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Postcards: Amiens Cathedral (FR)

The largest cathedral in France (you could put two Notre Dame de Paris in it!) also possesses the tallest nave for a complete cathedral in the country. It stood proud before me on a glorious Wednesday morning when I was in Amiens and yet I was at lost on photographing it with Frédéric’s few-days-old camera. The small manual that I’ve grabbed on my way out of our apartment sat in my bag; I didn’t have the time to consult it page by page, nor the patience to. I would just have to make do somehow.

Amiens Cathedral is a Gothic cathedral which construction began in the 1220 under the instruction of Bishop Evrard de Fouilly, while three architects – Robert de Luzarches, Thomas de Cormont, and Renaud de Cormont – oversaw the works. These men are commemorated through an octogonal plate embedded within the floor of the cathedral, enclosed within a labyrinth. Standing at 112.7m in height, its nave stretched an impressive 42.3m, giving it the real meaning (esp back in the 13th century) of reaching for God and the heaven. With multicoloured stained glass and imposing sculptures that recount religious stories to the populace, the cathedral in its entirety was deemed worthy to be listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981.

(Hover over photos as usual for captions)

Amiens Cathedral

Amiens Cathedral

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Weekender: Gilded city of Nancy

When an opportunity presented itself for travel, I’m hardly one to refuse the chance to do so. I guess some of my go-go-go-travel attitude must have rubbed off Frédéric as he ambitiously planned for our trip to his cousin’s wedding to be flanked with day-trips to Nancy and Metz. I have friends who agreed that both cities are small enough to be visited as day-trips, and after visiting them, I am more of the opinion that they make good spots for weekend trips.

Place Stanislas

Arc Héré

A TGV ride between Paris and Nancy takes approximately 1.5 hours and our early start means we arrived in Nancy just shy of 10am, affording us a day of exploration given we were also staying overnight in the city before heading off to Grosbliederstroff the next morning. We were lucky to have arrived on a sunny morning for what was to be a forecasted-to-be-cloudy-and-wet weekend. The day did progressively get glummier, but not before we saw the splendour of Place Stanislas in the full sunshine.

I am no historian so I won’t go into the birth and the development of the city, even if we did see the free exhibition of La Ville Révélée at the Palais du Gouvernement (daily except Monday, until 31 August) which looks at these aspects in details. The exhibition is part of the programme of Renaissance Nancy 2013, which has an interesting agenda that makes me want to stay longer so I can check them out.

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101 Goals: UNESCO World Heritage Sites

I thought I’d start easy on my 101 goals challenge – item number 75. I’m not doing it for the purpose of being able to boast how many of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites I’ve visited, but rather, I’m curious at which I have visited. Truth be told, as I don’t search for sites under this listing to visit in the first place, I have not even realise some of them are on it, until now! (The photo below is the only one I can find among thousands of my photos that marks the recognition of such site.)

UNESCO's recognition of Þingvellir

As of today, there are 962 sites listed altogether, and my travels have brought me to 35 of them. Some of them have just been visited recently, i.e. during my blogging lifetime, and therefore have been written up (when I wasn’t being lazy about it), others were visited when I was (much) younger that I really had to think hard if I’ve been there or if I confused it with something else, e.g. I visited a palace in Vienna but was it on-the-list Schönbrunn or off-the-list Hofburg?

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Cultural evening in Kandy

Our visit to Kandy was far too short to say the least. We arrived in this picturesque city in the early evening – around 4pm – from Dambulla. Our arrival into the city was greeted by some drizzle, but nothing too heavy to hamper our movement. We had booked a room at a budget hotel on Saranankara Road (based on guide books recommendation) but we also ended up checking out a couple of other places just higher up the hill on our driver, Nilan’s advice. We didn’t quite like those so we went back to our first choice, Expeditor Inn.

Reasonably priced, clean and comfortable, we were also pleased to find ourselves with a room with a view – overlooking the Kandy Lake. The receptionist/caretaker was a helpful and friendly lady in her late thirties/early forties (the common room computer was out of order but she let me used her personal laptop – I had to check my emails as I was trying to organise possible meet-up with a friend’s friend but that fell through in the end), and a porter who was thin and lanky was also on hand to assist the move of our luggages from the van to the room. On the fourth floor. By stairs. Ooops… I normally do travel light but this time, with wedding gifts and attires and whats not, the bag was on the heavy side. I felt quite guilty each time someone (well, usually Nilan) had to carry that.

Once everything was settled and we had a little pause, we headed back into town area. More specifically, to try to catch the Kandyan dance performance that was slated for 5.30pm at the Kandyan Arts Association. We got there just in time to purchase our tickets and grabbed a seat pretty much behind most of the other visitors since we were among the last ones in. Nonetheless, this wasn’t one of the busiest nights so the hall remained only half-filled.

