April 14, 2025
Cycle day 20 - Dambulla to Kandy
Dambulla to Kandy = 73km (Total distance on thistrip so far = 1303km)
Weather = Low of 20 with a high of 30 degrees. The mountains blocked most of the wind today.
Accommodation= Smile Hub Hostel = 4450 rupees ($23.58 AUD)
Happy Sri Lankan New Year everyone! It is April 14 and it is the Hindu New Year for about 80% of the population here in Sri Lanka. After a culmination of 3 days of Public Holidays– officially nearly everything was closed today especially when we got to Kandy– wait to the end to see what we had for dinner tonight!
Last night there were alot of fireworks and crackers banging away as we drifted of to sleep around 9.30pm. We were woken at 3.30am by some crackers nearby which set of the houses around it to also get up and set some more crackers off! After a frenzied few minutes of cracker bombings (they are really loud here and distinctly sound like gun shots!) it stopped and we drifted of to sleep again.
So our day began at 6am, we got up early as this accommodation provided a small breakfast (they said small – how small I didn't ask) but in preparedness that it is not alarge meal to sustain us for the first 2 hours we got our usual papaya and bananas. We ate the papaya as that is heavy and difficult to carry and left the bananas for todays ride, as we had a feeling most things would be closed.
Well our small breakfast was rather large and Oh My Gosh it was just lovely. We had a small serve of that coconut rice, 2 flat pancake type roti, fried egg and 3 sweet treats left over from New Years celebrations– of which I devoured them all and a cup of tea to wash it all down! I was full to say the least and yes it was definitely enough to help us through the first 2 hours of the day.
So Neils investigation into what todays ride was going to be like was based on that damn Google – flat then a hill then down to Kandy and while in Kandy it will bea bit undulating but a total of 73km. The only thing Google got right was the 73km!
As soon as we left Dambulla you can see the mountain ahead, whether you went up those particular ones, who knows!
We are back on the A9 and it is in places in very poor condition, no shoulder and a little narrower than the other major highways we have been on. But still pleasant enough to ride one. Being early in the morning there is not alot of traffic around.
But the traffic going north was alot more heavier than the traffic heading south with us. You are steadily climbing – not a hard gradient but a gentle climb and 15km later you are in a small town, 300m above sea level and almost at the top of the hill is a shrine!
We were feeling ok and there was a nice down hill after that, again not steep but gradual. For the next 30km it was just hills about 4 of them just long climbs with long downhills so not undulating.
Coming into the outskirts of Matale (5km before Matale) we see a shrine half way up one of the hills
Matale is a long and big town with heaps of Cargill supermarkets! Traffic travelling south with us has now picked up and it is becoming busy. But as you travel through the town alot of the shops and supermarkets are shut. We did find a bakery open and had a cuppa there with something to eat. Further up the road at about 46km we find a supermarket open and get some water as it is hot and we have drunk most of the water we are carrying. We do know that we have a big climb ahead of us. Waiting at the supermarket I take a photo of this weeks specials
Once loaded up with water again we head of and immediately we start to climb and we continue this for 9km at a gradient of about 5%.
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We are glad we have left this hilly part of the trip to the end and have 1200km in our legs before tackling the hills – not that the 1200km of flat riding would help with today and what is coming next. It is next to impossible for us to train in hill climbing for cycle touring in Australia. Australia doesn't do hills like this – It is not common in the Australian terrain to have these sorts of long gradual hills. The Australian idea of a hill is one of 2 things –
1. Shortest and steepest route possible, or
2. Up, down, up, down, up to go up or down, up, down, up, down to go down (in other words undulating with gradients that are just mind boggling and this can be spread outover not 1 or 2 kilometers but more like a distance of 50-80km!)
We got through it and stopped briefly about 3 times on the way up before the heat (remember it is 30 degrees when we are riding this!) got to Neil and we pulled over under a sheltered awning of a wine shop. Where a man in a shop must have seen us and walked up to us offering us some very ripe bananas! We were so full of liquid that we could only squeeze in a banana each but we thanked him! We checked and we saw that we are not that far from the top, about another 100m to go just around the corner!
