Day 17 Yala National Park 12 August

The day starts early as it would when one is going on safari. 

5.15 coffee and the Jeep arrived with us as the only guests at 5.30am. About a 20 min drive to the ticket office of Yala National park.

Absolute chaos, jeeps everywhere and a long queue to buy the ticket ( with the assistance of our Jeep driver and tracker). Ticket rubber stamped in triplicate and off we go.

It is a rough old trek, thank goodness for 4WD.

Spotted a young elephant early but not with any of her chums.

It was truly a fabulous morning to see so many of these critters in there natural habitat.

Mongoose, crocodiles, a bear!, boars, loads of water buffaloes in the lakes or wewa and so many birds.

But alas no leopards but many, many paw prints on the sandy road and lots of evidence of past dinners.

To be honest, if I were a leopard and hundreds of Jeeps invaded my rock, I wouldn’t hang around either.

This park as well as so many other areas in Sri Lanka were effected by the tsunami in 2004.

On that day 15 tourists and 29 locals were lost and a number of others were reported missing.

It seems that the animals instinctively left the area prior to the big wave and it appears there losses were minimal.

Back to our hut and a very leisurely afternoon was spent reading and drinking tea.

Our hosts are cooking us a BBQ this evening, we do fear a little but it was actually delicious.

Barbecue chicken and boiled veges with homemade bbq sauce and they still manage to slip in a rice and potato curry.

The wildlife in our roof were a bit of an issue last night.......later