Tuesday 3rd February
Udawalawe National Park
The night before, we decided to do a safari at Udawalawe National Park and book it from our hotel. After checking out the prices for private drivers + park fee we decided to take the offer from our hotel directly. It was 18.000 rupees (about 120€) for the transport to the park and back (1h 30min each direction) and park fee + jeep for 2 people.
If you are 4 or even 6 people it gets quite cheap but even for this price with 60€ per person, we thought it’s a steal for a safari tour. At 5:00 AM the next morning we drove to National Park with our private driver from Sandy’s beach cabana.
Our driver could drive us until the entrance of the National Park and there we were picked up by a jeep driver from the National Park. The last few kilometers are already quite scenic with a big artificial lake and some buffalos walking around close to the road + the sun rise and an elephant coming out of the water and almost greeting the cars driving by. After 15minutes drive we reached the park office where our driver got the official entrance ticket for the park and at about 6:45 we entered the gates of the national park and started the safari.
Tours in the Udawalawe National park take place usually twice a day and last about 3h to 3h 30min, one in the morning and the other one in the afternoon. So basically one for sunrise and one for sunset. We can really recommend the one in the morning as the smell and the noise is just breathtaking. It was a cloudy day with some light rain showers during our visit to the park, but this made a very special atmosphere. We really felt like in the jungle book. Large peacocks were sitting on the scarce trees in about 10 m height and making their significant noises, which you could hear everywhere in the park. Further on, a lot of birds inhabit the park as the white breasted kingfisher, black winged stilts, green bee eater, grey-headed fish eagle and many more.
Our guide drove us on a jeep through the park, we had the opportunity to be alone on a jeep with 6 seats, so plenty of space to find the right angle for taking picture :). The funny thing is that many jeeps drive through the park, but it wasn’t crowded and didn’t feel as they were doing a safari race, as I often read in other forums. It’s definitely a weird situation when all the jeeps gather in front of the entrance building and start at the same time, but as everyone takes a different route, you see one other jeep about every 20 minutes.
A nice fact is that also a lot of locals visited the park and it was funny to see how everybody enjoyed seeing wildlife so close. Our favorites were eating elephants and observing them while eating. Further on the monkeys jumping from tree to tree are pure fun to watch. In general I never though that a “safari” is so much fun, but seeing the animals in real life, not in a zoo, really makes a big difference. Our guide was always very patient waiting for us while we were taking photos and filming the animals, for instance bathing wild buffalos. He stopped the car and the engine always so that we could have the full nature experience and he had a very good knowledge about the wildlife and could explain us the variety of different birds we saw and especially showed them to us, good lad!
If you wanna stay closer to the National Park or go a few times, here’s the shortcut.
For all Udawalawe photos click here.
Turtle hatchery – Rekawa Beach:
After the safari we had the opportunity to check out the turtle hatchery at Rekawa Beach at night. So we thought, let’s have a wildlife day and check that out too. We started at about 8 pm and after 20min drive we arrived at the area close to Rekawa Beach. You pay 1000 rupees (about 7€) per person for the tour and the whole amount goes to the foundation to save the turtles in this area by buying some party of beaches to secure their nesting places.
We walked about 15 minutes at the stunning beach of Rekawa along the ocean in the full moon light to reach a big loggerhead turtle (about 100-150cm) which was already digging for quite a bit to have a secure hole to lay down the eggs.
The guide and the people were very respectful and we were advised to only watch from a few meters away and just from behind the turtle to not disturb it. The only light which is allowed it the infrared torch of the guide.