Hambantoto, Sri Lanka

Wild game is certainly different then the city. We took a safari drive through the Yala National Park in Southern Sri Lanka today. The port we are docked at opened a cruise port in 2010 and we are the second ship to visit. You can see that the entire area is being built up for industry and tourism but it just hasn't developed yet. I suspect the area will be quite different 5-10 years from now as they are putting some serious infrastructure into it.
The Park is pretty rustic but they have a dozen or so safari jeeps that take people around the dirt roads looking for animals and we did find most of them :-) We got a great view of a leopard sitting in a tree just off the road. We didn't get a look this close in a week in Africa. We also saw the Asian elephant and even got a view of a couple monitor lizards mating beside where we were parked to look at something else. I think they thought we were invading their privacy. :-)
There were also a bunch of water buffalo and a great selection of birds. It was a lot of fun and once we washed the dirt off from the open jeeps and the red dirt roads we were ready to go again.Read more