After the hot water wells at Madunagala that morning, we drove the fifty odd kilometres to Tissamaharama, or Tissa as the town is commonly called, stopping briefly to taste fresh yoghurt at the state run farm in the village of Wirawila.

Tissa was the capital of Sri Lanka’s Ruhuna Kingdom in the 3rd century B.C. Only a few buildings from that period can still be seen today apart from the restored Tissa Dagoba (with a circumference of 165m and 55.8m tall, it is one of the biggest Dagobas in the country and is thought to have held a tooth relic and a forehead bone relic of the Buddha) and the large artificial Tissa Wewa lake (they are called Tanks in Sri Lanka) which was part of a sophisticated ancient irrigation system. Water in the tank is retained at about 13 feet depth and there is a 5 foot gap between the water level…