Sunday, 22.09.2019

Today we are going to Anuradhapura.

Anuradhapura (UNESCO World Heritage Site) is a huge excavation site, surrounded by an inner protective wall, within which numerous monks used to live and there were temple complexes, and an outer protective wall, within which the artisans, farmers, and fishermen used to live. It is today the capital of the North Central Province of Sri Lanka and was the center of various Sinhalese royal dynasties for a thousand years. We will see the temple complexes with the sleeping and meditation places of the monks. While meditating, some of us were more or less successful. Some managed quite well to let their mind dwell in a place other than their body. However, this probably had less to do with proper meditation 😉.

Then we visited another monastery. Indige sacrificed flowers here for us, so that our names were announced 🙂. The ground here was so hot that we almost burned our feet. We got temple socks 'already' right after the visit. Indika learned the difference between 'already' and 'only' here 🙂.

After that, we saw the Bodhi tree 'Sri Mahabodhi', a descendant of the Indian bodhi tree under which Siddhartha Gautama became Buddha. To this day, countless local devotees make pilgrimages to this tree.

The conclusion of this very interesting day was an elephant safari. We saw several hundred elephants, some of which came as close as 3 meters to our jeep. The very small, clumsy ham-will-elephants made Simone want to take them with her.