Dambulla Royal Cave Temple

Almost everything a visitor is taken to see in the middle of Sri Lanka was lost and then found again. Cities were abandoned to the forest, buried, argued over by antiquarians and eventually cleared by archaeologists. Dambulla was never lost. Monks have lived on this rock and maintained these caves in an unbroken line for something close to two thousand years, and nobody has ever had to excavate it, because nobody ever left.

That single fact is the key to the place, and it is also the reason a lot of visitors come away vaguely disappointed. They arrive expecting an ancient site, which implies a fixed date and a preserved moment. What they find is a temple that has been continuously repaired, repainted, extended, gilded, whitewashed and repainted again by every generation with the money to do it. The oldest surfaces are underneath. The visible ones are comparatively recent. If you go in looking for the first century you will not find it, and you will miss what is actually remarkable, which is the accumulation itself.

This page is about the caves rather than the drive to them, which belongs on the route pages. It covers what is in each cave, how to read the painting, and where the friction is: the heat on the steps, the modern golden Buddha at the bottom that is not the temple, the stone that burns bare feet at midday, the monkeys, the dress code, and the commonest mistake of all, which is arriving already worn out from somewhere else.

What Dambulla actually is

A granite hill rises out of the plain above the junction town of Dambulla. Near its top, one side of the rock leans out over itself in a long overhang, and beneath that overhang a series of hollows have been closed off at the front with walls and doors to make five separate shrine rooms. That is the whole arrangement. There is no building in the usual sense: the roof of every cave is the underside of the rock, unaltered, still carrying the natural swells and dips of the stone, and the ceiling paintings run straight over them.

It is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and it is a working monastery of the Sri Lankan Buddhist order rather than a museum with monks attached. The caves hold somewhere around a hundred and fifty images, most of them Buddhas, along with a scattering of kings, disciples and Hindu deities. The painted area across the ceilings and walls is usually described as the largest surviving expanse of temple painting in the country. Both those claims are worth holding lightly and neither is the point. The point is that all of it is still in use.

The names

The names are not quite interchangeable. Dambulla Cave Temple and Dambulla Royal Cave Temple both mean the caves themselves. Rangiri Dambulla is older and translates as something like golden rock, from a mediaeval episode of gilding. The Golden Temple of Dambulla covers the whole complex including the very modern buildings at the foot of the hill, which is where the confusion at the bottom of the steps begins.

How old the different parts are

The caves were used by monks long before they were decorated. The earliest physical evidence is in the rock itself: grooves cut along the lip of the overhang to throw rainwater clear of the cave mouths, and short donative inscriptions in early Brahmi, the script in use on the island before the Christian era. These are the marks of a plain forest hermitage rather than a royal foundation.

The account traditionally given for the temple's founding involves a king of Anuradhapura driven from his throne by invaders from south India, who took refuge among the monks on this rock for years, and who endowed the caves as a temple after he recovered his kingdom. Whether the story is history or foundation legend, the shape of it is plausible enough: a defensible hill on the edge of the settled country, with water and monks already there.

What is more certain is that the place kept being invested in. A twelfth-century king of Polonnaruwa is credited with gilding the interiors, which is where the golden rock name comes from. Kandyan kings rebuilt and repainted on a large scale in the eighteenth century, and most of what your eye registers as you walk in dates from that campaign or from maintenance since. Nothing here belongs to one century.

A temple that never closed, and why that changes what you look at

Set Dambulla beside the excavated cities and the difference is not scale but custody. At a ruin, the archaeologist's job is to stop the decay at the moment of discovery. Nothing is repainted. Nothing is replaced. The value of the thing is understood to lie in its being untouched, and a modern hand on it counts as damage.

A living temple works on the opposite principle. A shrine that is not maintained is a neglected shrine, and repainting a faded image is an act of merit rather than vandalism. So the paint has been renewed, panel by panel, whenever a donor could be found. Layers have gone over layers, older schemes survive underneath in places, and the interior is less like a painting in a gallery than a building decorated by every occupant in turn.

This does two things to a visit. It removes the pleasure of standing in front of something and knowing exactly how old it is, which some people find genuinely deflating. And it replaces that with something more interesting once you tune into it: you can see the layering. Palettes change from cave to cave. One wall has the flat, tightly outlined, red-and-ochre manner of the Kandyan workshops; a few metres away a panel has been touched up in a brighter, harder modern paint that sits differently on the surface. Looking for the joins is far more rewarding than looking for a date.

