What would a trip to Sri Lanka be without shooting a few elephants? I am talking photos, in one of the best places to see pachyderms in the wild in Sri Lanka: Uda Walawe national park. This park is an enormous nature reserve surrounding one of the large resevoirs in southern Sri Lanka and is home to more than 450 elephants.
Our trip from Galle to the national park went pretty smoothly - we have been taking local buses to get around and for the most part it has been pretty good. Although lacking in the comfort department, these buses make up for it in personality. All of the buses have always had blasting Sri Lankan music coming from what looks to be someones old home stereo speakers bungy tied to the overhead luggage racks. For mood lighting, there is always some form of hindu or buddhist deity surrounded in flashing LED lights mounted at the front of the bus. Air conditioning comes in the form of open windows that you can dangle limbs out of when it gets too hot - and of course, there is always the doors which stay permanently open (makes it easy to get on and off - the bus doesn't really even need to stop - you just jump out as it slows down). With little space (no room for luggage on the bus) it always makes for an entertaining ride trying to stack our bags on the impromptu luggage rack that also doubles as the dashboard at the front of the bus... Our only complaint is that our fat western bodies don't actually fit into Sri Lankan bus seats. The standard long distance bus has FIVE seats in every row. I am not a big guy, but when I sit down, I overflow at least about 6 inches into the neighbouring seat - when Marie and I sit side-by-side, you can do the math: one butt cheak is floating in mid-air out in the aisle. It is good value though, with a two hour bus ride costing around a dollar (or sometimes less).
We stayed in a small guesthouse outside of the park called Mansala which was amazing. The family who ran the place was super friendly, they prepared amazing homemade dinners of Sri Lankan food for reasonable prices and they were always available to help. We booked a safari into the park with our guesthouse for about $40/person - compared to safaris in Africa this seemed like a great deal! We have heard some people calling it the "poor man's safari".
The next morning at 5:30am a beat-up old LandRover (circa 1960) showed up to take us into the park. Although a bit worse for wear, it looked like it would do the job - although I was a bit concerned that the tires were bald and we were supposedly going off-road...
It had actually torrentially rained the night before and unfortunately for us, this made finding elephants pretty hard. With all the water everywhere, the elephants didn't need to hang around the shores of the resevoir where they are normally found. This meant that we spent the greater part of the morning searching far and wide through the savanna-like landscape with no luck. We did, however, see a lot of birds, wild buffalo and crocodilles. Not sure if this was just this park, but there were a huge number of peacocks - they were everywhere in this place. In the trees, on the roads - everywhere.
Midway through the morning my concerns about the vehicle turned out to be justified - we got stuck in a large pool of mud. After a bit of pushing, some creative work with a jack and a lot of determination, flying mud and smoking tires we got out of the mud pit - note to driver: having bald tires is not a good idea when off-roading.
Just as we were about to give up for the day we finally found a roaming family of several mothers with babies! We even litterally ran into a few right by the side of one of the road taking a mud bath in a large pool of water.
Definately worth the trip.
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