Anuradhapura

Today started with an egg hopper for breakfast. This is the Sri Lankan culinary equivalent of its distant relative, the space hopper. It consists of a bowl shaped pancake in which is cooked an egg.

Then off northwards to Anuradhapura, an even more ancient city lost to the jungle than Polonnaruva. This site, although enormous enough to need a car to get around it, was less complicated and mainly divided into three gigantic Buddhist monastery complexes.

Each monastery had a giant brick stupa. We are talking structures which when constructed in the first few centuries AD, were the largest man made monuments after the pyramids of Gizeh. They looked like somewhat oblate prototypes for the Albert Hall, but completely solid and far less musical. To make the largest was calculated by an early archaeologist to have needed in excess of ninety million bricks, enough to build a three metre high wall from London to Edinburgh (although he didn't explain why).

The drive, although about the same distance as yesterday, was only one and a half hours long as the roads were better. We travelled across a low plain much given to rice cultivation. The irrigation system was first constructed by the inhabitants of Anuradhapura with thousands of dams, tanks and canals. It was the agricultural benefits of this system that supported the thousands of monks.