The golden Buddha at the bottom is not the temple

At the foot of the hill, beside the car park, stands a very large modern seated Buddha, brilliantly gold, on top of a museum building whose entrance is formed as an enormous open-mouthed beast. It is recent, it is enormous, and it is the first thing anyone sees.

A great many visitors photograph it, walk around it for ten minutes, and leave believing they have seen Dambulla. They have not. The temple is up the hill, out of sight from the car park, and the two things have almost nothing to do with one another beyond a shared name and a shared administration.

Opinions about it are strongly held and mostly unkind. Plenty of visitors find it garish, and the objection is not only aesthetic: putting something that large and that new at the entrance to a site valued for its antiquity has been contentious in Sri Lanka too. You do not have to like it. It is worth saying, though, that it was built as an act of devotion by people for whom a bright new Buddha is a better offering than a faded old one, which is precisely the instinct that has kept the caves painted for two millennia. The complex includes a museum of Buddhist art, whose opening arrangements are worth checking on the day.

The practical advice is simple. Do not judge the temple by what you can see from the car park, do not spend your energy at the bottom, and if you are short of time, skip the golden Buddha entirely and climb.

The climb, and where the ticket is sold

The caves are reached on foot. There is no road up and no vehicle access; the driver waits at the bottom. What you have is a stepped and ramped path that switchbacks up the flank of the rock, partly cut into stone, partly built, with handrails on the exposed sections and a series of landings on the way.

It is a real climb and should not be dismissed, but it is a moderate one. Most reasonably fit people are at the top in twenty minutes to half an hour at a steady pace, and the gradient is nowhere alarming. What makes it hard is never the distance. It is the sun. Long stretches have no shade at all, the pale rock throws the heat back up at you, and the dry-zone plain at midday catches out people who have just come down from the hill country. Carry water and drink it on the way up rather than saving it.

Two things are worth knowing in advance. There is more than one way up the rock, so confirm at the bottom which entrance you want rather than following whoever is walking ahead of you. And the ticketing arrangements have moved over the years. Foreign visitors pay for entry, priced separately from what Sri Lankan visitors pay, and where that transaction happens has not always been at the top of the steps. Ask before you climb. People have made the ascent twice, and once is enough.

Coming down is quicker and slightly more treacherous, because the steps are worn smooth in the middle where everybody walks. Use the rail and the edges of the treads.

The monkeys on the steps

Toque macaques live on this rock and they work the staircase with a professionalism that has to be respected. They are small, sandy, crested, quick, and entirely unbothered by people. You will see them on the handrails, on the landings, on the terrace wall, and sitting on the whitewashed parapet looking out at the view like everybody else.

They are also thieves, and what they take is predictable: anything that rustles, anything that might hold food, sunglasses, hats, water bottles, phones held loosely at arm's length, and the paper bags people carry lotus flowers in.

• Keep food out of sight and out of your hands. Not in an open side pocket, not in a net bag, not visible through a plastic carrier. If they can see it, it is a target.
• Do not feed them, and do not let a child feed them. It is the reason the population on the steps is as bold as it is, and a fed monkey becomes a monkey that takes.
• Do not try to take something back. A monkey that has your water bottle owns your water bottle. Contesting it is how people get bitten, and a macaque bite in a rural district means a course of injections and a ruined week.

None of this makes them a menace, and they are one of the pleasures of the walk up. They simply have a longer record of success against visitors than visitors have against them.

Bare feet, covered shoulders and the rest of it

Dambulla is a place of worship, and the requirements are not a formality invented for tourists. They are what any Sri Lankan visitor observes without thinking about it.

Shoes come off earlier than you think

This is the practical detail that most catches people out. Footwear is removed before you enter the temple enclosure, not at the door of each cave, so you cross the open paved terrace in front of the caves barefoot. That terrace is in the sun. At the middle of a clear day the stone is hot enough to be genuinely painful, and you will see people crossing it at a trot with their faces set, which is not the frame of mind in which anybody looks at a painted ceiling.

The answer is socks. Take a pair in a pocket, put them on when your shoes come off, and the problem disappears. Plain ones. This is the single most useful thing to carry to Dambulla and it costs nothing. Failing that, arrive early or late, when the stone has not had all day to heat up, and keep to the shaded strip along the front of the caves where there is one.

