Are you ready to rock?

Sigiriya to Kandy

M woke early and was picked up by Sam at 6am to go and climb Lion Rock. It's recommended that the climb is done early in the day to avoid the heat, since there are about 1200 steps to climb.

There were plenty of people around but it wasn't like Pidurangala the evening before, the only choke point this morning was the spiral steps leading up to the famous rock paintings.

After getting to the top, exploring the ruins and admiring the view it was back to the guest house for a traditional Sri Lankan breakfast of curry, samosas, pancakes, hoppers and fruit.

We left for Kandy after breakfast, with a few stops along the way. First was the Dambulla Cave Temple. This had quite a few steps, but even though K hadn't quite recovered from her illness she managed to make it all the way. There must have been hundreds of Buddha statues here, in different rooms cut into the rock.

Next was Nalanda Gedige, known as Sri Lanka's central point, where there was a small  Hindu temple from around the 8th century.

Sri Lanka is famous for spices so we were looking forward to the next stop at a spice farm to learn about how they were grown and harvested. However this was really just one of many "spice farms" tourist traps along this road. There was a small demo garden with examples of many spice plants, such as cardamon, cinnamon, and pepper, but the focus of the guide and the tour was on the medicinal properties of the plants and trying to sell natural ayurvedic remedies and a "miracle" hair removal cream. This was quite disappointing, and in checking the online reviews once we'd left we found that we weren't alone in thinking that way.

We finally made it to our hotel in Kandy, in a nice room with views of the surrounding area, but still not too far from town. We did have to exchange pleasantries with the host for about 15 minutes, who wanted to tell us all about his network engineer son that used to work for Telstra. M cracked a couple of jokes about this but they fell quite flat for some reason.

We used the Pick Me app to book a tuk tuk to take us to a nice restaurant overlooking Kandy Lake for dinner.