WARM WELCOME

Carefully placing one foot after another, hands gripping the steel railing, my mother and I climb up the ladder-steep steps. “We’re here,” our guide, Prasanna, finally announces. We are standing on top of Sigiriya, a fortified city and the ruins of King Kashyapa’s seven-storey palace.

From the 200-metre-high rock plateau, we have sweeping views of Dambulla below and the neighbouring sacred site Pidurangala in front. The bricks of the fortress remnants take me back to our drive through the neighbourhood, where a local man was making bricks using fire. The same traditional method would have helped construct the King’s grand