There is a supervised place to leave shoes at the entrance, and a small offering for the service is customary, so carry a few small notes. The floors inside the caves are cool, smooth and swept, and after the terrace they are a relief.

Dress

Shoulders and knees covered, and the rule applies to men as much as to women. Trousers or a long skirt and a top with sleeves. Loose light cotton is ideal, since the climb is hot and you want the coverage against the sun anyway. Vests, shorts and cropped tops will not be admitted, and while wraps can sometimes be had near the entrance, arriving already dressed is better than arranging it at the door. Hats come off with the shoes.

The photograph that causes real trouble

Photography inside the caves is generally permitted, and flash is not. The thing to be careful about is posture rather than permission. Never position yourself with your back to a Buddha image for a picture. It is read in Sri Lanka as a deliberate insult and it has caused visitors serious legal difficulty, which is disproportionate to the intention and entirely real. Stand beside an image and face the same direction it faces. The same applies to sitting with the soles of your feet pointing at an image, which is why everybody kneeling in the caves has their feet tucked away behind them.

Beyond that: keep your voice down, do not touch the painted surfaces or the images, and step around rather than in front of anyone praying. Tattoos of the Buddha are a serious matter in this country and should be covered here.

The terrace, and the whitewashed front

The first sight of the temple is not caves at all. It is a long white colonnaded verandah running along the base of the overhang, with a row of doors and arched openings, looking from a distance like a modest whitewashed monastery built against a cliff. This front is comparatively modern, and it is the reason photographs of Dambulla so rarely convey what is behind it.

Before you go in, spend five minutes on the terrace, because most people do not and it is where the site explains itself.

• Look up at the overhang. The rock leans out a long way, and you can trace the groove cut along its lip to shed rainwater away from the cave mouths. That single line of chiselling is the oldest piece of engineering you will see here and the reason the paintings inside have survived at all.
• Look at the shape of the rock face. The caves are not carved chambers but natural hollows under the lean of the stone, closed off at the front. Register that and the ceilings inside make sense.
• Look out over the plain. The terrace is high enough for a long view across flat dry-zone country, patched with tanks and paddy and the dark green of scrub forest. On a clear day the rock at Sigiriya is visible out in the distance, which is a better way of understanding how these places sit together than any map.
• Notice that most people here are making offerings rather than sightseeing. There will be flowers on the terrace, and a smell of frangipani that stays with the whole visit.

Then go in at the end and work along, rather than diving into whichever door is nearest. The caves are conventionally numbered from one end and the sequence makes better sense in order.

Cave one: the Temple of the King of the Gods

The first cave is small, narrow and almost entirely filled by a single reclining Buddha carved from the living rock, lying the length of the chamber with his head at one end. There is very little room to stand back, which is part of the effect. You are close to something enormous in a space that does not let you take it in whole.

Look at the detail rather than the scale. The soles of the feet are marked and painted. The line of the robe is cut so that the fabric appears to fall naturally over the body and the pillow. Behind the head the rock has been worked and painted so the figure sits into the cave rather than being placed in it. At the feet stands a smaller standing figure, conventionally identified as the disciple Ananda, who by tradition attended the Buddha at the end.

The cave takes its name from an image of Vishnu kept here, a reminder that Sri Lankan Buddhism has long made room for Hindu deities as guardians. The paintwork is dark, close and much handled, and this is the least photogenic of the five caves. Do not let it set your expectations for the rest.

Cave two: the Temple of the Great Kings

The second cave is the reason people come, and if you only look properly at one thing at Dambulla it should be this ceiling. It is far the largest of the five, a long high hall under the rock, lined with seated and standing Buddhas and lit by daylight coming in through the openings at the front.

It takes its name from two royal statues kept in it, associated with the kings credited with founding and later enriching the temple, which is unusual in itself: kings do not often stand in the same room as the images they donated. There is a small stupa within the cave and deities in a side shrine. Rows of seated Buddhas run along the walls, and the effect of walking their length is cumulative in a way single images never are.

The ceiling is the extraordinary part. It is painted from end to end and the paint follows the rock exactly, dipping into every hollow and riding over every swell, so the surface reads as a rippling textile rather than a flat plane. There are bands of repeated seated Buddhas, panels of narrative scenes, geometric and floral borders, and processions of figures, all in a limited palette of red ochre, yellow, black, white and a little green. Stand still and let your eye travel along it. Almost everybody photographs it, and almost nobody looks at it for as long as it deserves.

