As Steven and I rightly figured that morning that our tour of the incredible Buddhist cave temples wouldn't take all day, he had gone online and found a company that could pick us up at our hotel in Dambulla in the early afternoon and take us on a private jeep safari to the nearby Minniriya National Park. Normally, we spend far more time than that researching tour options to optimize our chances of a good tour.
We'd been on jeep safaris in both Kenya and South Africa several years ago and both those had guides that spoke English well. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case here at all with the driver and 'guide' as they seemed to think they only had to speak to each other in one of the Sri Lankan languages almost the entire time!
The park was located about 30 minutes away, near Sigiriya, which we'd gone to on our first afternoon to climb the mammoth Lion Rock.
We'd hoped to learn about the history and geography of the national park while on the lookout for elephants and other animals but we got no information at all. As I am sure you must have figured if you've read more than a few of my blog posts, I love facts and figures as they provide depth and context to what we travel so far to discover. In this situation, I was plumb out of luck as we knew no more after the tour than going on it!
After driving around on for about 45 minutes on some of the bumpiest roads we'd had the misfortune to travel on, the driver stopped the jeep when he spotted these baby Indian elephants in the brush. Surprisingly, the mama was nowhere in sight initially.
The elephants hardly paid us any attention when they first heard us approach, preferring to just go about munching the grass! We understood the 'guide' to say the bigger elephants were five years old and the baby one was just five months old.
I think there were GPS trackers on the adult elephants' heads but I didn't understand why. Why were the rangers, whom we didn't see one, interested in tracking their movements, I would have loved to have known.
In the foreground were the same elephants and they were the focus of my shot. Only later did I notice the large rock or mini-mountain in the background! This area of central Sri Lanka was known for its large 'rocks.'
Unlike the national parks we'd been to in Africa, this one seemed very, very small. We encountered about a half-dozen other jeeps on our two-hour tour.
It was very neat going through the creek even if it was bumpy! Depending on your point of view, it was either lucky or unlucky we didn't spot any elephants bathing or drinking there!
Pretty spectacular tree but no idea what it was!
We could only guess this was another baby elephant and the driver hadn't gone around in circles so we were seeing the same ones again! It was a different experience watching the baby elephant once again just wander across the road to meet up with mama as we'd only seen babies with adults before.
This group of what we soon learned was five elephants had the tiniest baby.
Either my memory of those we saw in Africa is faulty (a distinct possibility!), we didn't see baby elephants there as young as these, or only baby Indian elephants have tusks - take your pick!
This was the closest by far we'd been to elephants.
Thank goodness, neither of us suffers from bad backs as it would have been two plus hours of sheer torture on the park's roads as they were truly that bad.
Our driver and several other jeeps stopped at the bottom of a hill - no explanation as to why or what we'd see at the top. Oh well, we figured the exercise in the heat would be great, especially after climbing about 600 steps that morning to reach, and then descend from, the cave temples!
We didn't know whether what looked like a hut at the top of the rock was a fire lookout or just an observation tower but it didn't matter. We climbed up to it anyway since that was clearly expected of us!
We met a mother and daughter who were touring Sri Lanka from Scotland on the viewing platform. It worked out great as we took each other's photos.
The views were pretty fabulous in every direction.
After leaving the observation tower, we spotted the backs only of water buffaloes in the pond just a few meters away.
Guess we didn't need to pay to have the 'luxury' of the jeep tour through the park as we saw these elephants beside the highway for free on the way back to Dambulla! Though the experience wasn't what we'd expected, on the plus side, we got to visit a national park that afternoon, were able to take in some pretty scenery, and saw our first Indian elephants in the wild so that was all good.
Next post: Heading north to Anuradhapura, home to the largest monuments ever constructed in the ancient world, exceeded only by the pyramids in Giza, Egypt!
Here's a link to my most recent post on our day exploring Edinburgh last fall near the tail end of our six-week vacation in Ireland and the United Kingdom:
Posted on May 31st, 2020, from steaming Denver. Where or where has the month of May gone - May Day seems like yesterday. As I write this, I am so saddened by the death of George Floyd and the resulting pain and outrage that has spilled over onto the streets of America. My adopted country appears to be in edge; what will make this stop?
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