Sri Lanka Day 7: Yala National Park Safari
- Will Boddington
- Nov 26, 2017
- 2 min read
We woke up at 4am to leave for Yala National Park. The sun rose whilst we sat in a queue of jeeps waiting for the park to open at 6am, during which time Janaka gave us a little heads up that he may need to ‘drive fast for a little bit’ to get ahead of the other jeeps as there were apparently 200 yesterday. We were a little worried because the local buses reminded us of the Harry Potter Knight Bus and they were just the day to day usual buses.. but it wasn’t actually too bad as we were near the front of the queue anyway.
The morning was quite eventful; we had seen various animals such as different birds, buffalo, wild boar and a couple elephants. Nearing the last hour of our safari and it had quietened down and we hadn’t seen much for a while then Janaka took a phone call. He let us know that the phone call was about a leopard that had been spotted. There are only ~8 leopards which roam all 5 of the park areas so it is quite a rare find, he said he can’t promise anything because it is quite far away but we’re going to head in the direction with our fingers crossed.
It took about 20 minutes of bumpy safari roads and driving though streams and after a total of 7 hours in the jeep we found the elusive leopard.
When we got back, Janaka's wife lent us their two bikes and we had a quick cycle around the wewa (lake) before grabbing some late lunch and heading back to have a shower.
Dinner was Sri Lankan curry (rice and various curries) at Janaka's house, cooked by his wife. Afterwards, we planned our journey for tomorrow with the help of Janaka. He sorted us out with a tuk tuk at 8.30am tomorrow to take us to where we can catch a direct bus to Ella.
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