Hidden Trails Podcast By cover art

Hidden Trails

Hidden Trails

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 Hidden Trails is the subject of this podcast, which steps off the tourist path to give you a glimpse of the things that really make Sri Lanka tick. Sacred temples, royal palaces, leopards, tea tasting, ancient frescos, sandy beaches, gourmet curries, tamarind martinis, whale watching, trekking, turtle fostering – these are the things that most visitors to Sri Lanka typically get up to. And they are lovely: very lovely. Well worth doing. But there’s more. Much more. “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good,” noted Moses with satisfaction in Genesis; and he must surely have had Sri Lanka in mind. Because what is special – most beautiful of all – is its ordinary life. The life you notice driving its roads or walking its streets. And it is all that enables this life that is the subject of this little most local of tours, a tuk tuk drive from Sri Lanka’s jungle retreat, The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. This journey will take you behind the door of what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lanka – those aspects of life that matter most to most people: god, food, water, culture, education, crafts, and local lords. These are the things that motor this little Sri Lankan community, perched in jungle and paddy on the edge of the highlands. As it does most others. For as Bad Bunny, the rapper said, “Simple goes a long way.” Especially here, far from the busy busy world. History has the hardest of times being heard in a tropical climate, which is no respecter of artefacts. Much has been lost. The haunting story Dingiri Menika in Galagedera exemplifies this. The fate of this renowned local beauty entwined with the story of Kandy’s last king. Selected to stimulate the moribund fertility of the last King of Kandy queen, Dingiri Menika was kidnapped by his soldiers, garlanded with jasmine, and propelled with elephants, drummers, and banner-bearers to a stake atop Bahirawa Kanda, or Gnome Mountain, now home to one of the tallest statues of Lord Buddha. Bound to a stake, she was meant to be a human sacrifice though quite why anyone thought a feast such as this might make the despondent queen procreate is a mystery. Fortunately, the king’s elephant keeper got to Dingiri Menika first; rescued her, married her, in fact - and set up home with her in Welligalle Maya, in Cross Street, close to Kandy Super Phone, Ltd, a present-day mobile phone supplier. But although the king chose to terminate all future human sacrifice, his late-burgeoning liberal values were not destined to bring him any greater luck. Within a few years he had been exiled to India, along with at least two of his four wives, the third of which was to use her exile for bankrupting shopping sprees. Traces of the king remain in the museum in Kandy but of the Galagedera home that housed his beautiful would-be sacrifice, there is no trace. Yet the world she inhabited is not yet all gone, and this tour will try to pick up what aspects of it still live on. We will visit Mrs Liyange and the tiny preschool class of tiny singing children at the ancient monastic school of Galayawe Sri Suvi Suddharamaya. And Manju and his family beside their paddy fields and figure out all that happens to our sticky rice pudding before it gets to be anything of the sort. We will finger inscriptions so ancient they predate recorded Sri Lankan history with a script that fell out of use nearly two thousand years ago when we call in on Gunadaha Rajamaha, a cave altar that was the refuge of a king who symbolised the enduring and unique culture of the Sinhala nation that is Sri Lanka today; and who rescued the young Anuradhapura Kingdom. On route too is a handloom workshop; and a wood carver, part of a great artistic tradition for which the Kandyan kingdom is famed. And an abandoned manor house dating back to the first years of British occupation. 2THE KING’S HIDING PLACE Hidden down tiny roads very close to the hotel is the ancient cave temple of Gunadaha Rajamaha, its lofty views and deep forest hinterland once home to one of Sri Lanka's most unlucky kings. Valagamba became King of Anuradhapura in 103 BCE; but had first to kill Kammaharattaka, his sibling’s murderer and chief general, before gaining what he regarded as his birthright - the crown. This he did, but little good came of it. Decades of earlier royal misrule had set up the grand old kingdom of Anuradhapura for utter disaster. Within months of taking power, a rebellion broke out in Rohana. A devastating drought. The kingdom’s preeminent port, Mantota, opposite Mannar, fell to Dravidian Tamil invaders. And at a battle at Kolambalaka, the hapless King Valagamba was defeated, racing from the battlefield in a chariot lightened by the (accidental?) exit of his wife, Queen Somadevi. The king went into continual hiding - including here in Galagedera as he sought to build a guerrilla resistance to the invaders. His kingdom was now ruled by a series of Tamil kings who, between...
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