Sri Lanka started, as these things often do, with a plan that immediately fell apart. We landed at Colombo in the late morning of July 25th, walked out into a wall of wet heat, and were met with garlands and a warm welcome — and then the news that the car had broken down. What we'd booked as one driver-guide turned into a separate chauffeur plus a guide riding along, which is how we ended up with two men in the front and the four of us in the back for the long drive up to the Cultural Triangle.
That drive taught us two things fast. First, Noah gets carsick in the back seat if he looks at his phone — something about the winding roads. 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 real stop was the Dambulla Cave Temple, a set of five halls hacked straight into the cliff, filled with something like 150 Buddha statues and covered, floor to curved ceiling, in old murals. It's a striking introduction to a different culture and religion, and a cool, dim contrast to the heat outside. Jesper had to borrow a sarong to cover his legs at the entrance — temple dress code — and we all went barefoot up the last steps.
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.
An afternoon safari in Kaudulla
The next 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.
But once we finally rolled into the park it delivered. Almost straight away a huge lone bull was standing right by the gravel track, and soon after we came on big family herds — adults and calves grazing, and some out bathing at the water's edge with the drowned trees of the reservoir behind them. We also got lucky with a little pack of jackals trotting across the grass, masses of birds, peacocks strutting about, and a crocodile hauled out on a rock. As Noah summed it up: a huge number of tourist jeeps, but thankfully also a huge number of elephants.
The elephants were the headline act, but Kaudulla kept handing us supporting cast: a jackal here, a peacock there, and a crocodile doing its best impression of a log.
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. And the reward at the top is one of the great views in Sri Lanka — the whole plain spread out, with the Lion Rock standing alone above the jungle. Noah even filmed a few disc-golf "shadow throws" up there for his disc-golf Instagram. Vitus, still under the weather, sadly sat this one out.
A cooking class with Ishi
Back down, we had a cooking class booked on the very lane where we were staying, with a lovely man called Ishi who runs his own little local restaurant and teaches from it. Together we cooked six or seven different curries served with rice, and learned a huge amount about the spices Sri Lankans use.
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. We ate an embarrassing amount of the results.
Everyone had a job — grinding, grating, chopping — and clay pot by clay pot the meal came together.
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, built in the 5th century by King Kashyapa, who put his palace up where nobody could easily reach him.
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 started up. 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 — and the polished Mirror Wall.
The climb also comes with a genuinely great sign. 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 to “BE SILENT — WASPS,” and our favourite, the slightly-lost-in-translation “Please be quiet, wasps may be attacked.” Noise-making children, take note.
Then come the metal staircases, zigzagging up the bare rock past the caged catwalk, 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.
And then you're on top, and it's just fantastic — the ruined palace foundations laid out across the summit, and the whole of the surrounding 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 view, and started down before the light 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.
For someone who doesn't love heights, getting up here at all was a genuine triumph — and then, of course, there was the small matter of getting back down those staircases.
We ended the day back at Ishi'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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