We weren't the only ones struggling up the hill, everyone was! I have never seen tuk tuks go so slow! And I have never seen so many on the side of the road being fixed! Even small cars were going marginally faster than tuk tuks, it was the bigger cars/vans/peanut buses that cruised up the hill with ease. There were a few public buses and they were struggling to get up, spewing out their black fumes. I saw one red bus have to go on the other side of the road to get around a corner (it was that tight for it!) when it was descending as we were ascending.
Recovered we get back on the bikes and finish the climb, it had bit of a Tour de France feeling about it with that metal structure across the road, anyway it felt good for us so we had our little moment to pretend!
And what a descent it was! It wasn't as steep but just as long and unfortunately we couldn't go fast as the road was in a terrible condition. In fact it was single file all the way down for all, as even the tuk tuks had to go slow to avoid the rough roads. In fact if the vehicle behind you beeped to let you know they are going to overtake you – you didn’t bother to move left as it was just uneven and too rough to ride in it, so they had to go on the other side of the road! I think these people have done this before (up and down) as there was alot of patience with each other and no angry beeps to get out of the way just the usual beep of overtaking.
On the outskirts of Kandy there are a few towns which seem to blend in with each other. The closest town is a muslim community and riding through there it was crowded as it is a public holiday but it is not a muslim holiday (theirs was the other week!) and so all their shops were open and trading hence the crowds as we rode through.
Kandy is the 2nd largest city in Sri Lanka and I think that would be population size and not necessarily land size. You see Kandy is built on hills (lots of them) and the first thing you notice is how the buildings look – they are a minimum of 4 levels high and very narrow and long. The bottom level is a shop or service or something, the next 3 levels above are the living areas.
Fortunately for us today most shops are closed which means way less traffic on the road and way less traffic/people parked on the sides which can add to the difficulty of riding through a major city. So today we felt lucky and it was less stressful than normal!
Our hill climbing wasn't over as we navigated our way through the city to our accommodation,naturally the hills are short and steeper and there was one hill we had to get of and walk – it was a 20%er! Man it was steep. Damn Google sent us on a wild goose chase as when we got to the top, I looked to my right and could see that we had been there before!
A nice archway when you enter Kandy and some quirky features if you get the opportunity to look around while Neil is looking at Google
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Eventually we find our accommodation and the name says it all!
If you are wondering why it is called that – our accommodation is above a dentist –I kid you not! And yes it is a hostel! And you may remember Dad when we chatted that Neil was looking up booking.com for this and kept making me double check and it got to the point I said just book the damn thing and then after he booked it I sort of thought that shit – hostel, crikey young people being noisy etc.
Well this is far from it and is the best accommodation so far. It is run by a Japanese guy who is a sticklerfor routine – for the first time in 4 weeks we have bins for organics, bins for plastics and bins for general. We have a washing machine that is free, we have a clothes line on the sheltered roof top, we have a clean spotless communal kitchen and lounge room. Our room is on the 2nd level so the dentist is right under us (hope I can't hear the drill when they use it!) our bikes are stored in the communal lounge. The wifi is really good and the bathroom doesn't have a smelly pipe system and there is a hot water shower! OMGosh we are not going to leave! Check out the photos – Neil loves the fact that there are sliding window partitions between the bedroom and shower/toilet – checkout the photos of him modelling!
As mentioned earlier that not much is opened and we really can't be bothered looking for something – a Muslim restaurant would be open! So we went to the supermarket to get water and something we could eat at dinner and is what we got – they had a deal – 1500 rupees for Kellogs cornflakes and 1L of full cream milk.
We each had 3 bowls full! Bearing in mind I always eat my cereal almost dry – I used 50ml of milk over the 3 bowls where Neil used probably about 750ml!
Today's ride: 73 km (45 miles)
Total: 296 km (184 miles)
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