La Gringa y Su Esposo: Udawalawe

March 2, 2019

We took a taxi from Ella to our homestay in Udawalawe a few km outside the national park. There are enough tourists and taxi operators in Ella that some drivers offered unprompted discounts for the ride, down from the official 8,000 LKR. We arranged through our homestay for 7,000 LKR (~$40) for the 2 hour drive, with a brief stop at the waterfall outside of Ella. Back near sea level, Udawalawe was warmer and more humid, so it was a sticky couple kilometers walk to lunch. There were two other couples at the homestay so we grouped up to do a 10 hour safari the next day.

We headed out around 7:45 am into the park. The safari jeeps were different here than in Africa, where they were one enclosed cabin with a pop up roof. These were an enclosed driver’s cabin and six chairs in an open (but canopied) bed. The truck’s open sides weren’t bad for viewing angles, but you had to lean out to look up and it was difficult to look out the opposite side. A less crowded truck would have made it easier. It was also harder to talk to the guide, even though he kept his window open the whole time. Another tourist in Ella who had done this safari had warned us that “this wasn’t Africa”, and that’s true enough. But, there were a lot of elephants, water buffalo, birds, as well as a few monitors and crocodiles, a troop of monkeys, and a brief glimpses of mongoose scurrying across the road. No leopards for us. I kept wanting to stop and take pictures of peacocks (those colors!), but our guide seemed to think they weren’t worth our time. To be fair, they were kind of everywhere, even outside of the park, but still. Paying customer over here wants to take pictures of the pretty jungle chickens.

Our guide told us a story about an incident a couple weeks ago in the park where a large bull elephant got angry and tipped over two jeeps. From what we heard no one was injured, but the park was shut down for a few days. Most of the elephants we saw were smaller females, but in the afternoon we came upon a large bull walking down the road. Our guide stopped and immediately started backing up, giving the elephant some space. Turns out it was the same elephant from the story. We gave it a wide berth and it eventually left the road so we could pass.

For those primarily interested in the elephants you could easily do seven or even four hours, and for comfort you could break up the safari into two half-day rides (evening and the following morning) to view the park during all periods of the day, but one long day let us get deep into the national park and we felt like we’d seen most of it. The park was halfway through a five year project to clear out an invasive plant species that was choking out native grasses and obscuring views, and the regions that had been opened up were definitely an improvement.