids... "Where's he going?", "is he going to die?". Then there's Beth, who has had to stifle her many predictions ("he's going to get shot!", "oh, they're going to hook up!") at the vociferous requests by the rest of the family. Ah, fun family time at the end of a hot, great day in Polonnurawa.
No comments:
Post a Comment