Up at the crack of dawn! It was a 5:30 wake up in the pitch black in order to get to the gates of Udawalawe National Park in our safari jeep for the 6:00am opening.
On the way around the park exterior to the front gate, we caught this little straggler sneaking some fresh grass at the edge of the reservoir....
As we drove towards the park gate the sun started sneaking over the horizon.
We picked up the entrance tickets just inside the gate and were joined by a park guide who sat in the middle row between the kids and the parents. As we rolled through the beginning of the interior park road, we started to see the animals waking up, taking their places for the day's action - including eagles setting up on dead tree perches to get a good view of the ground below.
Our guide remarked in surprise when he saw a couple of jackals scrounging around. The one I got a picture of is hard enough to see in the picture below. Jackals are pretty rare to see and are pretty shy in this park.
We saw several bunches of white spotted deer, though they tended to shy away from the jeeps. Udawalawe has leopards, wild cats and fisher cats, so the deer don't exactly have free reign in the park. I could sympathize as to why they ran away from everything.
We spotted our first elephants as we drove around the reservoir. This reservoir was created in the late sixties (the park opened in 1972), and you could still see the remains of dead trees caused by the artificial flooding of the plain area. The water at this time of year is at it's lowest, as is the vegetation, which makes for ideal viewing.
The two young males were learning the ropes from the older male. I guess they'd reached the age where they were no longer welcome in the female and baby packs, and were now out on their own living with the occasional male straggler.
This guy came around and occupied our little jeep road. He casually walked in front of the jeep, not caring that we had a safari to continue! :-)
The peacocks were everywhere. This may sound weird, but I had no idea they could actually fly. We saw all kinds of them perched at the tops of trees.
We interrupted this little monitor lizard's ant and termite breakfast. Sorry buddy....
At one point, we came up a section of the road with two other jeeps stopped and obviously looking at something. We spotted a wild cat, a rare find, that was coiled on a branch, overseeing her baby as she hunted around on the ground below (we think). The baby was hard to spot, but the two times I saw a glimpse it looked like a domestic cat, just about twice as big. The guide had not seen a leopard or wild cat since last December, so we counted ourselves lucky.
There are some really cool examples of Banyan trees in the park, this one was well over one hundred fifty years old...
The driver got a call and changed direction - he seemed to accelerate to get down one particular dirt road. We found out why in short order, as we came upon a small pack of females who were eating brush. Two younger pregnant females were applying sunscreen right beside the jeep, so we sat and watched.
Elephants can start having babies at age 12! They have up to 6 babies over their lifetime, and with a gestation period of around 22 months, this means they can be pregnant for a total of 12 years - yikes!
We left the mothers to be, and went down a new road, circumnavigating the other side of the reservoir but within the scrub area. We saw quite a few groups of monkeys and langurs.
The jeep emerged from the brush at an obvious favourite spot for crocodiles (I say obvious because there were three other jeeps parked around the reservoir staring at something). Yes, sure enough, we saw a half dozen lazy crocodiles sunning themselves near the shore.
The view behind that area was spectacular - water buffalo soaking in the reservoir with the cloud covered mountains that formed the northern border of the park in the background.
It was almost time to leave. We headed back towards the park entrance when we encountered two ladies drinking and applying a higher SPF rated sunscreen - mud.
We watched for a while, then a skinny male came out of the brush and joined them. He barged right in the middle of them and used them as a scratching post. It seemed to be mutually beneficial!
Along the main park road, we saw groups of wild buffalo soaking in some liquid mud pits. The buffalo soak in water up to 16 hours a day - I can't imagine how much water compared to "non water liquids and solids" there was in the little pools but they seemed happy. I might have headed towards the reservoir, but to each his own I guess...
We had a great morning. We bade adieu to our guide and headed back down the main road in our jeep. We had to slow for more wildlife... Ok they were domestic buffaloes but still cool!
We had a really lazy afternoon. Beth and I have been focusing on our last four cities - Istanbul, Rome, Paris and London. We are going to have a crazy last two weeks in Europe, and we want to make sure we plan it out pretty carefully. Katniss was at it again for two more hours, they both got a nap in and Abby finished her unit test in math. More delicious food was had at dinner and we topped the night off with the Season 3 finale of our zombie soap opera.
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