Elephant Island

by Maxine Bates

It was our first visit and we were impressed with the beauty and diversity of the island and the friendliness of the people. We took a private tour in a mini-bus with our own driver/guide booked through Elephant Island who we can thoroughly recommend.

Arriving at Colombo airport at 8.00am Christmas morning – after dashing through Doha airport at midnight on a tight 40 minute connection! - we were met by Amaranga, our guide, who deposited us at our hotel to relax for the rest of the day. Suffering from jetlag plus coughs and colds, we didn’t actually see much of the capital apart from a huge number of armed guards along the main road from the airport into the city. Although perhaps our decision to laze by the pool rather than explore further afield was a wise one in view of the bombings and assassination of a prominent journalist that followed shortly afterwards. We were the only guests in the hotel restaurant for most of the evening although we found out early the following morning our watches had been half an hour fast having been told the wrong local time upon landing in Colombo! Sri Lanka is one of the few countries with a half hour time difference being 5½ hours ahead of GMT. Christmas dinner was a strange combination of traditional Sri Lankan dishes and spaghetti bolognese. When my partner Andy asked for the pasta without parmesan cheese on top this got lost in translation and he ended up with no meat, a plate of lukewarm pasta and a small dish of tomato ketchup! And there was no alcohol due to it being a public holiday. So we had an early night ready for an early start the following day - earlier for us, having not adjusted our watches correctly…

Our first stop was the Pinnawela Elephant Orphanage which was a four hour drive from Colombo along very bumpy roads. Despite being a rollercoaster fan I felt a little queasy at the end of the journey, but luckily conditions did improve. The 69 elephants have mostly been found injured or abandoned in the wild and the orphanage is the world’s largest collection of captive elephants. Raja is a blind elephant, and the only one with tusks, and Sama is a three-legged elephant, a landmine victim. You can pet them (for an obligatory tip to the mahoot) or bottle feed some of the calves (for a small fee) before crossing the road to the river, where you can watch the herd being bathed for free from a viewing platform. This happens twice daily between 10am-12pm and 2pm-4pm. We also visited a small factory and were shown how they turn elephant dung into bookmarks, fridge magnets, calendars, stationery sets etc. taking recycling to the extreme though some of us couldn’t resist making a purchase!

By early afternoon we’d arrived at our accommodation in Dambulla, the Na Mala Eco Rooms. These were a few cabins and when I now hear the word ‘eco’ I translate as ‘basic’! Our basin tap didn’t work, the showers were cold, there were cockroaches and geckos in the rooms, holes in the mosquito nets, and the restaurant was open-sided meaning I ended the day with 84 mossie bites (yes, I counted them!) and Stewart had bat poo on his sleeve! However, saying that, it was a rustic experience and made us appreciate our next hotels even more.

After lunch and a swim in the pool we drove the short distance to the Golden Cave Temple. This is an ancient series of five cave temples containing thousands of Buddhist images and Sinhalese paintings which date back 2,000 years. It is known as Sri Lanka’s artistic masterpiece and is one of five UNESCO World Heritage Sites we visited on our tour. The caves reduce in size from 165 feet long, crammed with more than 100 Buddhas in various poses around the room, to the smallest where only a few people can view the murals at one time. Outside the caves, prayer flags flutter in the trees and wild monkeys wait to snatch your food. It’s quite a climb up stone stairs to the caves – not for the unfit!

Next day included two of my personal highlights. Having already seen elephants today we got chance to ride one. With all four of us sitting in a huge basket on the elephant’s back we set off passing small houses with waving children until we were in the river. During the ride we were accompanied by the mahoot and his friend who waded through elephant dung floating in the river to take photographs with our own cameras. He was rewarded with a good tip! It was huge fun feeding our elephant mangoes en route and, on the return journey, we were allowed to ride on the elephant’s neck where we all got a free bum massage!

Onwards to Polonnaruwa, the capital of medieval Sri Lanka from the 11th to 14th century. The site contains ruins of stupas, temples and monasteries which are still excellently preserved. The Gal Vihare with three huge rock-cut images of the Buddha is one of the world’s great works of Buddhist sculpture. At each building you have to remove shoes and hats, so this got a little wearing as the temperature was 32C, with the ground too hot to walk barefoot.

