Yala Block 5 (Lunugamvehera National Park)

10 March 2020

A day in Yala.  Yala National Park is the second largest but far away most visited national park in Sri Lanka.  The park is split into a number of blocks some of which can be visted and some which cannot.  The vast majority of visitors to the park take a safari in Block 1, the coastal part of the park, the reason being that you supposedly stand the best chance of seeing Leopard which, for most people, appears to be all that they are interested in.  The result of this is that Block 1 is frankly over-run with jeeps which does tend to somewhat spoil the experience.

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Polonnaruwa

1 March 2020

A break from the wildlife today as we decided to visit the archaeological relic city of Polonnaruwa.

Polonnaruwa was the 2nd ancient kingdom of Sri Lanka, it was established in the 10th Century when the Chola Dynasty (Tamils) from southern India invaded Anuradhapura the then capital.

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Asian Elephant

29 February 2020

The target species this afternoon and surely the easiest of all the Sri Lankan Elephant, the native sub-species of the Asian Elephant.

Elephants are now found only in the dry lowland areas of Sri Lanka and inevitably this does lead to conflict with the human population not least because it has been estimated that about 65% of their range is outside protected areas.

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Wilpattu National Park – Day 2 (Birds Part 1)

27th February 2020

Today was a full day in the park i.e sunrise until sunset – 6.00am to 6.00pm, so an early start.

We arrived at the park entrance at about 5.45am and joined a few other “jeeps” waiting for the park to open.  Had this been Yala Block 1 there would have been many dozens if not hundreds of “jeeps”, fortunately Wilpattu is somewhat off the main tourist route and therefore is much quieter than Yala and all the better for it.  On reflextion we enjoyed Wilpattu far more than Yala and were really glad we included it in our itinerary, many do not.

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Sri Lanka

As I mentioned in a previous post I had for some time wanted to visit Sri Lanka the combination of world class birding coupled with some iconic mammals makes this small Indian Ocean island a potentially excellent destination for a wildlife photographer furthermore the presence of a number of UNESCO world heritage sites coupled with the colonial history makes Sri Lanka a good all round destination.

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