Asia trip: Udawalawe National Park

We haven’t done any safari in our lives. So when we did our research about Sri Lanka, we decided to try one. Especially as Sri Lanka has a great population of wild elephants and my dream has always been to see them. There are two options – Udawalawe or Yala National Park. The one that suited our itinerary the most was Udawalawe. As we wanted to do the morning safari from 6 to 11 am we booked 2 nights in a little homestay White Tusk near the park. We booked our safari tour in advance through email that someone shared and recommended on Tripadvisor. Our host Sobitha was amazing. We were the only guests staying at her place and she tried to help us with everything she could. She had a little garden with all kinds of fruit, herbs and spices and she gave us a little tour around it when we arrived.

Pradeep – our guide picked us up just before 6 am with his jeep. We saw a beautiful sunrise on our way to the park. Unfortunately, the bad news was waiting for us. Pradeep had double-booked himself. We were quite disappointed as the tour is still quite expensive to make any concessions. He apologized to us and promised to speak about the price later. We didn’t have many options. It was already after 6 am, we were still far away from the entrance to say no and find someone else plus he looked very sad about it so we agreed to share our jeep with other people. They weren’t that bad and they didn’t see it coming too so we were in it together. Little disappointment for the beginning, but right after we entered the park we saw our first wild elephants feeding themselves by the road. It was amazing. Pradeep took us to see them from a different angle to not be surrounded by all of those other jeeps full of people.

After a couple of very happy minutes, we continued our tour. In the beginning, we were excited about every peacock, every little bird or lizard we passed. Later not that much and we were more curious about other elephants, buffaloes, crocodiles. We found them several times. Pradeep used to work in the park so he told us many interesting (sometimes scary 😀 ) things about elephants. One of them was so close to us that if we wanted to we could easily touch him. Being not even one meter from such a gorgeous, but giant animal was an incredible experience. Again one of those we will remember forever, one of we had dreamt about for a long time.

In the park, we saw one female elephant with a collar on her neck so naturally, we asked what it means. Pradeep said that this elephant had come from Transit home and has trouble to join the herd so they are collecting her data and keeping eyes on her. He recommended us to definitely visit this Transit home and because we had no plans for the rest of the day, we gave it go. Elephant transit home is something like an orphanage for elephant babies and after a while, they are returned to wildlife. At 9 am, 12 am, 3 pm and 6 pm you can see them being fed. It was only 1 kilometre from our homestay. There were many children that day, but we could clearly see the feeding and it was sooo cute and heart-warming. We saw more than 28 baby elephants. From the smallest ones to slightly bigger ones. Our day couldn’t end up better than this.

Despite that the beginning wasn’t the best and we were a little sad to not have the whole jeep for ourselves, we had an amazing time and saved 3500 rupees – yaay. Sobitha’s delicious brunch was just a cherry on the top of our amazing morning.

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