Croctastic safari adventure time!

Yes my European adventure is over, but lucky for me it’s not home time yet.  I still have a month in Sri Lanka!  For those who don’t know, my desire to visit Sri Lanka has been fuelled entirely by my workmates Sandy and Samadhi, Sri Lankans who regularly go home only to send me photos of pristine beaches, baby elephants and wild leopards. 

A few days after I booked flights to Sri Lanka Samadhi told me I was a pain in the bum.  As my project manager she says this on a fairly regular basis, but this time it was because she now has to organise this holiday.  Apparently you can’t just go to Sri Lanka without them. 

Then Robina, another friend at work heard about our holiday and decided she’d like to visit Sri Lanka as well.  So here we all are, happy bananas hanging out on the beach in Unawatuna and going on safari in the Yala National Park.

Unawatuna is about 100k from Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka and where Sandy and Samadhi live.  It’s a beachy little tourist town, but it was out of season so nice and quiet.

We hung out with Sandy and Samadhi’s friends and family at the beach, had some dinner along with some super cheap cocktails and then headed to a local club, The Happy Banana, to show off our dance moves.  Needless to say, Sam and Juggie were pretty impressed with the moves Robina and I were pulling out.

I also went diving, but that was a bit of a misadventure.  It’s out of the dive season so the water was pretty gritty with only 2-3 metre visibility and a bit of swell.  If you’re going out for a dive and starting to feel sea-sick they say the best thing to do is get in the water because you don’t get sea-sick under the water.  I now know this is not true – it is entirely possible to get sea-sick underwater.

I was fine until the end of the dive when we were doing our 3 min stop.  I was keeping level with the guide and because of the visibility all I could see was him – nothing else, it was like we were both suspended in space.  I could feel the swell was moving us about but it looked like we were both still, it was a very weird sensation and annoyingly pretty much made me feel like vomiting straight away.  

From Unawatuna we went to Yala.  Here we stayed at a resort called Jetwing.  After months of backpacking in cheap hostels and staying with friends holidaying with Sandy is like having a grown up holiday.  This resort had the hugest pool I’ve ever seen – it was like 150m long and the beds were these giant king size, four-poster things and they were so so comfy.  And the all you can eat buffets for breakfast and dinner… I’ll definitely need to start running again when I get home.

Biggest pool ever

But the best thing about the resort that it is in the Yala National Park.  We did both the evening and morning safari and saw heaps of animals.  Crocodiles, elephants, buffalo, these weird looking stork things, deer and lots of wild peacocks.  We also saw four leopards.  It was my first chance to take photos with my new camera so I think all the leopard sightings may have been some new camera karma coming my way.  That and Sandy’s mad leopard spotting skills.

 

On the evening safari our driver was on a mad mission and driving like a crazy man (and that’s pretty crazy by Sri Lankan driving standards!) and Sandy started yelling to stop.  We then backed up and and Sandy was like ‘there’s a leopard’.  I looked over and saw a yellow thing lying flat in the grass.  I zoomed in and was about to take a photo when I looked to the right of the yellow thing and there was the leopard just sitting there like a big house cat.  Turns out I was about to take a photo of a big yellow elephant poo – not my fault ok, I didn’t have my glasses on!   

 

The morning safari was also cool.  We had a crocodile run across the road in front of us, saw one of the most ridiculous sunrises I've ever seen and Sandy and I saw the only leopard that was seen all day, again thanks to Sandy's awesome spotting skills.