Eighth Wonder of the World
Sigiriya, Sri Lanka’s World Heritage Site
Story and photos by MJ Pramik
As I watch the strife and mayhem in Colombo of late, I’m drawn to my memory of Shirly Fernando, and of the three weeks I spent with him in the winter of January 2010 after the end of the Sri Lankan civil war the previous May. We’d toured around most of the island, avoiding the north and east where tensions still simmered with the Tamil Tigers. Peace negotiations were underway and drawing to a close, news agencies advised.
At first, Shirly, my Sri Lankan guide, indicated that I, the patron, was to sit in the back while he escorted me from one venue to another. This tour was arranged through a travel agency and Shirly Fernando was one of their trusted and very experienced guides. He would explain the historical site and location while pontificating on the morals of the actors during its history. Eventually, I rode in the front seat with him to better hear his history lessons and to debate some of his more outrageous and humorous claims.
“Well, is it? Is Sigiriya the Eighth Wonder of the World?” he asked as we stood at the base of the solid granite, hardened magma plug of a long-eroded volcano. Sigiriya, over three hours by car from the capital Colombo, is a major tourist site in Sri Lanka. I detected a hint of cynicism, mixed with a whisper of pride, in Shirly’s question. I dripped and drooped as a result of the muggy weather at the base of the 600-foot ascent up this ancient rock fortress. The temperature registered a mere 86 degrees Fahrenheit, but the 93 percent humidity on this bright-skied January day in central Sri Lanka sucked my climbing energy and goodwill.
Serendipity
Shirly Fernando — in Sri Lanka, Shirly’s a man’s name — served as my guide throughout this serendipitous journey through “Old Ceylon.” I’d “won” a plane ticket to Sri Lanka — an exciting bit of adventure luck until I learned my prize paid for only half the distance to the teardrop-shaped island off the southeast tip of India. The plane ticket covered London — Colombo — London. I live in San Francisco, California, nine flight hours from my port of departure. I had to cover all the other tour fees.
Serendipity: the act of making fortunate discoveries by accident. Horace Walpole created the word “serendipity” after an ancient name for Sri Lanka, Serendip. Out of a glass bowl on a California winter afternoon, my business card pulled up a supreme act of serendipity. The precious round-trip ticket, London-Colombo-London (airport taxes not included) had to be used in one year. I started to sweat the trip immediately. Exercising the ticket proved a challenge. Outside the U.S. and the European Union, things move tortuously slow. A simple process such as purchasing an airline ticket with a SriLankan Air voucher called for patience, fortitude, daily phone calls to New York and Colombo, and sweat. Traveling to London (airport taxes not included) to connect with the SriLankan Airlines flight proved the easy part.
Sigiriya
Once I landed in Sri Lanka’s capital of Colombo, my three-week tour took off with the assigned guide Shirly Fernando. He drove with a close focus and extreme care. After one week driving north, we headed inland to Sigiriya, a contender for the title of Eighth Wonder of the World. Or so Shirly claimed.
The previous day and night, “unseasonal” — a common word used these days due to the climate crisis — monsoon-like rains drenched the grounds of the Kassapa Lions Rock Inn, my pre-Sigiriya rest stop.
From the open-air patio of the Kassapa Lions Rock Inn, I surveyed the stone wonder of Sigiriya, a massive rock fortress from several miles away. Determined, it loomed out of the verdant chaparral and low trees, jutting high and alone out of the landscape. An evening walk up the muddy, flooded red dirt road bordering Lions Rock Inn, Sigiriya appeared as a reddish-beige mountain island, beckoning across the scrub-bush-covered plain. Shaped like a hardened loaf of bread, it presented a top full of outcropped dripping greenery, slashes of black rock, and gouges from waterfalls. In the setting sun, it stood majestic against the darkening sky.
The next morning Shirly embellished and enthused over Sigiriya’s history. The rock, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is the ruins of a capital palace of King Kasyapa I, who ruled from 477 to 495 CE. This king’s brief reign began under evil portent. Kasyapa I assassinated his father Dhatusena in a most heinous manner, and Shirly was still steamed about it.
“How do you like that! Kasyapa walled his own father into the palace bulwark for a slow death!” Clearly, Shirly did not think very highly of King K.
Dhatusena, Kasyapa’s father, had ruled with respect for the inhabitants of his lands for decades. He had built many “wewas” or tank reservoirs that still function today as water holders over the plains of Sri Lanka. Kasyapa I’s younger brother, Moggallana understood his predicament and fled to India where he bided his time.
King Kasyapa built the Sigiriya (Lions Rock) fortress above the forests. He embedded frescoed galleries of buxom painted ladies thought to depict Tara, the Mahayana goddess worshipped as the great savior. He erected staircases cascading out of a lion’s mouth and between its giant paws. The twenty-first-century Sirigiya that I met that January day still hosts the twenty-one “Maidens of the Clouds,” many preserved in splendid colors in an overhang gallery out of the elements.
“Let’s begin the ascent,” Shirly coaxed after we ambled through the ruins and grounds, coated in naturally shorn green grass. Cows with one or two calves grazed among the raised walls that once housed King Kasyapa’s workers.
Naked Goddesses Gallery
A pilgrimage to the gallery of the naked goddesses raised my heart rate instantaneously. The climb up to the top of the Sigiriya by way of pinging wrought iron stairs should have been easy for a runner like me. I neglected, however, to consider this ascent as the equivalent of marching straight up 60 flights of stairs in a skyscraper. In high heat and humidity. Without stopping.
