Kumama to near Yala national park

Our earliest start yet with a 4am alarm call. This saw is meeting with the group at 4.30am to get the bus to the national park.

The journey took about 30 minutes where we met the Jeeps and then it was another 50 or so minutes to the entrance to the park. In contrast to other places we've been, both yesterday and today the park seems to be completely devoid of most other safaris. We were one of only about four vehicles to go through the gate at 6:00 a.m. and we hardly saw any other vehicles whilst we were there so it felt like we had the whole park to ourselves. Despite the early start it was also lovely to see the dawn slowly appearing and the sunrising.

We took a similar route to the one that we'd done the day before and spotted lots of small wildlife on the way including deer lizards and water buffalo.

We passed the point at which we'd seen the leopard yesterday and a bit further on we stopped because there was a male elephant in the middle of the road walking towards us. He didn't look particularly happy to see us but he carried on walking and eventually turned off just before he got to our vehicles but we've managed to get some great shots.

We carried on before eventually needing to turn back because the road was quite rutted after all of the rain. On the way back we came across another bull elephant. He was even less happy to see us than the first one and refused to get out of the way but also made it clear that he didn't want us to go past. After some time and some manoeuvring of the vehicles the Jeep ahead of us with half our group in it got past and then he did a false charge at it. Fortunately he then decided to head off to the right and into the bushes to start eating which meant we could go past. All very exciting and the video here is probably not suitable for children!

We carried on before turning off the main track which took us through some bushes and down to a beach where we had some breakfast that we'd bought with us.

By now it was time to start heading out of the park and so we thought we weren't going to see a leopard that day. However about 5 minutes from the entrance our guide stopped because there were monkeys in the tree. They started making lots of warning noises and he followed their line of sight to find a leopard about 10 m away in the bushes. We stopped and watched her for a little while and then amazingly a male leopard came along. They were clearly very friendly and there was lots of purring that you could hear. However the male leopard wasn't done and it was clearly time for them to mate, all captured on camera and video. What a special sighting.

Very satisfied with our morning's efforts we reversed our journey from before getting back to the hotel at about 11:30 and then we about an hour to shower change before we had a 4-Hour trip to our next place.

We stopped about 2 hours into the journey for a quick snack at a local roadside place. And containing carrot leeks and banana flowers.

The last bit of the journey was a shortcut which the drive had initially been unhappy to do because there are often elephants on the road. True to form we ended up passing two elephants very closely and our drivers tactic was to stay very close to a much larger bus in front of us. The first elephant in particular was a massive bull elephant but we were going a bit fast to be able to capture a picture of him.

We arrived at the hotel just before 5:00 and after dumping our stuff had a couple of drinks overlooking the pool and a lake and we were treated to an amazing sunset.

We all reconvened at 7: 30 for the dinner that was provided which was a buffet style with a good selection of different things and after spending some time chatting we were back in our room for 9:30 for a relatively early night because of yet another early start in the morning.Baca lagi