We woke early from a well needed good nights sleep! We packed out bags back up and headed up stairs for some breaky. The view was quite nice across the rooftops and really tall palms scattered throughout! The temperature was very warm already and it was only 7:30! After breaky we met our driver downstairs and headed off four our 2.5-3hr drive that was more like 4.5hrs! The countryside was a mix of green palms and tropical landscapes to busy and dusty cities! It was quite interesting but after a few hours of bumping along I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer and dozed off! Rudi enjoyed some political chats with Jerome and we learnt our first Sinhalese words Ayubowan a greeting for long life, stuti is thankyou and epa stuti for no thankyou! Jerome took us to a beautiful place for lunch where we declined the all you can eat buffet for 1100 rupees and decided on some vegetable curry and rice which turned out to be all you could eat as the wIter tried to refill our bowls when we finished! We had to tell him to stop and we rolled out of there very full. We then met the owner of the driver company we booked through who put the guilt trip on us that the hotels we had booked at didn't have accomodation for our driver and we needed to ask them for a room for him. After politely telling him that we had already paid for his rooms in the price we paid he left us and we continued on our way. We checked in to our next home for a few days at Dignity villas down a very bumpy dirt road! We are given a cold towel to cool off with and an orange looking fruit juice that we had no idea what it was but drank anyway... Not sick so was safe I think! We got changed into some walking gear and headed to the Dambulla Rock Temple! It was stinking hot and we had all broken a sweat after walking a couple of metres from the van! We headed up many stairs, stopping to admire the mountains and scenery and also to catch our breath! At the top there was 5 different cave temples filled with over 167 Buddha statues and 2100 square metres of Buddhist murals. After removing our shoes before entering we ran across the scorching hot stones to find shade in the temples. They were very impressive with Buddhas of all sizes. The painted ceilings and walls were amazing. The cave temples started off small and grew as we entered the next. After many photos we got our shoes back from the old shoe keeper man for 25 rs each and headed back down the stairs. We cranked up the aircon and headed back into town to find our driver somewhere to sleep. No luck as yet as he said they were too expensive. We came back to our homestay and had a lovely chat to the owner Daniel and he offered us his very last beer...priding he would scoot off on his motorbike to buy us some more! We sat outside most of the evening, Tudi trying to complete one side of a rubric cube and me being eaten alive by mosquitos! We were made a delightful home cooked Sri Lankan rice and curry and Daniel proceeded to show me the correct way to eat it...thought I was going to be fed!!! It was delicious and soon after I headed for bed...so full and absolutely exhausted.
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