The water that drips upwards

Inside this cave, water drips from a crack in the ceiling and is caught in a vessel below. The remarkable part is the geometry. The rock above is a dome, so water arriving at that point has run along the underside of the overhang against every intuition about which way water should go, on a hill with nothing above it. It is collected and used in temple ritual, and it is said not to run dry even at the end of a hard dry season.

The physics is not miraculous: water soaks into the rock elsewhere, moves along fissures, and surface tension carries it across the underside of the stone until it reaches a point where it falls. Knowing that spoils nothing, and it is easy to walk straight past.

Caves three, four and five

The Great New Temple

The third cave is the other large one, and it belongs to the eighteenth century and the Kandyan kingdom. It was cut back and fitted out under a Kandyan king whose statue stands inside it, and it is the clearest single expression of the Kandyan school of painting anywhere at Dambulla: flat, strongly outlined, crowded with repeated figures, dense with pattern, and unmistakably a different hand from the older work next door.

There is a large reclining Buddha here too, ranks of seated and standing figures, and a ceiling of repeating Buddha images in tight registers. Compare it directly with cave two. The subject matter is similar, the sensibility is not, and the pair tell you more about this temple's history than any label does.

The Western Temple

The fourth cave is much smaller and takes a minute or two. It holds seated Buddhas and a small stupa, and the stupa carries a story: it was broken into by thieves after the jewellery of a queen said to have been enshrined in it. Whatever was actually in there, the damage is real and visible, and a useful corrective to any idea that a temple in continuous use has been safe from everything.

The Second New Temple

The fifth is the newest, and the construction is the thing to notice. The images here are largely built up in brick and plaster rather than carved from the rock, which is what happens when the workable stone has been used up and the devotion has not. There is a reclining Buddha, and deity figures of the Hindu-derived guardians that Sri Lankan temples commonly house.

Most visitors give it thirty seconds on the way out, having been worn down by the first four. It deserves a little more, because it is the newest layer of the accretion and makes the argument the whole temple makes: this is not a monument that stopped.

How to look at the ceilings

The painting is the substance of Dambulla, and the commonest complaint about the visit is that it is dark and confusing and it all looks the same. It does look the same for the first ten minutes. Then it separates, and there are four things that speed that up.

• Find the seam between schemes. Look for places where the outline weight changes, where the palette shifts, or where a hard modern brightness sits next to something softer and more absorbed into the surface. Those are different campaigns, sometimes centuries apart, and once you start seeing them the whole ceiling reorganises itself.
• Follow the rock, not the picture. The painters did not flatten the ceiling before working on it. Watch a border line as it crosses a swell in the stone and you can see where they accepted the distortion and where they corrected for it. This is the thing photographs cannot show.
• Separate the repeating from the narrative. Much of the surface is rows of identical seated Buddhas, which are devotional rather than illustrative: multiplication is the message. The narrative panels are the ones with movement, crowds, animals and buildings, carrying episodes from the Buddha's life and from the island's chronicles.
• Let your eyes adjust. Come in from the terrace and give it a full minute before deciding anything. The caves are lit mostly by the light from their own doorways and there is far more visible after sixty seconds than there is after five.

The same unevenness runs through the gilding. Some figures gleam and others are dull, rubbed or only half done, because regilding is donor-funded and happens when a donor appears. That is a record of who could afford what, and when, rather than a sign of neglect.

A guide is more valuable here than at most sites, because there is no signage worth the name and the iconography is not self-explanatory. Guides can be engaged around the entrance and quality varies considerably. Establish in advance what the tour covers and what is being asked for it, and be aware a good guide is worth having while a poor one will recite a list of numbers at you.

When to come, and the light inside the caves

Two separate questions get tangled here: what is comfortable, and what looks good. At Dambulla they mostly agree.

The hours that work

Early morning is the best time overall. The stone on the climb and the terrace is cool, the light is soft and the coach groups have not arrived. Late afternoon is the other good window, with an advantage of its own: the cave mouths open outwards over the plain, so as the sun drops it reaches in under the overhang and lights surfaces that are in shadow at every other hour. Ceilings that read as brown at midday come alive.

