My top 5 places

Trip Start Jan 05, 2011

Trip End Jan 26, 2011

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Where I stayed

Nusini Guest House

(Hatton hotels)

Flag of Sri Lanka Adam's Peak, Central, Sri Lanka
Sunday, January 23, 2011

This is a proper mountain, broad at the bottom, pointed at the top like a witches hat or what we used to draw when we were children. It's 7,200 feet high but fortunately we start from 4,000 so it's only a little stroll up to the top. You walk along an illuminated path with Buddhist flags all the way, tea stalls every few hundred steps (they carry all the supplies up on their heads!!), the sound of waterfalls and the air gets colder as you near the top. It's a hard climb, partly the lack of oxygen and partly my little legs.

At the top is a Buddhist monastery which is built around a footprint in the rock reputed to be where the Buddha walked 500 years BC. The Christians maintain it is Adam's footprint and since it is 1.8 metres long and God used bits of Adam to make Eve I go along with the view that it is his. He certainly stepped down into paradise anyway.

Adam's peak

Left at 2.20 and got to the top at 5 and waited for dawn which broke in the east gradually revealing the mountain ranges below us, first in silhouette and then more and more details became clear, the trees, lakes, the mist in the valleys, it is just beautiful. When the sun actually rose above the horizon at 6.30, we went round to the west side of the mountain to watch it's shadow cast on the mist and the landscape below. It formed a perfect pyramid shape that stretched all the way to Colombo on the coast 70 kms away. Then as the sun got higher, the shadow moved towards us, I could see it moving, just an incredible sight, it was awe inspiring.

I walked back down before it got too hot. Even harder on the joints going down and stopped at an Ayurvedic treatment centre near the base for a leg massage. That seems to have worked, I have taken two bus rides to Kandy since, 5 hours sitting cramped on crowded buses and I am not stiff.

In my top 5 places I have seen in my life this is one of them. I felt totally uplifted, still do.

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