A temple at dawn, or almost

March 1, 2020

POLHENA - Please don't feed the monkeys, the man in the ticket office asked. He was almost blond, a Sri Lankan albino if such a thing exists, and the way he looked at us suggested he was blind.

"You're the first visitors of the morning," he added in a tone that suggested monkeys would see us as a source of breakfast.

The rock temple was a dozen kilometres from where we started. We spread jam on bread in our room rather than get into a bad mood in the hotel restaurant. And just as well, too, because the hotel manager was dressed in a towel and wet from a shower. It was that sort of place.

We got away before 7, the air fresh and the sun yawning. No one was on the road. Our tyres hissed in the quietness. We followed the road that passed the hotel and turned on to a smaller road before being turned down another which had more traffic than a byway justified. The first worshippers and, more specifically, the first of those who wanted to sell them drinks and trinkets, were on their way.

We'd have reached the temple last night but we were too tired to go further. Just as well, as it turned out, because it would have been closed when we arrived. This morning we were the first tourists and we parked our bikes beneath a tree, locked them to a metal fence and set off to climb.

The temple occupies several layers of a cliff and worn and not always encouraging stone steps reached steeply from one to the next. Each landing had its Buddha and other religious artefacts. Each was quiet and each more free of monkeys than the one beneath. Monkeys don't bother to chase tourists uphill when they can stay where they are and wait for a fresh supply.

Western logic said the peak should be a temple beyond all others. Instead, it was an afterthought, a back yard. Far from closer to Nirvana, we were closer to abandoned hose reels and the clutter you'd expect in the wake of men in overalls.

It was a delight to go up there, though, and we had an unjustified smugness in being first of the day. The rest of the day was a delight, too. Or most of it. We rode lovely roads all day, sometimes just concrete tracks or plain unsurfaced.

We rounded a lake over which flew several hundred rooks. Instead of which, they were bats. Steph realised it first and we stood fascinated as they swarmed between trees, sometimes stopping, usually flapping on. Bats at homes are the size of a small hamster. You could, if the law allowed, hold one comfortably. But not these. These were the bats you expect to see around crumbling castles in Transylvania. I don't know what Dracula saw but he wouldn't have been disappointed.

When the rising heat and rising traffic coincided, we stopped with relief at a roadside shack selling the needs of life, which in our case were bottles of drink. The woman running the shop was fascinated. As best she could, she explained that she had been a Sinhala teacher and that the shop was her retirement project. It was new, she said.

Little by little she realised that, while sweating cyclists may be odd, Europeans in general weren't. Once again we were in a region that sees few tourists. She called her daughter, who with pride she said was studying Sinhala and political science in Colombo, to take a picture of the three of us.

Once off that road, we tangled with single-track earth paths through back-of-beyond villages, the path rutted and often treacherous with brief stretches of concrete or the local klinkers (the herring-bone tiling that Holland uses on domestic streets).

There were short, sharp climbs, the sort you crest moments before coming to a halt. And then we were in flat, open rice country reminiscent of lowland Vietnam. We passed under Sri Lanks's motorway, called an expressway, and finally on busy roads we reached a coastal town unreasonably promoted in our guide book.

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