Asia > Sri Lanka > Cultural Triangle > Dambulla > Articles > Shabby, but Splendid

Sri Lanka is full of long, elegant words that glide effortlessly off the tongue: Jayasuriya, Tissamaharama, Trincomalee, Parakramabahu, Polonnaruwa, Radawaduwa, Aravinda da Silva, Nuwara Eliya, Gunasekera. In Sinhala script, they form impenetrable squiggles. Spelt out in Roman lettering, your eyes glaze over after two or three syllables and the rest of the word is taken as read. There could be something sinister going on at the end of the words and no one would notice.

Perhaps, it’s much the same with Sri Lanka. Twenty years of civil war and a fragile ceasefire should have left more obvious scars, but it all seems absurdly peaceful, not at all like India.

There is not, at first sight, the same vast discrepancy between rich and poor, the same sense of living on the edge. There isn’t the litter or the crowds. Or the noise or the smell. Even the heat seems less oppressive.

Hitch-hiking round India, even in the remotest places, you attract an increasingly large audience, not ashamed to stare, and a ripple of applause every time a car goes past without stopping to give you a lift.

In Sri Lanka, you are welcome. The beggars and touts are fewer and less persistent. On the steps of the Dambulla caves, the sellers of postcards, toy elephants and badly made boxes were more interested in talking about cricket. Life seems to be conducted in a more orderly sequence. In the towns and villages, the houses are either being built, being lived in or falling down, and not all three at the same time as is often the case in India.

I have mixed memories of the only time I shared a bottle of Indian “Burgundy” (50 proof). Sri Lanka has a much more relaxed attitude to alcohol. The local beer, gin and vodka are very drinkable and not at all dangerous, although palm toddy and arrack may be something of an acquired taste.

Perhaps it’s because it’s a Buddhist state, which ought to be a contradiction in terms. A sign on the front entrance to Colombo jail read: “Prisoners are human beings.” Security at the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy has been strict since the 1998 terrorist bombing, and I had imagined the local monks as heavy as nightclub bouncers, whispering: “Watch it son or you’ll be pushing up the lotus flowers!” But they didn’t.

When the Buddha was young, his father surrounded him with every imaginable luxury and shielded him from the evils of the world, and it was not until he was nearly an adult that he had any contact with old age, illness or death. Travelling round Sri Lanka on an up-market tour is a bit like that. There could be all sorts of ugly places and dangerous people just around the corner but they are kept safely out of sight as you are shepherded from one wonder to the next.

Perhaps it really is what it seems, and the media warnings are wrong. A headline in the local Daily News read: “Rotten reporting causes tremendous damage to Lanka.”

I shared the ancient ruins of Polonnaruwa with a group of improbably well-behaved schoolchildren escorted by a Buddhist monk in an almost luminous orange robe. The girls wore gingham dresses that belonged in the 1950s; the boys wore grey flannels and white shirts; all of them had bare feet. It was a genuinely serene moment.

The “Cultural Triangle” between Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa and Dambulla is a jungle-covered plain strewn with granite boulders 200m high, with a profusion of wildlife, exotic plants and World Heritage sites. The forests are mostly teak, mahogany and ebony and names like rosewood and satinwood that you only come across in The Antiques Road Show. Near the villages are mangoes and papayas, cloves and cinnamon, things that in England come from Sainsbury’s rather than trees. Gardeners appear to have an unlimited choice of large shrubs and small trees, neatly shaped with large, evergreen leaves and showy, heavily scented flowers for most of the year. Marco Polo called it the most beautiful island in the world, and you can’t really disagree. Nowhere else is so like a Henri Rousseau painting.

The Cultural Triangle is like the Bermuda Triangle except in reverse. Here, nothing disappears; it is just temporarily lost from sight for a millennium or so, always waiting to be rediscovered. The roads are full of Morris Minors, you see more in a day that you would see in a year in England. They aren’t wrecks; it is as though they were still being made.

The palace in the sky at Sigiriya took only seven years to build; it was occupied for 18 then forgotten for more than 1,300. Half way up the rock, you can take a detour to the cave of the heavenly maidens via a shaky spiral staircase with open wrought-iron steps and a vertical drop of several hundred feet directly below your feet. “Very safe!” said the guide. “It was a gift from London Underground in 1938.”

Polonnaruwa was the island’s capital in the 11th and 12th centuries, then forgotten until the mid-19th when a British hunting party stumbled across it deep in the jungle.

You realise how they must have felt as you drive along the forest track to the Kandalama hotel near Dambulla. It is like rediscovering The Lost City of Milton Keynes, abandoned for centuries after global warming has made southern England uninhabitable. The hotel is seven storeys high and 965m long but almost invisible, covered in grass and creepers. It leans against a rock beside an 11th-century reservoir. No rocks, apparently, were injured in the making of the hotel. Rooms and corridors were built round them, which makes the rock seem organic, growing into the building. If you leave your bag in reception you might come back to find the rock has started to swallow it.

The hotel is said to have cost $100 million, designed by Geoffrey Bawa, Sri Lanka’s one undisputed 20th-century artistic genius. You may wonder if he put in a proper road when he was building the hotel, only to replace it with a cinder track once it was finished, but by any standards Kandalama is a magnificent achievement, even by the standards of Sigiriya and Polonnaruwa.

At the shabby but splendid Queen’s hotel in Kandy, we drank tea in an empty room overlooking the garden, the copper light fittings greener than the grass. Another quiet moment. According to rumour, the Queen’s is soon to be bought by the Aman Group and so will be transformed into one of the world’s great hotels, or totally wrecked, depending on your taste in such things.

At the Mahaweli Reach Hotel (the height of 1980s good/bad taste) the resident band, Los Kalypsos Kandyans, sang a laid-back but deeply serious version of My Body Lies Over The Ocean (Bring Back My Body To Me), as surreal a moment as any I have experienced on the entire subcontinent.

“You are all Japanese, no?” said the lugubrious wildlife guide at Yala National Park. Somehow, this did not inspire confidence in his ability to identify the more obscure species of bird and mammal. We failed to spot any leopards, but he did show us some trees where he had often seen them, and we tried diligently to imagine what they might have looked like. The high point of the safari was a close encounter with a spoonbill. “Look! A spoonbill. Its bill . . . is shaped . . . like a spoon.” It was better than any production-line African safari.

Along the south coast, we stopped for morning tea at the Tangalla Bay Hotel. The Lonely Planet guide describes it as a concrete monstrosity, and few would disagree. It has seen better days and will certainly see worse. In America, it would have been pulled down long ago. In England, it would have been given an unconvincing post-modernist makeover. But in Sri Lanka it has been left, increasingly frayed at the edges, to await its rediscovery as a heroic example of late-60s architecture.

My last night was spent at the new Saman Villas hotel on the west coast, south of Colombo. It said to be one of the smartest beach resorts in Sri Lanka, built in the almost obligatory Indonesian style. Perhaps, in 20 years’ time someone will start a society for the preservation of faux-Balinese resorts when they are all being knocked down to make way for 60s-revival concrete.

In the evening, I swam in the infinity pool overlooking the Indian Ocean. It was raining and thunder rolled around the bay. Swimming in the rain is not something you can often enjoy in England.

Infinity pools are the modern ha-has, and from the hotel the view blends seamlessly into the ocean, 40ft below. When you get to the far edge of the pool, you see how it works, what seems fragile from a distance needs heavy-duty reinforcing. Down on the beach, the sea looked rough, and is said to have dangerous undercurrents. Perhaps, infinity is best seen from a safe distance.

A shorter version of this article first appeared in the Guardian.

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