Day 8. Friday

If I wasn’t going on a safari today at 5.15am, nothing would have got me out of bed. It has been full on everydayday. The 4x4s arrived and we got on 6 at a time. They have raked seating so we were sorted by height, the big boys had to sit at the front so they wouldn’t bump their heads on the roof.

  

It was a 20 minute drive to the national park and what a shock when we got there. Scores, nay, hundreds of jeeps were queued up to get in as the gates didn’t open till 6am - think Disneyland.

  

There was a bit of jockeying for position, especially those with Chinese passengers, who all had masks on. By this time it was getting light and when we went through the gates the park police counted us in. Funnily enough they didn’t count us coming out. Free meal for the leopards possibly. Anyway in Sri Lanka there is not as big a variety of big game.as in Africa and also no tigers, I was sad about that as I really wanted to see one. The tracks were very bumpy and when it started to bucket down, they soon became very muddy. The jeeps thinned output although the drivers were with each other by phone so as soon as one spotted wildlife, everyone converged causing bunching. All the drivers waited patiently for their turn except the ones with the Chinese who beeped their horns, the masked ones obviously didn’t like waiting

In a nutshell, we saw dozens of birds. My favourites were the pelican, and of course Ronnie regaled us with the poem about the pelican, his belly can, I don’t know how the hell he can., the painted stork just gorgeous, the green bee eater, the peacocks and the kingfisher. 

The painted stork

The peacock

If you are interested in twitching send me a message and I’ll give you the full list. We saw crocodiles, monkeys,deer, lizards,wild boar with piglets, hundreds of water buffalo

Land monitor

Wild boar and piglet

Cheeky monkeys

Water buffalo

Crocodile yawning

The beautiful painted stork

Crocodile after a paintedstork for breakfast

but NO ELEPHANTS and NO LEOPARDS!   Oh dear. Actually at one bunching point the guide said there was a leopard in a tree in the distance but you had to be a recent visitor to Specsavers to see it.
However one of our party, Jean, who was even shorter than me and therefore in the back seats had bought some Marks and Spencer’s rich fruit cake so we had a very nice little tiffin break. I don’t know if it was the tiffin or the fact that the sun came out but it lifted our spirits and on theway out of the park, we saw a tusker emerging from the bushes. Hurrah!

Tusker peeping out of the bushes 

Had to have a little snooze after a late breakfast back at the hotel. Then Ronnie had chosen to go on another safai, sadly it turned out to be more of the same but in the heat of the day. I have never seen a man more desperate for a Lion beer, well any beer really
At this hotel in Yala, again we had an outdoor bathroom with an open ceiling so we were not surprised to see bird poo and little droppings, turned out to be a little chipmunk which we saw on the balcony later. But what made my day was a lot of screeching outside. I looked though the window and there was a monkey on the wall and 2 seconds later her baby jumped up for a cuddle. Magic

Mum and baby on our balcony

While Ronnie was on his safari, I went for a walk on the beach. There are sand dunes and turtles lay their eggs, which are then protected by a little wooden fence. I found an old hatch site and was surprised that the egg shells were soft and rubbery, not like chicken’s egg shell.

 
The rocky end of the beach

Live turtle nest    

 Empty turtle shells

Further down the beach I came across evidence that wild elephants do roam here as well. In fact Su said he had heard one trumpeting in the night. Feral dogs are everywhere in Sri Lanka but not so much in packs. There were 10 here and one definite leader. He did all the barking and lead the way. But they don’t approach you. Except the one in Kandy which came from nowhere and bit a man in our party on the leg.

Pack of feral dogs

Dead dog pose. 

More dead dog pose 

And unluckily, and inexplicably, he had not had a rabies jab before he left the UK.That meant several hours at a local hospital and a further visit today. He’s fine though. Anyway, a word about the dogs here. They are all the same size, same pricked ears, same short coat, same straight tail and mostly have their ribs showing. The only difference is they vary in colour. They sleep on their sides so they look dead and they sleep anywhere, including in the road and in full sun
And so for our evening cocktail and dinner  . You really could not ask for a bigger selection at the buffet. Curries galore of course, lots of local dishes, not always curried but always hot, bloody hot!

 

 No  more chillis thank you

Old Sri Lankan game  guess what your dinner is tonight 😆

 I fact I had a cheese toasty at lunchtime and it had chillis in that, lots of vegetables (with chillis) and the occasion sop to picky eaters - lasagne, shepherds pie but WITH CHILLIS. And lots of things which you simply didn’t know what they were.

Day 7 Thursday

Today.our guide, Su, told us we would be travelling down from the central highlands to the east coastal plain. He said that the climate would change from hot to bloody hot. He has a brilliant command of English an a sense of humour to go with it. We drove along steep winding roads like those in the Alps but I must say that the drivers are all very courteous, backing up as necessary. Full marks to our driver, Prianta, who  managed to get within an inch or so of the edge of the road next to a sheer drop although some of our party had to get off the coach and change their pants


We passed a Hindu Temple at the side of the road.

It was said to be the place where the king of Sri Lanka brought an Indian princess he had kidnapped, Sita, and kept her for 7 years. The monkey god brought her a message from her husband who then came and rescued her. The monkey god statue has a nice string of lemons round his neck, which is odd as lemons and oranges don’t grow in Sri Lanka but do in India

The villages we passed through all had a Hindu feeling about them - the womens’ saris were different, there were lots of little Hindu temples and cows roamed freelyin thestreets

Eventually we arrived in Udevaliva at a baby elephant transit camp. It’s not an orphanage although there are orphanages do exist but the elephants get used to mixing with humans and can’t be released into the wild. Here the baby elephants which are orphans mix freely with wild jungle elephants. There are 6000 wild elephants in Sri Lanka and 450 domesticated ones. They can live for 70 to 80 years. They live in a matriarchal herd, that is the females and the babies. The babies are fed by their mothers till they are 7 years old. When they reach maturity at 14 years, the young males leave the herd and live solitarily until it is mating time when they briefly return to the herd.  Only 7% of males grow tusks, they are called tuskers, and none of the females. So the Ivory is very rare and precious. Punishment for killing an elephant is rightly very harsh. Elephants have 6 sets of grinding teeth over their lifetime which fall out and are replaced as they wear down. Towards the end of their life, their last set of teeth become worn and they have to seek easier food to chew so they often migrate to marshy ground. Eventually they die of old age and so a lot of elephant bones are found in these areas. It has long been a misconception that they come to these so called elephant graveyardsto die. They don’t, they’re just looking for softer food.  There are usually 10 to 15 elephants in a herd but in times of drought they join up with others to form a larger herd to drink from reservoirs, where of course there is more competition.
Anyway the transit camp. The babies are fed 4 times a day on formula milk which is poured down a funnel and tube straight into their mouth

As soon as it’s over they trot off to where we were waiting and chew some grass laid out for them.

Except a couple of cheeky ones who tried to sneak up for seconds. The keeper stood at the river and let them come up to the feeding station 2 by 2 as aelephants should do according to nursery rhymes.  Their ages ranged from 2 weeks (ahhhh) to 7 I think.

There are over 40 young elephants currently at the centre

Only 2 weeks old!

A couple of them were tuskers.  There was also an older one who had had her leg amputated after treading on a mine.  They had fitted her with a prosthetic leg and she seemed quite happy but she could of course never be released. She would probably only live for 25 to 30 years as her leg would not be able to support her adult weight for much longer

You can see the prosthetic on the back left leg

And so on to Yala where tomorrow we will be up at the crack of dawn for a 5.30am start to our safari. This time we are hoping to see elephants in the wild.