Jayantha also took us to the Situlpahuwa Buddhist temple, with two dagobas on high, from where you could see acres and acres of Yala National Park spread out around you, not to mention trees full of Malabar Pied Hornbills (crazy-looking birds.) Later that evening, we all went to puja at the Hindu and Buddhist temples at Kataragama, a very holy site. I took a huge fruit platter into the Hindu temple as an offering to the gods.We were blessed with ashes and holy water, and fed some concoction that was tasty but unidentifiable to me.We took flowers to the Buddhist shrine and had red dot puts on our foreheads for luck. All in all, a very moving experience. At the Hindu shrine, there was a rock where the faithful could smash coconuts for luck. If your coconut did not break cleanly around the middle, it was considered VERY inauspicious.
For our final evening in Tissamaharama, Jayantha invited us to join him at the park camp he had set up for the three aforementioned stupid Italian tourists. This wasn't part of the official schedule; he just wanted to share our company. Gordon drank beer, I drank mineral water, and we sat around the campfire chatting with Jayantha and looking at the stars in the inky-black sky, as fireflies literally danced around our heads. Even though we were planning to return to the SunSinda for supper, Jayantha insisted we eat "a little rice", which actually meant eating a lot of rice, shrimp, curry and several other delicious items that were a bit hard to see in the dark. Then he and Gordon downed some arrack, the popular hard liquor of Sri Lanka that starts its life as palm tree sap.
