We took a city tour in the first day of our stay in Colombo, capital city of Sri Lanka. We hired a cab driver for our 5 days trip in Sri Lanka. We basically relied on our driver, Nana, to take us to the heritage sites in Colombo and made sure that we didn’t miss some of the recommended places from Tripadvisor and some other Sri Lanka travel websites.

Nana first took us to Independence Memorial Hall located at the Independence Square. As the name suggests, it is a national monument built for commemoration of the independence of Sri Lanka from the British rule with the establishment of Dominion of Ceylon on February 4, 1948.

The Independence Memorial Hall, also always written as Commemoration Hall

A row of majestic stone lions guarding in front of the hall

The caresses of the breeze played over my face, and instantly I felt so refreshed. This was the only place in Colombo that reminded me of the existence of wind. I was kinda reluctant to leave the hall and let the flaming sun to burn my skin once again.

Sri Lanka is DREADFULLY hot.

Interior of the hall

There were some Sri Lankans sitting about in the hall, chatting and looking at us aimlessly. An old Sri Lankan chap approached us without hesitancy and held forth about the stories of the pictures on the wall. We were kinda shocked with his overwhelming enthusiasm. He then introduced himself as a History teacher. Without any doubt, I was immediately impressed of how enthusiastic the man was to even carry forward his spirit of teaching from education to tourism.

There were total 25 sculptures on the wall depict the history of Sri Lanka. The man explained to us of the story behind each sculpture. He made sure that we stood at the perfect spot to fully observe the picture of the sculpture. Don was like quite curious to look around and the man instructed him to stand right next to me to look only at the picture. I felt like I was back to school with my Hello Kitty bag and 2 lovely pony tails, hopped, skipped and jumped to attend the outdoor class.

Story on the wall: A monk welcoming monks

Arrival of Buddha in Sri Lanka for the first time

Buddha donates his head to Sri Lanka

I wanted to snap the photos of the sculptures during the ‘class’ but was warned by the teacher to only do it after the class -_-”

Carvings on the ceiling

Carvings on the pillars

Isn’t the hall kind of empty?

Not so empty now after building a statue there. The statue is called ‘Unwanted’

Teacher then brought us to see a real statue next to the hall. It’s a statue of Father of the Nation, first Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, Rt. Hon. Don Stephen Senanayake.

Statue of Rt. Hon. Don Stephen Senanayake

4 stone lions are guarding the first Prime Minister

Former parliament building can be seen from Independence Memorial Hall

After about 15 minutes lesson given by the old chap, we were requested to pay him Rs 200. All my good impression about this place and this teacher was instantly thrown to the drain. It was a trap! He didn’t tell us about his motive in the first place and we were misled to accept his ‘service’ unconsciously. We were reluctant to pay him but we finally surrendered in order to get rid of his pester power.

This was the first case we encountered. Later on during our subsequent trips, we encountered more and more similar touts that were really annoying and irritating.

Bought ice-cream from a mini ice-cream tuk-tuk before taking off

External Links:

Details from wikipedia

Lonely Planet Review

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