Our family Sri Lanka travels end
Our Sri Lanka travels end, how sad and what a relief also. saved the best for last….
Elephants!
The highlights of our trip through Sri Lanka was definitely getting to see and pet elephants! Two spots we were able to see them were Uda Walawe and Pinnawala. There a couple other places you can journey to find elephants like Yala National Park.
Uda Walawe National Park
We stopped in Uda Walawe a couple of nights on our way to Arugam bay. Along with the National Park there is also an elephant orphanage you can visit. You can see them from afar and watch them eat and drink at the orphanage. A visitors center and some kind guides explain to you the role the orphanage has in the lives of these elephants. I guess much of the money is going to feeding them and looking after them until they can be released into the park.
The hotel staff kindly arranged our safari through Uda Walawe National Park. We are grateful they did so since our schedules with nap time can be quite tricky. They made sure to provide us a guide who spoke great English and knew quite a lot about the animals in the park!
Safari adventures!
We got to see many elephants in the safari! Herding together, and a couple walking off along to drink water. One of these they explained must be in mating season, he had big tusks and was quite intimidating as he came out of the bushes, passing right in front of us to go to the lake! We continued to observe a family with a small baby, the guide thought it was a good idea to reverse the jeep so we can see the big male drinking at the lake. We’re looking back as the guide reverse when suddenly the male raise his ears and tail and stomps towards us!!! The guide heard me telling him go back go back, so he put the jeep in forward drive! Thankful the elephant went back to his water, but we felt we got our money’s worth by the. And kept on the rest of the ride and back to the hotel!
Here’s a picture of the big guy
Pinawalla
Pinawalla was not our list of places to stop. But we had some extra days towards the end of our trip and it wasn’t too much out of the way. We read the elephants are chained and guided by men with sharp sticks.
Anyway we figured we could just stay on the balconies of the hotel and see them bathing and drinking. These guys are walked twice a day from the orphanage to the river to wash and hydrate. People say it can be quite dangerous so we were a bit skeptical. Staff approached us with a bag of bananas to feed the babies, and another encouraged us to go into the water and scrub down the baby elephant!
It needed up being quite an experience though I’m sure there are better ways to care for these amazing creatures!
More beach!
Towards the end of our trip we headed back to the west coast. We got a tip about a beautiful beach and decided to head there.
Kitirigya
I’m sure that in season this beach will be amazing to hangout at. We went in the last week of July, it was windy and the waves were too strong. Thankfully the hotel was peaceful, had a pool, and food was delicious. They really knew what they were doing when they build the place!
Negombo
Last stop, Negombo once again. Unfortunately it is a busy place, bot cool to drive there at all! And also the amount of garbage on the beach was incredibly saddening. Maybe there’s not enough education amongst the locals about recycling and such. Was mostly among the locals that we witnessed the most polluting.
Well that’s the sum of our trip! so sad our Sri Lanka travels come to an end.
We got to see amazing incredible spots in a part of the world we never thought we would get to visit!
Good bye Sri Lanka! Our Sri Lanka travels end !
Jenny Pena
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