Yala National Park

Today, we did the one thing that we were looking forward to the most in Sri Lanka - a safari in Yala National Park! This was our first safari ever and we were so excited to see some wildlife. We had originally planned to do a full day safari (6am-6pm) to make the most of our time here. However, there has been near constant rain for 5 months here, which meant that the roads in the park have been continously flooded and/or badly damaged. It's also harder to spot animals in wet weather, so we didn't have high hopes on seeing much wildlife. Our guide recommended that we do a half day afternoon safari as there wouldn't be enough of the park accessible to warrant a full day safari. We ended up doing the afternoon safari, and it was the right choice! The morning safari that day was only able to access a very small part of the park, whereas by the time we arrived in the afternoon, roads had been fixed allowing us to go much further.

We left our guesthouse around 1pm, and it took about 45mins to arrive at Yala. As we arrived at the park entrance, huge sections of road were flooded (up to 0.5m in some sections), and only jeeps could get through. We saw heaps of animals just on the drive from the park entrance to the safari gate, including water buffalo, pelicans, storks, monitor lizards and crocodiles. As we pulled up to the gate, we were the 2nd jeep in line, which meant we were some of the first people to enter the park that afternoon.

We entered the park at exactly 2pm and within the first 30mins, in addition to the animals already spotted, we saw spotted deer, sambar deer, cormorants and mongoose. We watched a wild boar trot across the road and reunite with its family and a herd of spotted deer on the other side. Shortly after, we spotted a leopard sitting in a tree! After we pulled up, it climbed down from the tree, and walked right in front of our jeep - we couldn't believe our eyes! Yala National Park has the highest chance for guests to see a leopard, but there are many days were no leopards are spotted at all, and we found one in the first 30mins! We later found out that that was the only leopard spotted in the park that day, meaning that we were incredibly lucky to have seen it. Even our guide was super happy to see the leopard, as it had been days since he has spotted one in the park.

After the first 30mins or so, we spent the next 2-3hrs circling around the park on bumpy muddy roads. Many jeeps got stuck in the mud and had to be towed by others. We didn't have as much luck spotting animals as the day went on, most likely because of the increased number of jeeps driving around. Towards the end of the day, we finally spotted an Asian elephant. It got so close to us and walked behind our jeep! Satisfied that we'd seen everything we'd wanted to see (except a sloth bear, but they are incredibly rare), we exited the park at around 5.30pm as the sun was setting. As we drove out of the park, we had one last surprise with a group of hanuman monkeys hanging out on the road! We then drove the 45min back to our guesthouse as the sun was setting over the rice paddy fields, very hot, sticky and sore, but very satisfied.

We ended our day with a homemade dinner at our guesthouse of banana curry, chicken curry, pumpkin curry, dahl, salad and rice - one of the best meals we've had in Sri Lanka to finish off an awesome day!Read more