Dambulla

Dambulla's history begins with its rock. The caves under the overhang were occupied by Buddhist monks in the last centuries BC, and inscriptions at the site record early donations. Tradition holds that King Valagamba, driven out of Anuradhapura by South Indian invaders in the first century BC, sheltered here for years and, on regaining his throne, had the caves converted into a temple. Later kings added to them: images were carved and installed, the caves were plastered and painted, and in the twelfth century Nissanka Malla of Polonnaruwa is said to have had many of the statues gilded, giving the place its name of the Golden Rock Temple.

The painting and sculpture seen now belong largely to the Kandyan period of the eighteenth century, when the temple was restored under Kandyan kings and covered with murals of the Buddha's life and of Sri Lankan history, laid over earlier work. The site was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991, and a large golden Buddha and a museum were later built at the foot of the rock.

The modern town below grew for a much plainer reason: it stands where the main roads from Colombo, Kandy, Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa and Trincomalee cross. Irrigation and resettlement schemes in the twentieth century brought farmers into the surrounding dry zone, and the government's wholesale market, the Dedicated Economic Centre, made Dambulla the clearing house for much of the country's vegetable trade. A cricket stadium followed in 2001, built on the edge of town in a matter of months.

Two quite different lives share the same address. Dambulla is a place of pilgrimage, where white-clad families climb the rock with lotus flowers and oil for the lamps, monks tend the caves, and the great full-moon days fill the terrace; and it is a hard-working market town whose rhythms are set by lorries, produce prices and bus timetables. Visitors usually see only the first, since most arrive, climb the rock and leave for Sigiriya the same day.

The surrounding countryside keeps the customs of the dry-zone village: the temple and the tank at the centre of life, water shared under old rules of cultivation, and dansal set up at the roadside during Vesak and Poson to hand out rice, drinks and sweets free to travellers. The perahera season brings drummers and dancers through the streets, and the Kandyan tradition of drumming and dance is strong here, since this is the northern edge of the old Kandyan kingdom.

The town is predominantly Sinhalese and Buddhist, with Muslim traders long established in the market trade and a smaller Tamil population. Manners are conservative: modest dress, shoes removed at temples and in homes, and a reserve with strangers that gives way quickly to hospitality. The temple's rules on dress and behaviour are enforced, and pictures taken with a Buddha image behind a smiling visitor are a reliable way to cause serious offence.

Tens of thousands of people live in the town and the surrounding divisional area, the second largest urban centre in Matale District after Matale itself, spread between the built-up junction and farming villages around the tanks. The economy rests on three things: agriculture, the wholesale market and the traffic. Farmers grow paddy under the irrigation schemes and, on higher ground and chena plots, chilli, onions, maize and vegetables; the Economic Centre buys, sorts and redistributes produce from across the country, working hardest between midnight and dawn; and the junction supports garages, hardware stores, lodgings and eating houses for drivers.

Tourism is the fourth pillar and the most visible to outsiders — guesthouses, guides, craft stalls, drivers and the hotels out at Kandalama — but it employs far fewer people than the vegetable trade. Government offices, schools and a base hospital account for much of the remaining work.

Days start before dawn and slow at midday when the heat becomes hard to work in, picking up again in the late afternoon. The town's persistent problems are those of the dry zone: water that is plentiful in some years and scarce in others, elephants raiding crops and damaging houses as farms push into forest, and a chronic kidney disease of uncertain cause that has long affected farming families across the north-central plains. Traffic through the junction, and the lorry parks around the market, add noise and dust that residents complain about regularly.

The everyday meal is rice and curry in its dry-zone form: rice with dhal, a pumpkin or jackfruit curry, long beans or snake gourd, a mallung of shredded greens and coconut, papadam, and pol sambol, the pounded mixture of scraped coconut, chilli, lime and onion that accompanies nearly everything. Freshwater fish from the tanks, dried fish and chicken are the common proteins. Older grains have not disappeared: kurakkan, finger millet, is eaten as flatbread or as a thick porridge, and green gram and cowpeas from the chena plots appear boiled with coconut at breakfast.

Because the town is a market and a crossroads, its street food is that of the bus stand: short eats in glass cases — fish buns, cutlets, rolls, vadai — along with kottu, roti chopped on a hot plate with vegetables, egg and meat to a loud, rhythmic clatter, and hoppers and string hoppers in the evening. Tea is strong, milky and heavily sweetened.

Two local products stand out. Buffalo curd, set in shallow clay pots and eaten with kithul treacle or jaggery, is sold from stalls along every road out of town. And because the Dedicated Economic Centre gathers the produce of the entire country, Dambulla's own kitchens have unusually good access to hill-country vegetables as well as dry-zone ones — leeks and carrots from Nuwara Eliya alongside local jackfruit, drumstick and wood-apple, which is pulped into a sour-sweet drink sold at the roadside.