The middle of the day is the worst of both. The terrace is at its hottest, the glare outside means your eyes take longer to adjust inside, the caves are busiest and everybody is tired. If that is the only slot you have it is still worth going. Just take the socks seriously.

Opening times and last admission are worth confirming locally the day before, along with whether any cave is closed for conservation work, which happens.

Poya days, and arriving during a service

On full-moon Poya days and at festivals the temple fills with Sri Lankan pilgrims, most dressed in white, carrying lotus buds and frangipani and oil for the lamps. The queues are longer, the caves are crowded, the climb is slow, and you will not have any of it to yourself.

Whether that is a problem depends on what you came for. If you want an empty painted hall, choose another day. If you want to see what the temple is actually for, a Poya day is the most instructive visit you can make. Dress with extra care, keep out of the way of anyone making an offering, and accept that you are a guest at somebody else's service.

The same applies on a smaller scale at any time. Chanting may start while you are in a cave. The correct response is to stop moving around, lower your camera, and either stay still or leave quietly.

Doing Dambulla and Sigiriya in the same day

Sigiriya is seventeen kilometres away, about half an hour by road, and the overwhelming majority of visitors do both. That is sensible. What is not sensible is the order most people do them in, and it is the reason Dambulla has a reputation among some travellers as the lesser, duller half of the day.

The standard pattern is a pre-dawn start, the whole of Sigiriya in the morning, and the caves squeezed in before lunch on the way past. By then the group has been on its feet for hours, has climbed a great many stairs, is dehydrated, and arrives at the bottom of another hill in the hottest part of the day to be told there is a further climb and that shoes come off at the top. Nobody reads a ceiling in that state. They walk through five caves in twenty minutes and go back down.

Three better arrangements, in descending order of preference.

• Give them separate halves of separate days. Sigiriya at opening on one morning, Dambulla in the late afternoon of the day before or after, when the sun reaches into the caves. This is the best version.
• Sigiriya in the morning, Dambulla late the same afternoon, with a long, genuine break in the middle — lunch, shade and preferably a shower. The break is not a luxury. It is the difference between seeing the caves and passing through them.
• Dambulla first, at opening, then Sigiriya after. Fresh legs and a cool terrace, at the cost of climbing Sigiriya later in the morning than is ideal. Suits cooler months better than April.

The pairing to avoid entirely is three sites in a day. Sigiriya, Dambulla and Polonnaruwa between breakfast and dark is a schedule sold to people who do not know what they are agreeing to, and it produces a day of car doors and ticket counters.

How long to allow

One to two hours inside the enclosure is the realistic figure, and two is better than one. Add twenty to thirty minutes for the climb, fifteen for the descent, and whatever the ticketing takes at the bottom. Ninety minutes to two and a half hours from car door to car door is a sensible budget.

You can do it in forty-five minutes, and plenty do. But the caves are dim and dense, and this is a place where the last twenty minutes are worth more than the first twenty: that is when your eyes have adjusted, the group ahead has moved on, and you have stopped photographing and started looking.

Whether you can get up there

This needs a straight answer rather than an encouraging one. The caves are reached by a stepped climb up the side of the rock with no alternative route, no vehicle access and no lift. If you cannot manage a sustained flight of uneven stairs in heat, you cannot reach the temple, and no version of the visit changes that.

That said, it is a good deal more manageable than the other famous climb nearby, and people who have written off Sri Lankan rock sites entirely should not necessarily write off this one.

• The gradient is moderate and the surface is mostly good — made steps and ramped sections rather than boulders or metal stairways. There is nothing exposed and no drop to speak of.
• There are places to stop. Landings and low walls occur at intervals, so the climb can be taken in stages. Somebody who needs four rests can still get up.
• The stairs are the whole difficulty. Inside the enclosure the ground is broadly level, the caves are entered off one terrace, and the distances between them are short.
• Bare feet are a factor for anyone with diabetic neuropathy, foot ulceration or a healing injury, since the terrace is hot and you cannot keep shoes on. Socks help but do not remove the risk, and this is worth thinking about honestly before committing.
• It is not wheelchair accessible in any practical sense.

If part of your group cannot climb, settle that at the hotel rather than at the foot of the steps. The car park has shade, seating and the modern complex to look at, which is a poor substitute but not nothing, and whoever is climbing should go up and come down promptly rather than linger out of guilt.

