Photography has been a crucial part of my life for the last 8 years. However, it has now become the vast time killing factor. As I’m interested in mapping, Local guides and mapping took an interesting part in my life. I enjoy trekking trails being a responsible nature lover. I and some of my friends have this regular habit of trekking into forests whenever we find time. We use to go there, stay in places cook and eat in traditional way.
This time it was another journey in Batticaloa, some colleagues like me who were stressed out of the device driven world joined me. It was a pleasure to be close to the nature with fresh breath without any pollutions and man-made disturbances. All that we could experience was just nature, nature and nature at its purest.
On the way towards the wild, we first saw a huge Banyan tree which an enormous number of prop roots which literally turned it into a separate rich ecosystem which had its own balance of flora and fauna. The single tree itself pretender to be another forest. Under this Banyan tree, there was a Narasimha Bhairava temple which was considered as a temple for the Deity who secures the villagers from evil. This was followed by a very narrow path with a lot of shrubs where we couldn’t take the car in. So that we parked it outside and went into the wild.
While trying to reach the forest, we met an old man who was cleaning the temple premises under the Banyan tree. We thought of having a little chat with him to grab some idea about how the place is. We asked him whether it is a safe place and how long can we stay in the forest (assuming that we can spend the night). However, that man warned us not to stay beyond 4 pm as the wild elephants take the custody after that. This was believable as we could see some fresh elephant dung on our way.
We went forward and we could see many rocks here and there. Also at the entrance, I saw a skull of a buffalo which was dried and decayed. This scared us at first. However, we decided to continue the journey. I took my macro lens outside and started capturing the minute aspects of the tiny objects. Of course, the friends who joined me started losing patience and scolding me for spending so much time on every small aspect. However, we wanted to get out of the forest as soon as possible before the wild is taken under the custody of its owners, the wildlife.
After passing some distance, we say a nice mushroom like rock. When we went neat to that, one of my friend told me that this might be an archeological site looking at some aspects based on his previous experience. As soon as I heard about the archeological significance, I tried calling my colleague @AnuradhaP as he is one of the Archeology enthusiasts whom I know. However, I couldn’t contact him as there were no signal on my mobile. So we decided to take photos as much as possible. It was surprising for all of us, being natives of Batticaloa for this long time and we never knew anything about this kind of a place. When we went near the rock, we saw some stones arranged in a strange manner and some excavations has been done. This may sometimes be caused by a wild boar or people. The roads were ploughed and some stone carvings were really nice and neatly done in cubic shapes. We took a lot of photos of the nice ecosystem. I realized the fact that this ecosystem has been exploited by human beings only after reaching home and transferring the data from the devices.
On the second day, it was another place from nearly 40 km from that place. It’s a place near Unnichai tank where we use to go to take a bath and have fun on weekends and holidays. The place was really nice with a lot of paddy fields and manual ploughs that are driven by bullocks. It was really a nice place to capture. This time we went on Motorbikes knowing the fact that accessing these places by car is difficult. However, at a point, even the bikes go stuck and we had to carry on walking. On the way, a local villages also joined us. He knew all the paths. We were surprised to see his familiarity. Having GPS and Walkie Talkies even we were struggling to find each other. But this time, this villages was very helpful. He told us many stories about the existence of the wild. We shared our food with him too and took a lot of photographs. Here also we saw many inscriptions written in many languages. However, some of them seemed to be destroyed too. Also we saw a partially destroyed pond like water body which has written inscriptions in the middle of the water. Also we could see many colorful stones here and there. However, I got the traces of these places and have uploaded the 360s to Google maps.
360 virtual tour
My nature trail ended up with a lot of cool memories. Also, I have sent an email to Department of Archeology to keep them informed. Hope there will be some good things happening soon in saving these places.
