After a few good days relaxing in Arugam Bay, we hadn’t really thought about how we’d get to our next destination; Tissamaharama. As it had been relatively easy navigating the local buses of India and Sri Lanka, we were under the impression that we’d be in our next destination in no time as google maps said it only takes 3 hours to drive. What we hadn’t taken into account is that we’d be travelling on a Friday of a long weekend in Sri Lanka. We managed to get seats on the bus, however as the journey went on, more and more people were getting on the bus and no one was getting off. By the time we made it to our stop we were the only people getting off but as the bus was so full we couldnt move or get our bags off with us. The local ladies standing next to our seats ended up helping us throw our bags out the window and we made our way through the crowd to get off the bus. Seven hours later we made it to our guesthouse and was greated into our room by a big old cockroach.
The whole reason for coming to Tissa was so we could visit the Yala National Park on a safari and hopefully see some animals. Fast forward to 4.15am the following morning and our alarms are going off so that our driver can be first in line to enter the park which opened at 6am. We spent the first two hours looking for leopards as this was apparently the best time to see them. We didn’t have a whole lot of luck to be honest. I’ll post a picture of a tree that supposedly had a leopard in. Harry kind of saw it with binoculars and I saw the back of it before it jumped into the tree. We spent the rest of the time looking for various animals, we saw a lot of water buffalo, two different herds of elephants, crocodiles, eagles, peacocks and monkeys. Considering we saw all of these when we rented a tuk tuk in Arugam Bay, we didn’t really feel it was worth the money.
A lot of the drivers work together, so if one car spots some elephants, the driver will ring his mate who then speeds off to the location. If you’re not one of first few cars to the location then by the time you get there, you’ll be in a queue to take a look at the animal. We were lucky with the second lot of elephants we saw as we were the first car to spot them so we had a good view. Whilst it means you have more chances of seeing animals as companies can search different areas of the park at the same time, at times it felt like we were in a zoo rather than the animals natural habitat.
Haz & Rac Travels 