Around Dambulla, beyond the obvious

Dambulla is where the roads to Kandy, Anuradhapura, Trincomalee and the east converge, and almost everybody passes through whether or not they stop. The town itself is a junction and a market rather than a place to spend an evening. That makes it a natural base and a natural point to change drivers or begin a Cultural Triangle trip, and it means there are things within easy reach that get overlooked because the two famous ones absorb all the attention.

The wholesale market

Dambulla has the country's principal wholesale vegetable market, working through the night into the early morning as lorries come in from the hill country and the produce is auctioned and redistributed across the island. It is not a tourist attraction and makes no allowances, but if you are up before dawn anyway it explains more about how Sri Lanka feeds itself than any museum.

Nalanda Gedige

South of Dambulla on the Kandy road stands a small stone shrine of unusual form, drawing on South Indian temple building rather than the usual Sri Lankan idiom and carrying carving of a kind rarely found on the island. It was dismantled and moved to higher ground when the reservoir below it was created. Twenty minutes, almost always quiet, and an easy stop on the drive to Kandy.

Ibbankatuwa

A short way from Dambulla is a protohistoric burial ground of stone cist graves, far older than anything Buddhist in the region and belonging to the people who lived here before the historical kingdoms. There is little to look at in the theatrical sense: low stone slabs in cleared ground. What it offers is chronological perspective, rare in an area where every signboard says ancient and means something different by it.

Kandalama, and the arboretum

East of the town the Kandalama reservoir sits below wooded hills, and the hotel Geoffrey Bawa built into the rock above it is worth knowing about whether or not you stay in it, as one of the defining buildings of tropical modernism. Nearer the town, a dry-zone arboretum planted on degraded land offers short forest walks and guided night walks in search of the slender loris.

Kaudulla

Further east, elephants gather at the Kaudulla reservoir in large numbers through the dry season, moving between there and neighbouring Minneriya as the water drops. An afternoon safari is the standard shape of a visit, and the one question worth asking before booking is which park the herd is actually in that week, because the same elephants use both and the answer changes.

Getting there, and where people sleep

The route pages handle the journeys properly; this is only the shape of it. Dambulla is around a hundred and sixty-five kilometres from Colombo, something under four hours on the road. The roads out in every direction are flat dry-zone roads and quick by Sri Lankan standards, and the temple is reached by climbing from the car park rather than driving up, so the vehicle simply waits.

• Bandaranaike International Airport to Dambulla — 145 km, about 195 minutes.
• Sigiriya to Dambulla — 17 km, about 30 minutes.
• Kandy to Dambulla — 72 km, about 105 minutes.
• Anuradhapura to Dambulla — 65 km, about 75 minutes.

Most accommodation is not in the town but strung along the roads leading out of it, and many visitors sleep nearer Sigiriya and drive across for the caves. Because Dambulla is a crossroads it is a common place to be collected having arrived by another route, and a common place to begin a trip. To sort the car out, start here; the rest of the island is covered in the destination guides.

A sensible plan

1. Do not attach it to the end of a Sigiriya morning. Either give it its own late afternoon, or put it first at opening, or take a proper break of several hours in between.
2. Confirm the ticket arrangements and the entrance at the bottom before you start climbing, and confirm opening times the day before.
3. Put socks in a pocket. One small item, and it changes the entire quality of the visit.
4. Dress for the temple before you leave, shoulders and knees covered, then climb steadily and drink on the way up.
5. Give five minutes to the terrace — the overhang, the drip groove, the view over the plain — before you go into the first cave.
6. Work along the caves in order and spend the bulk of your time in the second one, standing still and looking up.
7. Look for the joins in the paintwork rather than for a date. It is the thing this temple has that nothing else in the region does.
8. Ignore the golden Buddha at the bottom unless you have time to spare, and do not mistake it for what you came for.

Dambulla asks less of a visitor than its famous neighbour and gives back something harder to photograph. It is not a moment held still. It is five rooms under a rock that have been swept, patched, painted and prayed in continuously since before most of the world's surviving buildings existed, and the layering is not a flaw in the preservation but the substance of the thing. Arrive tired at noon and it is a hot climb to some dark caves. Arrive with an hour to spare and some idea of what you are looking at, and it is the most quietly astonishing interior in Sri Lanka.