Today Jennifer and I went on the excursion to Yala National Park in Sri Lanka hoping to see the tiger. It was wonderful even tho we didn’t see the Sri Lanka tiger. We were in the park at mid-day and the tigers are usually, if at all, seen in the early morning or late afternoon. We did see many other birds and animals. Other folks on the tour said it should have been called a ‘birding tour’ because of all the birds they saw.
It was a two hour bus ride to the park and then we had a 3 hour safari and lunch before heading back to the ship.
Jennifer and I ended up in our very own safari vehicle- there were no other passengers except the man who was in the top level of the tour company that arranged the safaris. He was good at spotting animals. All the other jeeps had 5 or 6 people each. I originally went into a jeep that had 3 people expecting that there would be 5 when Jennifer and I joined but then I realized another person was joining so I left the vehicle and went to one that was empty. Jennifer and I sat in the jeep wondering and wondering if we could possibly end up being the only ones in the jeep.
One disadvantage of the jeep we had was it was noisy– every 30 seconds or so a metal piece would clang against another piece of metal very loudly. It was so loud the driver couldn’t hear us when we asked him to stop for an animal.
The other odd part of this safari is that each vehicle is allotted a certain amount of time before they must leave the park consequently the jeeps drove very fast. Once we were stopped looking at something when another jeep came up and their driver berated ours for stopping and made ours start driving again. Between the noise, rough roads and speedy travel, it was the first time ever I was glad to end a safari drive.