The iron stairs to the goddess gallery were bolted into the rock itself. Cakes of rust encircled the bolts. Some caged steps, supposedly there to prevent accidental falls, did not inspire confidence. Of course, the rusted bolts precariously keeping the stairs adjoined to the mountain screamed for my attention. My heart raced. I closed my eyes, to avoid dizziness and any thoughts of imminent fatality. Visions of the entire mesh-enclosed stairwell collapsing and bouncing off Lion Rock kept entering my mind. If I closed my eyes, I would not see it coming. To my surprise, and relief, the bolts held to the rock. I panted as I entered the gallery.
The Sri Lankan damsels continue to inspire Sinhalese graffiti and poems on any surface reachable. The rich reds and golds haloing their bodies still captured an exotic beauty. My panicked climb was worth it. Sexy murals indeed.
Royal Intrigue
King Kasyapa was the patron of the Buddhist monks living at Sigiriya at the time. The monks responded to the King’s generosity by building a vast city of grottos, ponds, cisterns, and rock gardens both at ground level and up to the terraced top of Lion Rock. The rock palace forming on top of Sigiriya’s was impregnable and protected King Kasyapa.
Again Shirly editorialized on the King’s brief history. Kasyapa, hearing of his brother Moggallana’s return from India in 495 CE, descended from the fortress to crush his brother. Encountering a bog, Kasyapa on his elephant became isolated from his fleeing army.
“Kasyapa did not have the loyalty of his army. They left him!” Shirly approved of this development. Seeing he would be captured, Kasyapa “fell on his sword,” said Shirly, approving of this outcome. Upon the king’s death, Moggallana restored Sigiriya to the same Buddhist monks who initially had inhabited the site, thus ensuring the preservation of some of its splendor.
Once through the Cloud Maidens gallery, I admired the walls of rich greens, reds, and ochers that have held their mystique despite the annual monsoon rains. Past leaning boulders marking the site’s entry, I strode upward. I considered myself in good physical condition. After all, I ran at least three or four half marathons a year. But the direct ascent up 600 feet from the surrounding grounds challenged my cardio health. Did I mention it was hot and humid?
Emptying two water bottles and soaking my nylon backpack all through, I willed myself up the stairs. I huffed past two barefoot workers scrubbing the metal mirror wall with steel brushes the size of toothbrushes. Reaching the next level landing at the carved granite lion’s paws, I flopped down, immobile. A club of real macaques frolicked around me, running up and down the palace walls.
View from the Top
At this point, Shirly elected to leave me to ascend to the top solo.
“I’ve done it for thirty years. Every time I guide tourists here. I have seen the top; it has not changed.” He reclined in the shade, chatting with other drivers on the first landing after the initial climb through the naked maiden murals.
Mingling with tourists from Britain, Australia, Russia, France, Sri Lanka, and the forest’s resident monkeys, I clung to a rickety metal rail up slanted steel steps. We squeezed past each other on the extremely narrow ledges.
Once at the top, palace gardens, overgrown and displaying bulwark designs, led to a large stone seat labeled with a sign that read, “The Throne.” Some records claim it is a monk’s bench, placed there to take in a surrounding view, or a teacher would sit here to instruct fellow monks or novices in monastic practices.
Sitting under a bodhi tree sprouting out of the top ruins, I watched the mountains in the east change colors, and sighted my hotel afar off among deep green shrub trees. A cooling breeze played over the uppermost landing. I imagined monks living here year-round, strolling about on top of the rock, enjoying the zephyrs for weeks on end. I watched a monarch butterfly open and close its wings, open and close them softly, repeatedly on a thin branch.
On the descent, slow due to the slippery metal stairs, I returned to Shirly’s question. Many world sites have won the label of the Eighth Wonder of the World and are duly categorized. Natural formations. Pre-1900 creations. Post-1900 manifestations. Only one person has achieved fame as a “Wonder of the World.” That would be Andre the Giant, a French-born, Bulgarian-Polish professional wrestler, and actor. Never heard of him? Neither have I.
Sigiriya falls in the pre-1900 category of World Wonders, competing with the likes of the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, Machu Pichu in Peru, the Taj Mahal in India, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the moai statues of Easter Island belonging to Chile, and the Great Wall of China. From my perch atop the rock with its 360-degree view of open sky, rain forests, and the Knuckles Mountain Range to the east, Sigiriya trounces the two United States entries. The Great Wall of China, visited in 1995 with my two young daughters, an impressive bulwark that never did keep out invaders, remains a definite challenger. Compared to these contenders, Sigiriya took the trophy for the day. Building a city high in the heavens — hauling all the accouterments of daily life into the clouds — seemed absolutely astounding. I had great difficulty moving my small body with damp daypack up to the top level, let alone huge boulders for buildings and never-ending supplies for daily life.
“Well, what do you say? Is Sigiriya the Eighth Wonder of the World?” Shirly waited with pride, a touch of sarcasm gurgling below his question. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d never visited any of the big-time official Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. But it did not seem to matter, because today, I had made it to the top of a potential Eight Wonder.
“Yes, definitely, Sigiriya would win my vote for now,” I said. He smiled and gave me a sure wiggle of his head. Shirly Fernando had done his day’s work.
