CS Clancy Centenary Ride: Golden buddhas and celestial nymphs in the jungles of Ceylon

As the road twisted and turned out of Colombo and up into the Sri Lankan jungle, I was filled with admiration for Carl Stearns Clancy, the world's first around the world motorcyclist, whose journey we were following 100 years on.

How he had ridden these roads when they were rutted dirt and mud on a heavy, underpowered machine with one gear, no front brake and only a handful of horses to fling at these hills, was quite beyond me.

At Kandy, he found a picturesque lake bordered by restful hotels and luxuriant foliage, and after visiting the Dambulla Caves to view the 54 Buddhas there, by the time he got back to the Henderson it was 6.30pm, and darkness was only minutes away as he prepared to ride through the jungle to the rest house at Sigiri.

When he finally rolled up at the rest house after being almost scared to death by water buffalo, the two startled lady guests told him he was lucky to be alive.

After reading for a bit, he blew out the candle and settled down to sleep with his gun under the pillow.

The next morning, he climbed the 750 steps to the 1,500-year-old royal fortress of Sigiriya, or Lion Rock, built in the fifth century by King Kassapa as a combination of pleasure palace and impregnable fortress.

Hauling himself up a precarious wire-and-bamboo ladder, he found the so-called Sigiriya Damsels, frescoes of 500 girls who were either Kassapa’s consorts or celestial nymphs, and was delighted to find that they not only had fresh teenage complexions in spite of being almost 15 centuries old, but were, to a woman, topless.

Thus fortified, he sailed on to Penang, were his plans for a spot of gentlemanly motorcycling down the peninsula were scuppered by the news that the road petered out into swampy jungle 150 miles north of Singapore, which left no alternative but to continue to sail there on the Bulow.

Before it sailed, he leaped into a rickshaw for a tour around the capital, Georgetown, during which he managed to condemn the typical Malay as “a mixture of Chinese and monkey, and . . . about the most unreliable person on earth”.

How he quite managed to glean this comprehensive insight from a brief rattle around town is a mystery, for immediately after damning an entire race, he hurtled into the squalid business district.

He was much more impressed with the residential section, with luxurious bungalows surrounded by velvety lawns and flowering trees.

Soaked by a sudden downpour, he paid off the rickshaw driver and reboarded the Bulow for the day-and-a-half voyage south to Singapore.

Maze of temples
We arrived in Georgetown and did just as he had, jumping into a rickshaw and proceeding through a residential section in which the bungalows still slumbered behind flowering trees and velvety lawns.

The business section – by which I imagine Clancy meant the jetties on which the Chinese clans lived and traded, and the area just inland – was still a hiving, hawking maze of temples aromatic with joss smoke and noisy with the roar of small furnaces, the clang of tinsmiths, the buzz of saws and hiss of planes of the furniture-makers, the cluck of chickens in cages, the urgent tick of sewing machines, the slosh and steam of laundries and the silent, methodical labours of rattan weavers.

On the largest, the Chew Jetty, one of the stilt homes was available for rent, complete with air-con, TV, wi-fi and a karaoke set, just in case you wanted to invite the Wongs around for a good old sing-song of an evening.

Next week: Hong Kong and Shanghai