We set off after a leisurely wander around the town seeing the gentle bustle of the great country. Sri Lanka is a much calmer beast than India, its people are smiling, courteous, helpful and have a wicked sense of humour. At one street food stall we stopped for a vegetable roti (really well spiced and not hot….but with a ‘ball burning’ aubergine chutney to go with it) and fresh coconut milk. They took my order for three roti and two coconuts and when giving me my change (it cost 700 rupi (£1.75) they said ‘thank you Santa-sir’! Cheek of it.

In the early afternoon, we took a jeep safari in the Kadaula National Park, in search of wild elephants. The parks are also home to a large array of birdlife, including painted storks …… and guess what - more monkeys; both the ‘naughty’ macaques and serene purple faced langurs.

We were lucky in that on the drive to the park on the main road we saw a large female who had obviously found a way through the electric elephant wires (like the farming versions we get in the uk but a ‘tad stronger’). These protected species are allowed to roam free and only really cause damage when they wander into towns and villages, hence the electric fences.

In the park the number of elephants was amazing, I saw three distinct family groups and one lone male. In one of the groups there were a couple of juveniles, one still on mum’s milk, about two months old, and a two or three year old immature male. These magnificent beasts are even more impressive in the wild; they were friendly and inquisitive, coming really close to the jeep whilst ripping out and eating the long grasses that were in this part of the park. They then turned away and disappeared into the jungle and even though they were still only twenty or thirty meters away, were impossible to see.

After the park, another taxi ride to Sigiriya in the central region where the plan was to climb the incredible Lions Rock Fortress. As we planned to leave the hotel at around 0545 the next morning, my daughter and I decided to have a quiet night sampling a different style of Sri Lankan curry which used coconut oil as the base rather than ghee, and also became acquainted with Lion Brewery’s Stout…..a cheeky 8.8% number, a couple of which could have felled one of these elephants we saw earlier.







Blog conceived and written by Nigel Buckland