The cultural show was very much a tourist-geared event. It was evident when the majority of those seated in the hall were Caucasians, with a handful of South Asian families here and there. However, at 500 LKR per person, the price was a lot more accessible than many many other things that I’ve paid for during the trip. A programme sheet was distributed at the ticketing desk too, so we would have some information on the significance behind each performance. Unfortunately I can’t seem to locate my programme right now (no idea where I’ve stashed them since my recent move) so I can’t exactly match the names of each dance to the photos that I’ve taken… The dancing and drumming performance didn’t just end there – there were also fire-eating and barefeet charcoal-walking to cap the hour of entertainment!

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Cave temples of Dambulla

Buddhism runs deep in Sri Lanka. There are more Buddhist temples on this island than anywhere that I’ve been. Sights of monks in their orange/saffron robes make them stand out from the crowd, even when there’s already a myriad of colours surrounding them. Besides the temples, on street corners and main junctions everywhere, it is not unusual either to see a shrine, sometimes almost unnoticeably small, sometimes magnificent and breathtaking, paying homage to the Buddhas sheltered by a sacred Bo tree nearby.

Day 2 of our trip continued from Sigiriya, which at one point of time in history was also a monastery site, heading towards Dambulla for the famous cave temples before travelling further south to Kandy, home to the country’s most important shrine, the Temple of the Tooth. But let’s not get too far ahead. First, we’ll take a peek at the cave temples.

Dambulla on its own, is a small dusty town. A main street lined with shops, some in relatively modern multi-storey premises, others low wooden huts, and one should not be surprised either to see incompletely constructed buildings already in use – something we noticed no matter where we went.

The cave temples are located a couple of kilometres south of centre Dambulla. It would be hard to miss, given that the Golden Temple lies at the bottom of the steps leading to the temples. The Golden Temple boasted a gigantic golden (of course) Buddha, seated cross-legged over a lion’s head (its mouth the entrance to the temple – reminiscent of the idea from Sigiriya?). We did not enter the temple itself but walked around for a quick peek while waiting for the ticket counter to the cave temples to open after the lunch hour.

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Trekking Sigiriya

We had it all coordinated. Claire and I would be arriving in Colombo in the morning, her from Dublin via London and I from Paris via Dubai, with less than 1 hour difference between our arrivals. We would then meet our driver and began our 7-day roadtrip around Sri Lanka before arriving back in Colombo for our friends’ wedding.

However, Fate had it for both of us to be delayed due to technical difficulties. Things got slightly complicated here. Her delay was in London, mine outright in Paris. Having no idea how long each our delays could be, not to mention if I’d be able to catch my original connection flight, our best solution then was to contact each other after landing (while praying that our phones actually worked on roaming!). Whoever got there first would wait for the other – the wait could have been up to 3-4 hours. In the mean time, we had to wake Eve and Pras up in the middle of the night so they could contact and inform the driver in the morning (while we were airborne) that we were not a pair of no-shows, merely late.

Our flights still came in with about an hour difference, although in reverse order. Nonetheless, we had lost approximately 5 hours of time – that was half a day wasted. After withdrawing some money from the ATM (nope, we didn’t have any local currency with us) we bought ourselves a local mobile SIM card to use and tracked down our driver to truly kickstart our tour.

Our first base would be Dambulla, some 130km away from Colombo. While that distance didn’t seem all that far, it still took us about 3.5 hours to get there! By then (about 5.30pm) it has also started to get dark. There was nothing else we could do. We checked in to a hotel, grabbed some dinner at the hotel’s restaurant after a failed exploration walk along the main road near the hotel to find something appetising, and called it a night.

An early start the next morning was on the card. After breakfast, we were on the road for Sigiriya aka the Lion’s Rock, site of an ancient palace and rock fortress. It’s essentially a smaller version of Ayer’s Rock. I won’t bore you with the historical details of this site (here’s the Wiki) but back then, we needed some help. We were introduced to a guide (it’s terrible but I can’t recall his name now) who informed us that there were a couple of thousand steps to climb to get to the top of the rock, but first, we’d need tickets.

As we were not visiting the other two main ancient sites to really benefit from the Cultural Triangle pass, we paid for individual site entry fee. It was a whooping US$25 per person. No such thing as a couple of thousand rupees entry fee for us. This would not be an unique experience since we would encounter this practice one place after another. While we understood the premise of charging foreign visitors a price they could afford (I mean, if you’re going to fly all the way to Sri Lanka, then you are relatively well-off in comparison to most locals), we felt the prices could be made somewhat more reasonable. Afterall, plenty of (young) travellers nowadays would still have to scrimp and save to get there.

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