We landed at Colombo late in the morning of July 25th to a wave of humid heat, and were met with garlands and a warm welcome. Then we heard the car had "broken down." What we'd booked as one driver-guide turned into a separate chauffeur plus a guide riding along, so we drove the roughly 4 hours up to the Cultural Triangle with two men in the front and the four of us in the back. (We had our doubts about the broken-down car — more on the whole driver arrangement in this separate post.)
That drive taught us two things fast. First, one of Noah's quirks: on the winding roads he's fine in the back seat as long as he's looking down at his phone — it's when he stops staring at the screen that the carsickness kicks in. His brain seems to work backwards from everyone else's. Second, our guide did not yet know us at all. When it was time for lunch he pulled straight into a classic tourist trap: buffet, tourist prices, the works. We politely asked to go somewhere else, and that turned into a gentle running negotiation for the first four or five days until he finally worked out what kind of travellers we are. (Portions in Sri Lanka, by the way, are enormous. Noah had a dodgy stomach and barely ate; the rest of us struggled to finish half.)
Dambulla — temples cut into the rock
Our first stop was the Dambulla Cave Temple: five halls cut into the cliff, with around 150 Buddha statues and murals covering the walls and curved ceilings. Worth seeing. One thing we didn't expect — the caves were not the cool escape from the heat we'd assumed. Inside was hot and humid, if anything worse than outside. Jesper had to borrow a sarong to cover his legs at the entrance (temple dress code), and you go barefoot up the last steps.
Some of the halls are dominated by a single vast statue — a gilded reclining Buddha many metres long, laid out beneath a ceiling painted in endless repeating patterns.
From there it was on to our little guesthouse, tucked away in a tiny village near Sigiriya — just a couple of rooms side by side, the boys and Jesper in one, but genuinely lovely: good beds, hot water, and everything simply working, which after a travel day is worth a lot. We collapsed into bed, and the next morning ate a leisurely guesthouse breakfast of fruit, tea and roti before the day got going.
An afternoon safari in Kaudulla
That day we deliberately did nothing all morning — slept in, took it slow after the journey — and saved our energy for an afternoon elephant safari. On advice we chose Kaudulla National Park rather than nearby Minneriya: drought had thinned the herds at Minneriya, while Kaudulla had somewhere around 130 elephants at the time.
Getting in, though, was an ordeal. When we arrived, a whole fleet of safari jeeps was just sitting in the shade of the trees and in the car park, nothing happening. The reason: our guide had to queue to buy the physical park tickets, and there were exactly two people behind the counter. We waited about an hour and a half in the heat, and — not having expected any of this — had brought a grand total of half a litre of water between the four of us. Not ideal.
Once we got in, it was worth it. Almost straight away a big lone bull was standing right by the gravel track, and soon after we came on large family herds — adults and calves grazing across the plain, with the reservoir behind.
Some of the herd was out at the water — a whole group wading and drinking in the tank with egrets picking along the shore, and others crossing the open grass in a long line.
We also saw a pack of golden jackals trotting across the grass, plenty of birds, peacocks, and a crocodile on a rock. As Noah put it: a huge number of tourist jeeps, but thankfully also a huge number of elephants.
Vitus got a bit ill in the last part of the drive and wasn't much good for the rest of the day. We had dinner at a tiny local place — essentially someone's house with a little restaurant built onto the front — and ate rice and curry, which is delicious. One thing we learned quickly here: eating out takes time. Reckon on at least an hour before the food arrives, and often more, so we got through an enormous number of card games while we waited.
Pidurangala — the rock across from the rock
The following morning was meant to be our big active day. There are two famous rocks here: the celebrated Sigiriya Lion Rock, which you climb on fairly demanding staircases bolted into the cliff face — not an obvious win for someone with a fear of heights like Line — and its neighbour, Pidurangala Rock, which gives you the best possible view of Lion Rock. We started with Pidurangala.
Amusingly, our guide had warned Line the Pidurangala scramble might be too much for her given her fear of heights — which mostly just made her determined to prove him wrong. It turned out to be nothing at all: an easy fifteen-minute walk with a short boulder scramble near the top, not remotely in the league of, say, the Rinjani trek. Vitus, still under the weather, sadly sat this one out.
