When: October 2014 Weather: Hot 25-30C
Leica M240. 35 summilux, 21 super elmar, 90 summicron. Lumix FZ200
Our adventure started off well when we had a power outage during dinner in our hosts’ house in a Colombo suburb….with the blackout the fireflies came out and flashed brilliantly in the garden…
Having ended our meeting, our group of birders and nature lovers set off from Colombo heading east towards Udawalawe national park in our ten seater van, intending to stop there to view the elephants. As it turned out, it took a bit longer than we expected and we didn’t have time to stop in Udawalawe…but a friendly elephant came up close to us on the main road which kind of made up for it…After Udawalawe, we turned south towards our final destination of Yala National Park, the park with the most leopards resident. It took us the best part of 5-6 hours to get to the Leopard Lodge in Yala, our base for the next four nights.
The next morning, we headed in our jeep to Bundala Wetlands for some birding…it was about 1-1.5 hours away and we found a large lake there with many water birds…
Bundala was a wonderful birding location…highly recommended for general birding!
We were disappointed that Yala NP which was supposed to open on the day we visited instead remained closed due to the drought. So we managed to go in for one safari only…