I wasn’t sure what time our departure was scheduled today but it didn’t matter too much as the fighting dogs and revving truck engines woke my roommate and I up well before six.  At 7 o’clock breakfast I learned we weren’t leaving until 9:30a so I had time for a nice walk through town and along the road to a tea plantation.

We had a 3 hour drive ahead of us with a couple of little stops planned.  First was a beautiful waterfall, then a grocery store.  The camp where we are staying tonight does serve a 3-course dinner for $10 but the way our guide was talking up buying cheese & crackers and stopping at a bakery for baked goods led most of us to assume the cooked dinner was not the most appetizing.  I stocked up on Kraft cheese wedges (that lovely non-refrigerated processed mixture), crackers, and an avocado.  Back on the bus Udi handed out some local treats he bought for us – rosewater flavored creamsicles!  I don’t think it will catch on in North America as it tastes faintly of soap, but it was a nice gesture.

There are a couple of entrances into Yala National Park and we took the one where the public road drives right through a section of it.  We were on our own mini-safari seeing spotted deer, mongoose, spotted deer and 2 huge male elephants!  In fact, we couldn’t miss the first one as he was blocking the road.  A motorcycle in front of us turned around as the elephant was looking quite aggressive; we waited a bit then slinked past on the verge.

Our accommodation tonight is at the Big Game Park, a permanent campsite set in the trees, with our individual tents set in little groups around the property.  

We had time just to check everything out before boarding our jeeps for our real safari.  These jeeps were much more comfortable than our last safari vehicles with each row of seats set higher than the other so everyone had a view.  Not that it mattered too much for me as once again I had a poor driver who only had eyes for the road, not for any animals.  Also, we were consistently 3rd in the line of jeeps so anything interesting was scared off by the time we inched up.  The first 2 jeeps saw 3 leopards, the 2nd posing beautifully draped along a tree branch.  We only saw one, the 3rd leopard, at a distance and just on our way out of the park as the dusk was dropping.  I’ll post my picture as well as the photo that I missed out on, courtesy of Nicola.  

We saw 2 more elephants, which was amazing as the park isn’t really known for having a lot of elephants, a very inquisitive wild boar, a water buffalo submerged up to his nose in a lake, lots of deer and birds and 2 small crocodiles.  It sounds like a lot but most was within the first 20 minutes, then we had 2 hours of driving through the park.  If we hadn’t missed out on the first 2 leopards I’m sure we would have enjoyed the drive much more as it was very lush and relaxing but we were all a bit disgruntled at our driver.

Back to camp I braved the shower, which took a bit of figuring out, and at 7:30pm we all met at a big, long table set by a bonfire for dinner.  9 of us brought out our little plastic groceries bags of goodies and 3 suffered through the offered meal.  Luckily there was bar service so a glass of wine washed everything down nicely.
It was a peaceful, starlit end to our day.