Yala

‘STOP!’ A necessarily shouted command to our driver who is only able to hear us through a small window in the back of his cab. We come to a halt and there perched on a small twig a mere 3 yards away is a gorgeous little bee-eater, an Asian Green Bee-eater in fact. Small yet perfectly formed with its stunning, almost fluorescent, greens and blues reflecting the rays of a late afternoon sun that glints from its fiery red eye. The golden hour showing the rainbow coloured gem to perfection. That intimate acquaintance with a small, sleek bird is why we are here, at least it’s one of the prime reasons we find ourselves in an uncomfortable jeep, hot, dusty and feeling like we’ve been a few rounds with Mike Tyson. Yala National Park in the south east of Sri Lanka is our chosen destination and that close encounter justifies all the planning, expense and discomfort of being tossed around like ice in a cocktail shaker for a few hours. That analogy struck me because as I type I’m sipping a rather refreshing G&T!

But of course there is more, much, much more. I should perhaps start at the beginning.

Our flights from Seychelles (read about that leg here) carry us through the night to step out of the airport in Columbo, Sri Lanka at breakfast time, hitting a wall of heat that would cause apocalyptic headlines in UK papers should we ever experience such temperatures over our cornflakes. The 90 minute drive at the hands of our lovely guide Kumar deposits us at an old colonial style hotel overlooking a lake where local lads are splashing around, cooling off from the fierce assault by the sun. After a couple of hours kip (never can sleep on a plane), we don our swimming garb and relax in the cooling freshness of a lovely pool set in the grounds, where above us woodpeckers peck wood, babblers babble and Indian Pond Herons stalk small frogs and fish around the pond. Later in the evening, we sit like royalty under an impressive roofed verandah and are treated to an authentic Sri Lankan curry meal that could easily have fed a coach party of starving pensioners. Come to think of it we are a pair of starving pensioners, so it’s all well aimed.

The original itinerary for the following day includes a simple pick up, drive and deposit at our hotel in Yala in the south-east of the country. Our guide has other ideas and suggests we may like to spend the afternoon visiting Bundala National Park where there are ‘Lots of birds Sir, lots of birds’. He is right.  We spend a few hours bouncing around the parched trails there without encountering a single other jeep. We have the place, its wildlife; birds, butterflies, cheeky monkeys and monitor lizards, to ourselves. Heaven. And of course it is all new, this Asian nature fest, with pretty much every sighting registering as a tick. 

But it is hot and dusty and we are glad when able to settle into our hotel where air conditioning makes us feel as though we walk from an oven into a fridge.

We spend the next two days on safari around Yala National Park queuing in a scrum of jeeps to see a female leopard lounging in a tree 300 yards away. That kind of circus is not for us and we ask our driver to try and find quieter tracks and avoid crowding the animals. In this way we drive to various areas of water, park up and wait for the action to unfold. We are seldom disappointed with this tactic because there is so much life around that something always turns up. We watch herons catch frogs, a Great Coucal build its nest, see a pair of fledgling Brahamy Kites idling surreptitiously by their nest. We see spoonbills and egrets spiralling around the shallow waters, mopping up the fish that have been trapped in the swiftly evaporating water, Black-winged Stilts mobbing anything they feel is a threat, the iridescence of vivid cobalt blue White-throated Kingfishers and to cap it all small parties of Chestnut-headed Bee-eaters, another target species, gliding from their perches in pursuit of small insects. 

As the afternoon wains into the golden light of pre-dusk, we come upon female Indian Elephants with their small infants. They are busy kicking up grasses that they entwine with their trunks, swishing the clump of uprooted matter back and forth to remove the dust and dirt before cramming it between their grinding molars. A mongoose appears snuffling through the leaf litter for juicy morsels, while water buffalo nonchalantly blink at us as we pass. Our guides are exceptional, spotting distant birds with their naked eyes because none of them can afford binoculars. They work as volunteers, clearly loving their job and showing off the animals they are so proud of. We are advised to give them a tip, which we planned to do anyway, but are surprised when told the equivalent of £2 would be sufficient for a whole afternoons work. It seems a ridiculously inadequate sum, so we raise it to $10 which brings smiles of appreciation. For goodness sake we spend more than that on a glass of wine in our local pub. We are as one with nature, but surely worlds apart in so many other ways.