Sri Lanka & India 23/24

There were plenty of things advertised to do but a few were not possible with the swing bridge wiped out and the river uncrossable so we decided to do the nature walk. Now this wasn’t a nature walk like we had ever done before! We wondered why there were two guides needed but it became apparent fairly soon. There were wild elephants around and there was one who had been through that morning that was a lone elephant and was attacking humans. An angry elephant is not something you want to encounter!

One of the guides went further out in front and asked us to not talk so that he could listen out for signs of elephants. The other guide stayed close to us. He explained the escape routes should we encounter an elephant. Basically run and duck under the electric fence. If that was too far away then run up a bank or climb a tree. The lead guide would stay and ward off the elephant while we made our dash. All of this wasn’t hugely reassuring but it was an adventure we reasoned!

On our way we saw some pretty significantly sized elephant footprints and we were shown where an elephant had broken through a fence to reach a farmer's crops. On every farm there was a tree house where the farmer would sleep at night to protect his crops by warding off the elephant. First protection is the electric fence, second is fire crackers and thirdly a gun (they would shoot over the top of the elephant to scare it).

Then we were shown a footprint of a leopard. There weren’t many outside of the National Park but there was at least one living near us! We managed to navigate the trails without any encounters with life threatening animals and made it to the lake where the guide found a crocodile egg. Had to have been dead given it had been abandoned and not eaten, interesting all the same.Läs mer