The Sigiriya Village is the perfect antidote for the strenuous climb and inevitable travelling over Sigiriya rock. The hotel declares it is ‘where nature meets culture’ and it offers the chance to stay in rooms spread out among a profusion of the actual greenery you can admire from the top of Sigiriya.
Activities at the hotel include sporting opportunities such as tennis, badminton, birding, trekking and safaris. Another attraction is the Ayurvedic Centre, which offers to rid the body of pollutants through herbal baths, steam baths, saunas, peeling treatments, head and body massages and the intriguing panda sweda treatment, which involves fermenting the body with herbal rice packs and fresh cow milk.
Sigiriya Village is a perfect place to use as a base from which to conquer the mighty rock and then to recover afterwards. All that’s needed is for the visitor to arrive worn out and with a desire to discover the village life in the shadow of Sigiriya rock, and you have a match made in heaven.
Rooms The complex consists of a number of clusters, which are built and decorated according to themes that revolve around the Sri Lankan village, which consists of three interlinking components – the temple, the stream and the paddy field. Firstly there are the Kingfisher rooms that correspond to the idea of the stream. Each room is decorated in blue with fish swimming across the bedspread and a kingfisher keeping watch over the sleeping guests.
The Paddy Field cluster features green interiors, natural woven boxes like those in which farmers store paddy, and even a rice pounder. The Temple cluster has long, straight walkways like those monks use for walking meditation, dagoba-shaped candle stands, and triangles on the curtains representing the design of temple walls. The saffron of monks’ robes provides much of the colour in the room.
In addition there is the Sigiriya cluster, where all the rooms feature a water pool by the door and are arranged around a moat that hosts hundreds of fish darting back and forth in its depths. I was naively fooled into thinking the moss-covered wall around this section was ancient, when actually it was designed to look that way in the not-so-ancient times when the hotel was constructed!
Dining In the evening, the Sigiriya Village is not lit brightly in order to retain the atmosphere of the jungle. The daytime sound of birdsong is replaced by night creatures whose melodies accompany your stroll to the restaurant. The waiters are clad in the traditional shirt and sarong, and flowers in bowls of water at the entrance welcome you. The buffet is laid out before the guests with the highlight being the home-grown organic produce from the farm.