The view from the top is superb — the whole plain, with the Lion Rock standing alone above the jungle. We sat up there a while, and Noah filmed a few disc-golf "shadow throws" for his disc-golf Instagram.
A cooking class with Ishy
Back down, we had a cooking class booked on the very lane where we were staying, with a lovely man called Ishy who runs his own little local restaurant, Kaluwara Restaurant — "Let's Cook with Ishy" on Old Airport Road, and teaches from it under a hand-painted sign that reads "Anyone can cook." Together we cooked six or seven different curries served with rice, and learned a huge amount about the spices Sri Lankans use. It's a 2.5-hour class and the prices are very fair — children go free, so the four of us paid 9,000 LKR (what would otherwise have been the price for two). If you're anywhere near Sigiriya we'd genuinely recommend him: the reviews are full of the same warmth we felt. You can reach him on WhatsApp at +94 74 174 3420, or find his place on Google Maps here.
It reset our whole idea of "curry." We'd assumed a curry meant a single thick sauce with something in it, like an Indian curry. Here, though, everything is curry: you get rice, and then all sorts of different accompaniments alongside it, and collectively those are the curries.
Everyone had a job — grinding, grating, chopping — and clay pot by clay pot the meal came together. We ate an embarrassing amount of the results.
Climbing the Lion Rock
After a few hours' rest we checked, again, whether Vitus was up for the Lion Rock. He wasn't — so it was Jesper, Noah and Line who went alone. Sigiriya is an enormous old ruined complex, both at the base and right up on the flat top of the rock. A museum panel on site tells the story: in the 5th century, Prince Kasyapa seized the throne from his father, King Dhatusena, built a new capital here on the rock, and gave it the name Sinha-giri — "Lion Mountain." He reigned for around eighteen years before his exiled half-brother returned, and Kasyapa met his end on the battlefield below.
We stopped first at the excellent little Sigiriya Museum — better than you'd expect — which lays out the whole site with a big scale model, and then walked in toward the rock through the ancient water gardens, the monolith rising ahead of us.
The lower gardens are guarded by grey langur monkeys lounging on the railings, and partway up you reach the famous frescoes — the "Sigiriya Maidens," painted onto the sheer rock face.
The climb also comes with our favourite signs of the trip. Sigiriya has resident hornets, and if you make too much noise near their nests they will come for you — so the stairs are dotted with yellow warnings. The joke is that every one of them reads as though it were written to the wasps, not to us: “Please be quiet, wasps may be attacked” — a polite request to the hornets to keep it down, or a warning that they might be the ones under attack. Nobody, apparently, is telling the humans anything. Noise-making children, take note.
Then come the metal staircases, zigzagging up the bare rock past the caged catwalk and the polished Mirror Wall, and finally the Lion's Paw — the giant carved stone paws at the foot of the last stairway that once formed a lion's-mouth gateway, and gave the rock its name. There were monkeys waiting on the railings here too, ready to spring on anyone with sweets in their pockets. Noah got jumped by a pair of them: one came at him from the front while the other went for his bag and made off with a Snickers wrapper. It's a genuinely unsettling place to be ambushed — you're on an iron staircase with a long drop to one side — but no harm done.
The top is worth the climb: the ruined palace foundations laid out across the flat summit, and the country visible in every direction — jungle, reservoirs, distant mountains.
It was blowing hard and getting close to sunset; the rock closes at 6pm, so we wandered the ruins, drank in the golden light, and started down before it went and everyone else did too. Line, to her great credit, managed the whole thing despite the heights — pausing only to give Jesper, Noah and the world in general a good telling-off two or three times on the way down.
The way down is the same steep staircases in reverse, hugging the rock high above the canopy — which is exactly where Line's running commentary came into its own.
We ended the day back at Ishy's for dinner — which, in hindsight, we probably shouldn't have. He'd been running cooking classes all day and was exhausted, so the food came out very late; it tasted fine, but nothing like as good as what we'd made with him that morning. A small lesson in leaving people be.
We'd booked four nights in Sigiriya and, honestly, it was one too many — there isn't quite enough here to fill four full days. So we cut it short by a day and gave the extra day to Kandy instead, which is where we headed next.
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