Anuradhapura: Ruined Monasteries

At 6.45 am we took a tuk tuk to the Abhayagiri monastery area to the north, to start about 5 hours of walking about 9kms among the ruins of residential areas scattered through the cleared jungle. But first we waited for ten minutes for the ticket office at Jetavana Museum to open. I’m sure they would have let us use our tickets from yesterday, but we forgot to bring them and we didn’t really mind paying the US$30 each again for fresh tickets for the day.

Then our tuk tuk  driver dropped us at Abhayagiri dagoba, another enormous and ungainly dome of bricks 70m tall, originally slightly smaller than the Jetavana one. They’re a strange shape, crowned with a huge square cap and a thick spire on top of that.

It was so much nice to walk around in the relative cool of the morning, without socks to protect our bare feet, but it wasn’t long before the heat began to grow. We headed to the east of the dagoba to the Samadhi Buddha, a 4th century AD seated Buddha under a pavilion.

Again, shoes off to enter the compound (and, wherever there’s a Buddha, you mustn’t take photos of anyone standing with their back to the figure). Between and beyond this area were extensive monastery ruins –plinths and bases of once multi-storeyed compounds in a ‘5’ dice face pattern – the head monk’s residence in the centre and houses for the student monks in the 4 corners. The scale of the monastery must have been incredible; ruins were everywhere and we met very few other people for quite a while – just wandering dogs and groups of monkeys.

Twice, a wandering guard checked our tickets. We came to the Kuttam Pokuna, 2 8th century bathing pools where monks would wash. They were like large swimming pools and featured a small stone pool where the sediment in fresh water would have settled before the water was added to the pool through a decorative spout.

Back to the dagoba and heading west, we explored a whole series of ruins in the semi-cleared jungle, taking our time. The plinth and surviving columns of what was once a 5 storey chapter house, a beautifully carved semi-circular moonstone like a welcome mat before the steps of an image house, the steps themselves supported by squatting dwarves, the Dighapashana Cave once used by meditating monks (and now haunted by fluttering bats), a huge man-made pool called the Et Pokuna (Elephant Pool) that could have held a herd of elephants, and a large refectory featuring at a long stone trough that would have hold enough rice to feed 5,000 monks.

So much to see! We were both hungry, sweaty and footsore by the end and walked to the small museum for a quick look before calling a tuk tuk to take us back into town to a restaurant where we had an excellent rice and curry lunch – an experience only slightly spoiled by 2 young Instagrammers deciding to sit right next to us in the huge outdoor area and talk into and about their iPhones for the entire lunch.

Finally we went back to our room to rest and recover for a few hours, exhausted. At 6:30pm we had a delicious dinner of string hoppers; afterwards, while paying the bill, I had a very friendly and enjoyable conversation with the 33 year old owner of the hotel, Ash, who is a lawyer and lives in Wales most of the year! He moved there where he was 17 and hates the heat here!