Handpicked experience · Galle
Galle, Sri Lanka
The one Sri Lankan park where the animal you came for is close to guaranteed, and a rehabilitation centre nearby that deliberately refuses to let you touch anything.
The Udawalawe National Park is famous for all the elephants that can be viewed here
Pass by many species of animals, such as deer, bandicoots, water buffalos, and many more
Take photos of your favorite animals to bring home to your friends and family
A guided jeep drive built around finding elephants
The road transfer inland through Southern Province villages and paddy fields
Excellent birdwatching at the waterholes and marshes
An optional stop at the nearby Elephant Transit Home, subject to its opening hours
Udawalawe exists because of a dam. When the reservoir on the Walawe river flooded a large tract of country in the 1960s, the elephants that lived there were pushed into the surrounding land, and in 1972 that land was declared a national park to hold them. Everything about the place follows from that.
A long road transfer inland from the coast, several hours in an open jeep working the tracks and waterholes, and the drive back.
The honest reason to choose this park over the famous one. Several hundred elephants live inside the boundary permanently, they do not migrate out, and the terrain gives them nowhere to hide. Sightings on a normal drive run into the dozens rather than the ones, and families with calves are routine. If you have a single day and elephants are what you want, this is the more reliable choice: you trade the possibility of a big cat for something close to a certainty.
The landscape is doing the work. Much of the park is open grassland and low scrub, a good deal of it former farmland and plantation that was never dense forest to begin with. There is no canopy to swallow a herd and no thicket to lose it in, so animals are readable at several hundred metres rather than glimpsed at twenty.
Something visitors puzzle over. In this population only a small minority of males grow tusks at all — a figure usually put around seven per cent, against nearly every mature male in Africa. Part is inherited, part the consequence of centuries in which tuskers were the ones captured for ceremonial work or killed for ivory, steadily removing those genes from the breeding population. The tuskless bulls you see are what that pressure left behind.
Worth understanding before you decide about the optional stop. The facility near the park takes in orphaned calves, raises them and releases them back into the wild, and it is run on the principle that the animals must not become comfortable with people. Visitors watch feeding from behind a barrier at fixed hours. Nobody rides anything, nobody bathes anything, and you will not be handed a bottle for a photograph. If that sounds like less than the places offering all three, it is the reason these calves can go back to the wild and those cannot.
A request with teeth. On the roads around the park, elephants stand at the verge and beg, because drivers hand food out of car windows. Animals that learn this become bold, then pushy, then dangerous, and the ones that damage a vehicle or injure someone are the ones that get shot. Feeding an elephant at the roadside is a slow way of killing it. Keep the windows up and keep moving.
Context for what you will see on the drive in. The park is fenced with electrified wire, and the elephants have long since worked out how to break it — pushing posts with their feet, using tusks or logs where they have them. Beyond the boundary lies farmland, and the conflict between the two is serious and ongoing, with people and elephants both killed every year. The watchtowers you pass in the fields are not decorative.
Park entry, the vehicle permit and the tracker are arranged on arrival. Anything at the rehabilitation centre is separate again. Carry rupees in cash, because none of it can be settled any other way.
Open it to pick a date and work out the price.
What the fare covers, and what to budget for separately.
The practical detail, and the answers people actually ask for.
Close to it. Several hundred live permanently inside the boundary, they do not migrate out, and the open terrain gives them nowhere to hide. Sightings usually run into the dozens on a normal drive.
You trade the chance of a big cat for near-certainty on elephants. If you have one day and elephants are the point, this is the more reliable choice.
Much of the park is open grassland and low scrub, a good deal of it former farmland that was never dense forest. There is no canopy to swallow a herd, so animals are readable at several hundred metres.
Only a small minority of males in this population grow them, usually put around seven per cent. Centuries of capturing tuskers for ceremonial work and killing them for ivory steadily removed those genes from the breeding stock.
Deliberately not. Calves are raised for release back into the wild, so contact with people is minimised. You watch feeding from behind a barrier at fixed hours; there is no riding, no bathing and no bottle-feeding for photographs.
Because animals that learn to beg become bold and then dangerous, and the ones that damage a vehicle or hurt somebody are the ones that get shot. Feeding them from a car window is a slow way of killing them.
Not unless your booking says so. Entry, the vehicle permit and the tracker are settled on arrival. Carry rupees in cash.