Dambulla Caves

Yay! Our first beautiful site after 48 hours of traveling.

On our way to Sigiriya - our base for exploring Sri Lanka's cultural triangle - we stopped at Dambulla to explore the Buddhist caves. We were dropped off at the base of a large mountainous outcrop (note: this will be a become a common theme over the next few days) and greeted by a giant golden Buddha. The giant golden Buddha is pretty new. He sits over a monstrously ugly museum at the base of the hill. We skipped that and headed strait for the stairs to climb up to the caves.

Buddah over the Golden Temple, a recently build museum.

We started up the stairs, all 398 of them, almost straight up. We got a little winded here and there, but we were entertained my the passing monkeys. Crystal loooves the monkeys! At the top, Traveling Blonde 1's legs were a little shaky, but good to go explore the five temples carved into the side of this overly large rock.

The temples were magnificent. The were full of Buddah statues and paintings on all of the walls. They immediately reminded me of the pyramids with their colorful images decorating every inch of the tomb walls.

Somehow we got lucky and had each temple practically to ourselves.

These reminded me so much of Egyptian tomb paintings.

Cute little fella made up of a Fish, Lion, Eagle and maybe a goat.

The walk down wasn't a picnic either. The stairs are very steep and we were going against the flood of people walking up to the caves.

All of this was just a nice warm up for our next sites planned - Mihintale with it's 1863 steps up to the top and Sigiriya, also a jaunty 1800 steps up. Hope we make it!