22nd September 1981
After a light breakfast in my room I felt well enough to visit
several temples and the ruined city of Polonnaruwa. The highlight of the morning
was definitely the reclining Buddha at Polonnaruwa, but we also visited a
ruined palace that once towered several stories high and all built from tiny
hand-made bricks. It was extremely hot and I tried to keep in the shade and not
walk far.
Razeen told us about the king who had built the things we
were to see and our very first stop was at a self-portrait the king
commissioned, cut out of a living rock. The figure was most impressive and
reached a height of about twelve feet, carved three dimensionally.
The palace was built in small dark red bricks and only two
stories are now standing. We discovered a family of month old puppies and their
mother living in a neat little nest among the walls, covered on three sides and
roofed with dried palm fronds by some kindly disposed person.
Our next stop was at a vast temple-palace complex where we
photographed iguanas and drank coke purchased from a wayside stall. None of us
will try the king coconut or arrack because of the germ risk! There were a few
beggars by the stall, including one old man in a wheelchair because he had deformed
legs.
Back at the Village Hotel at Habarana we ate a mediocre
lunch and then swam in and sat by the pool all afternoon.
(Because my pictures of this trip were -and still are - on slides, I have included a link to the Unesco site http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/201 where there are pictures of many of the sites we visited.)
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