The highest mountain of Sri Lanka was known as Mount Pedro to the British, they abbreviated the original Sinhala name Piduru to that of the Christian saint Pedro. "Piduru" means "straw", referring to the grasslands on the flattened summit. The entire local name of the mountain, Piduruthalagala, translates to "straw plateau rock", "thala" is a Sinhala word known from several toponyms sucg "Mihinthala" or "Haputhala", whereas "gala" for "rock" or "hill" is even more common in the names of Sri Lankan locations.

Piduruthalagala, located just 10 km northeast of Nuwara Eliya, reaches an altitude of 2,524m or 8,281ft. The summit is not open to the public, as it is home to a a communications array and radar of the Sri Lankan army.

Yesterday, we informed you that Nuwan, founder and chairman of Lanka Excursions Holidays, still loves to do personal guiding for our clients. Due to his long stay in Italy, he speaks three lanfuages fluently, Sinhala and English and Italian.

Mr. Nuwan Gajanayaka is not only the chairman of our company. He still enjoys very much to come into contact with travellers from all parts of the wold and to be their personal guide. It's still possible to reserve a tour guided by him. But because he, of course, is a busy person and cannot manage to travel with all the guests, there is only one easy way to reserve him as a personal guide for your Sri Lanka round tours: Simply try by inquiring as early as possible and book many months in advance...

Lunuganga, meaning "Salt River" is the name of a peninsula within the Dedduwa Lake. It was named by its owner Geoffrey Bawa. The former country house of Sri Lanka's most renowned architect has become a major attraction for day-trippers from Bentota and Beruwela and other southwest-coast beaches. The small peninsula had been used as a cinnamon estate during the Dutch colonial period and become a rubber plantation during the British era. Geoffrey Bawa became the landowner in 1949 and developed the Lunuganga Estate into his weekend residence. His ambition was to create a Sri Lankan style of garden architecture including elements of Italian and English gardens in a tropical environement. Bawa lived here almost half a century. After he passed away, he was cremated in the gardens. The estate has been managed by the Lunuganga Trust, a group of his former friends, who devoloped the arcitecturally significant site into a country house hotel.

Read more about what to see in Lunuganga...

Sri Lanka travel destinations have been the main subject of our blog articles so far. Besides additional other topics, the series will continue. Tomorrow we will publish a short article about the private residence and garden of Sri Lanka's most famous archtiect, Geoffrey Bawa.

Currently, the weather in Sri Lanka is exactly what you expect during the monsoon season (July till September):

The sky is blue in the east and the west of the island, particularly in Anuradhapura, Jaffna, Trincomalee, and Arugam Bay,

whereas in Colombo and Galle and Ratnapura and other places in the southwest of the island heavy showers occur at times.

Spells of showers also occur in Kandy and Nuwara Eliya and other regions in the central highlands.

Strong gusty winds up to 50-60 kmph are likely over the island.

Starting tomorrow, our blog will publish one-week weather forecasts - for various regions regions of Sri Lanka - om every Monday.

Northern, eastern and south-eastern parts of the island are becoming dry exactly when monsoon season is starting at the south-western coast. Many wild animals can be observed in the dryzone right now, in wildlife parks in particular, as almost all national parks in Sri Lanka's are situated in the dryzone.

Many fruits are ripe in July and August, this is a reason for better chances to observe sloth bears now, for example in Sri Lanka's largest national parks, Wilpattu and Yala. Palu fruits are the favourite fruits of sloth bears. When Palu fruits are ripe in July and August, sloth bears can more easily be observed in Sri Lanka's wildlife parks than in any other season.

Almost half of Sri Lanka's sloth bears live outside national parks. In Kudumbigala near Okkanda (at the border of Kumana NP) you have best chances to spot sloth bears without entrance ticket. Though a sloth bear's preferred diet are insects and particularly termites and ants, 50% or even 70% of their food are fruits during this season. Of course, Baloo's relatives eat honey, too.
    
Baloo is called "the sleepy brown bear" in Rudyard Kipling's "jungle book". However, "Bhalu" is the Hindi word for the species of bears most common in South Asia, the sloth bear. Baloo, Mowgli's teacher and helper in the jungle, is a character well-known for his sleepiness. An impression of sleepiness was exactly the reason why the British called India's Melursus ursinus a "sloth" bear. Though, in contrast to most other bears, this Southasian species is not a hibernating animal (no winter sleep), sloth bears are less actice during the wet season.

Sri Lanka's subspecies of sloth bears, Baloo's cousin, is slightly smaller than bhalus on the mainland, a feature applying to many island subspecies. In contrast to Indian sloth bears, their Sri Lankan relatives mate during wet and dry season alike. Their preferred habitats are monsoon forests of lower altitude, those in India occur in open grassland as well.

Our Lanka-Excursions-Holidays blog will from now on deal with a larger variety of themes, including Sri Lankan history and current affairs.

If you are looking for the emblematic picture, a hallmark of Sri Lanka, representing the appearance of this particular country and no other world region:

It’s the white dome of a brick dagoba on a dark granite rock boulder. Similar kinds of boulders and monad rocks, which are a characteristic feature of Sri Lanka’s lowlands, can be found in all parts of the former South-Continent called Gondhwana, namely in South America, Africa, Australia and India. But none of these world regions is Buddhist. So you will rarely find white dagobas built on those continents and subcontinents.

Dagobas (stupas) from earlier Buddhist periods can be found in India, of course, but they are earthen mounds or elaborate stone monuments, usually not painted with white colour - and actually not as many or as densely distributed as in Sri Lanka. However, there is at least one country with even more stupas than Sri Lanka. Many, many, really many more "Chedis" - the Southeast-Asian form of dagobas - are hallmarks of Myanmar, formerly known as Birma. But they are not built on dark rock boulders. Thailand and Myanmar and other Buddhist areas of Asia were not part of the archcontinent Gondhwana. Myanmar’s stupas are golden and not white and their shapes do resemble bells and not hemispheres. But there is a hemispheric form of Chedis in Myanmar, too.

To come to a conclusion: These hemispherical forms are called “Ceylonese” or “Sinhalese” in Myanmar. The reason is: They were built by a group of monks that introduced a monastic reform from Sri Lanka. Monks from Myanmar were studying in Sri Lanka and documented their loyalty to the country of that form of Buddhism they considered to be more pure and unadulterated. Accordingly they started creating dagobas in a more Sinhalese fashion. The most famous examples are the Sapada brick pagoda in Bagan (Pagan) bearing the name of the reform monk who returned from Sri Lana, and the even more eye-catching hemispheric and glimmering white Kaunghmudaw-Pagoda in Sagaing near Mandalay.

Nevertheless, it is not built on an even eye-catching dark rock, which can be seen at many places in Sri Lanka - and only in Sri Lanka.