Slept well - up with the larks and packing myself back into suitcase and bags (boring but necessary!)
It's a 4.5 hour drive to Anuradhapura, the most ancient capital of Sri Lanka, and I want to go along the coast road up to Puttalam (not on the beaten track). My driver, Nimal is humouring me as he usually goes another way!
It's a great idea except that today, there is a convoy of trucks taking huge metal silos North to a plant and the loads are so huge that they don't fit under the electrical wires strung across the road! So the trucks are stranded every 100 yards with men using long poles to push the wires up and over the protuberances! The traffic builds up behind each of these scenes - Great!
At Chilaw, we've had enough and I suggest we take an inland route, along which we view these interesting wayside stalls selling highly coloured mats. Using my trusty map I guide Nimal to Wariyapola then Padeniya and there we catch a North bound highway straight to our destination. Nimal admits he has never used this road before and is happy to explore if that's OK with me. We quickly come to understand each other and get along fine. This road seems littered with archaeological sites and definitely worth a second look (next time!).
Arrival in Anuradhapura at 1 pm in the intense heat, check in to the Hotel Randiya and have an hour's kip before the long afternoon of sightseeing ahead. A nice old colonial style hotel.
Regroup at 2 pm and head off to lunch at a small local roadside place. Highlight of the meal is the SL specialty dessert - Wadalappan - a crème caramel made with cocount milk, that therefore I CAN eat (DF and GF)! Yippee! There we meet up with Kapila, (see pic right), who will be my site guide for all the ancient sights today. He proves to be exceedingly well versed in all matters archeological and historical and also a pleasant companion. Anuradhapura is a very widely spread out site and requires transport and a knowledgable scout. We start at the Archeological Museum where I buy an all sights Cultural Triangle ticket (US$50) which saves a lot of time and hassle over the next few days. The museum is worth the visit and prepares the ground for what lies ahead. It contains all the small pieces - jewellery, crockery, tools, some statuary that were found during the excavations. They reveal the complexity of the civilisation and the cosmopolitan origin of its visitors (Romans, Chinese etc)
Jetvanarama Dagoba is our first stupa, 70 m high with a rather endearing broken spire. In its pristine shape, in the 3rd C, it was said to have been the third tallest monument in the world, after two Egyptian pyramids. I admit it is difficult to fully appreciate this today.
Next to it, and perhaps easier to fathom, is an 8 m doorway which would have led to a large Buddha image. You can see from the picture on the right, the scale of these constructions! Just imagine the wooden doors that would have hung from this frame. The halls around this precinct were designed to serve 3,000 buddhist monks in their heyday.
The Sacred Bodhi Tree is central to Anuradhapura in a tangible spiritual sense. It was brought over from India as a small cutting by Princess Sangamitta (Buddha's daughter) over 2000 years ago. Incidentally, this makes it the oldest documented, recorded and guarded tree in the world. You can see it here propped up with "gold" tines and props.
It sits beside the brilliant white Ruvanweliseya Dagoba in a pleasant green park. In the intense sun this is an eye-dazzling structure. 
This park is dotted with oddities such as this ancient medicinal stone bath. Doctors would fill this bath with medicinal concoctions and get their patients to lie down in them for their treatment.
This is an enlarged photograph of the crystal which sits in the very tip of the spire on top of the stupa.
The elegant "twin ponds" Kuttam Pokuna were the bathing tanks for the monks. Water entered the larger one and flowed into the second one through an underground pipe.
Every palace or temple has a moonstone at its entrance. It can be quite a plain structure but as testimony to the relative importance of some of the buildings, the moonstones are carved more or less intricately. The Moonstone at Mahasena Palace, is regarded as the finest of its genre. Here in concentric circles we can see refined carvings of the spiritual bestiary of SL Buddhism: elephant, horse, lion and bull on the outer circle and geese on the middle ring.
The Samadhi Buddha Statue (4th C) is not far away in a woody clearing. It is regarded as one of the finest seated meditating Buddha statues in Sri Lanka.
The after a short wander through refreshingly cool woods we arrive at Abhayagiri Dagoba under renovation. You can see through the scaffolding at the top the vegetation growing happily on the rock structure. This needs to be removed regularly or the bricks become loose and start to fall away. 
Camera Battery ran out before the end of the day - Thuparama Dagoba I did see, and finally in the dark
Issunuweriya Rock temple - my favourite. Built into a rock cluster, it is less grand but more evocative. Not to be missed is the climb up to the top of the highest rock for great views over Tissa Wewa. Mine were at dusk! Not possible to photograph but etched on my memory instead!
The day felt like a great achievement and could not have been possible without a car and a guide to pilot me round efficiently from one site to another. We could have done with a few extra hours but we would have been even more exhausted! As it was we saw the most important sights. I felt delighted with the day.
After such an entrancing and stimulating tour, it was home to the hotel to rest weary bones and recharge camera battery! Sad to say, the evening was lack lustre: a very disappointing dinner in the hotel - dreadful Western menu and done very badly - soup from a can and tasteless, and the rest fried to cardboard texture. Oh well! It's only for one night!
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