I’ve been excited about going on a safari tour since we started our trip. My excitement probably grew further when we spent time with the elephants in Luang Prabang in Laos. As much as we loved that experience we craved seeing these majestic animals in a more natural setting.
There are a few different national parks in Sri Lanka but most tourists debate between Yala and Udawalawe National Parks.
Yala is larger, is the most popular option and offers some chance to see the (very illusive) leopards. Our research prior to the trip made it sound like Yala would resemble a car park with hundreds of jeeps lined up to try spot the occasional animal. This turned out to be wrong – more on that later.
We chose Udawalawe National Park for our trip in April 2017 because it is smaller and has a greater concentration of elephants (therefore far more chance to see them). As it turns out you are basically guaranteed to see elephants in both national parks although you will see a greater number in Udawalawe.
We stayed at Domain Elephant Bungalows in Udawalawe town. I should note here that we saw absolutely nothing of the town and ate every meal at the guesthouse. While we were there the country was celebrating the Sri Lankan New Year – our third New Year of 2017 – which basically meant homemade fireworks going off all night sometimes so close I was sure they were in our room! The very simple, three room, family run guesthouse offers good standard, clean accommodation and for a wallet friendly $8 per night for a double room (with homemade breakfast for free on New Year’s day!). The family were very friendly though we had significant communication barriers which made most of our interactions awkward but effective!
The guesthouse has their own jeeps and drivers so (after some confusion) we found ourselves off on a safari trip to Udawalawe National Park less than an hour after checking-in. The jeep was OK and the driver and guide very friendly. They gave Rochelle (our friend who travelled with us for part of Sri Lanka) a metal bolt and instructions to tap the window if we saw anything we wanted to stop for and to tap twice when we were ready to move on. Simple, effective communication – I like!
Udawalawe is stunning! We saw countless elephants (including small families with babies) going about their lives and often merely metres from the jeep. The experience again left us in awe of these beautiful animals.
Warning… many elephant photos follow!
Of course, there were more than just elephants with plenty of monkeys (some too friendly for comfort), crocodiles, water buffalo and plenty more.
The views on the drive (even without the wildlife) were pretty special…
Aside from the larger animals there were countless stunning birds with bright colours to catch the attention of the eye (and the camera lense)…
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The safari on the first day lasted about three hours (excluding driving 30 minutes or so there and back) and cost us $35 each including the jeep, guide and entrance fees!
The next day we considered going back to Udawalawe National Park again but after some (confused…) conversation we arranged to do a trip to Yala National Park from our guesthouse in Udawalawe. This meant a very adventurous (and windy!) open air ride for three hours in the safari jeep along a highway to Yala. We thought the way there was an adventure but as you’ll see shortly we had more fun to come!
Once we finally arrived at Yala we were greeted by this friendly guy before we had even passed the ticket gate.
It was three seconds after the entrance gate that the fun began. We stopped so I could take some photos of some cute monkeys in the trees. The monkey in the pic below (a real troublemaker!) saw me taking pics and climbed down the tree and ran to our jeep. He jumped up to the backseat next to Jen and snarled at me showing his teeth. It was at this point we realised (as did the monkey) that the guesthouse had packed us a plastic bag full of bananas, a melon and a knife. The monkey grabbed one banana, looked at us and realised he was the dominant male in this jeep then called around to call his buddies. About 30 monkeys started climbing down the trees and running to the jeep – Jen was shouting for our driver to drive away (unfortunately for some reason they were a bit too chilled out and had slow reaction time – this improved later after they had a few snacks) when the monkey grabbed the rest of the bananas (and the knife!!) and left the jeep to share with his monkey mates.
We drove away and enjoyed a few hours exploring the park. It is MUCH bigger than Udawalawe and our drivers (not being from this area) got lost in the middle of nowhere a few times. Every now and then we would see another jeep full of people who had stories of seeing a leopard nearby so we would fly through the park only to miss the leopard by moments each time.
After an awesome day with plenty of animal sightings (see the gallery at the bottom of this post!) we had to rush out of the park to be out by the 6pm hard deadline. A few moments before we got to the exit a leopard casually strolled in front of us and walked off into the tall grass. Despite having my camera ready for this moment all day I panicked and only got a poor shot!
The drive out of the park started with a stunning sunset to cap off a special day!
We still had a three hour drive back to our guesthouse. I now know that riding in the back of an open air jeep along a highway in the dark results in mouthfulls of bugs (and we had to wear our sunglasses even though it was dark to keep the bugs out of our eyes!) and a pretty hairy ride. Our drivers opted for the “new highway” which turned out to be only partly built and every 20 minutes or so we would come to an abrupt, unsigned road closure – have to drive on the wrong side of the road for a while – then randomly the highway would become a dirt road through a village before recommencing as a paved road. We got home safely and with memories to last a lifetime.
I’d highly recommend doing both parks, they have enough differences to keep you very interested – but perhaps stay the night in Yala and take a local tour and keep your bananas hidden..
I leave you with a few pics from Yala, scroll through to see more of the awesome wildlife!
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