We were due to visit Sigiriya Rock Fortress the following day but Amaranga decided to take us now. This was a wise move as we were then climbing the 1,200+ steps to the top (and back down again!) before sunset rather than in the heat of the day. Sigiriya is known as the ‘fortress in the sky’ and is a magnificent rock citadel 650 ft high. Beautiful frescoes hidden in a natural cave dating from 470 AD are accessed via a Victorian spiral staircase. The remainder of the climb to the top from the huge stone ‘lion’s paws’ uses metal staircases, one up and one down, and from the very top there are superb views over surrounding forests and distant hills. The newly excavated water gardens at the foot of the rock are some of the earliest from antiquity. Half have been excavated and half have been left in their original state to be excavated when technology is improved.

With us getting ahead with our itinerary the next day became a shopping day. Firstly we visited a wood carving studio and, whilst they produced some lovely furniture and carvings of elephants and Buddhas they were rather expensive. At the Luck Grove herb and spice garden, we were given a tour with explanations of the plants, then treated to a massage using natural ingredients. Mine included a special mixture for mosquito bites! 

After lunch we visited a gem store where we watched a film about the mining of the country’s gems and, after much negotiating, departed with purchases. Lastly we visited a silk shop where Christine bought a gorgeous sari. Having checked into the Thilanka Hotel, which overlooks Kandy Lake, we were treated to a cultural show, including various traditional dances with males and females, drumming, plate spinning and finally fire walking. All very entertaining. 

Kandy is located in the centre of the island and is one of the prettiest towns and the last capital city of the Sri Lankan Kings. It actually reminded me a little of Windermere in the English Lake District! Once again Amaranga had changed our itinerary to show us the best of his country so we were taken to the famous Temple of The Tooth, which is another UNESCO World Heritage Site, this morning instead of the previous evening in order to witness a ceremony. The temple contains the revered tooth of the Buddha and this is locked away in a golden casket and rarely seen, except by very important people. At certain times the door to the casket room is opened and you may file past, placing lotus flower offerings on a nearby table. Some of the offerings looked like floral displays in themselves and the table was soon covered in an array of bright colours. The ceremony involved drumming with men in traditional costume. Since the temple was attacked during a visit by Prince Charles in 1998 there is heavy security and men and women are required to pass through separate check points for a body and bag search. Some of our items, like a soft toy sheep and hippo and a platypus for drinking, took some explaining! We then visited three more temples in the Kandy area. The one of note is a combined Buddhist and Hindu temple. Very strange since Buddhists work on philosophy and don’t worship a God and the Hindu religion worship hundreds of Gods!

In the afternoon we were left to wander around the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens at our leisure. The gardens are said to be one of the finest in the East and Lord Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command Headquarters were located here during World War II. Although there were not too many flowers – possibly due to the heat - we did see the orchid house, huge bamboo, palm tree avenues, fruit bats in the trees, and commemorative trees planted by various royalty including one by Princess Anne.

Next day we took one of the most beautiful train journeys in the world from Kandy to Nuwara Eliya in the hill country. Rather than ride squashed into the carriages and sometimes hanging out of the doors, we had four of the 24 reserved seats in the observation car. As we climbed to the highest elevation town on the island, we passed through tea plantations. Nuwara Eliya is the original hill station of the British tea planters who came to Ceylon. The town has a colonial feel with half timbered houses, the Hill Club, Grand Hotel, the oldest golf course in Asia and even a race course. We took an optional trip to the Pedro tea plantation where we were the only tourists, so had a cup of the best quality tea called Lover’s Leap followed by a private tour of the factory. We learned that it takes just 24 hours from picking to packing, that the tea pickers work eight hours a day getting paid for a minimum quantity of leaves with a bonus for collecting more, and that the final product is auctioned.

Being the highest town on the island the temperature drops drastically at night so we awoke at 6.00 am to find frost on car windows! Our early start, armed with a packed breakfast provided by the hotel, was to drive an hour to Horton Plains Cloud Forest in order to do the three hour circular walk, before it was too hot and too crowded. We saw very few other tourists, only a few Sri Lankan families out for the day. We were wearing hiking boots and backpacks; they were wearing flip flops and carrying parasols! The central highlands have a highly dissected terrain consisting of a unique arrangement of plateaus, ridges, escarpments, basins and valleys. Sri Lanka's highest mountains - Pidurutalagala (8,281 feet), Kirigalpotta (7,858 feet) and Adam’s Peak (7,559 feet) - are found in this area. Our walk took us to World’s End where there is a platform with no railings yet a 4,000 feet drop to the valley floor below - not for vertigo sufferers! We also saw Baker’s Falls where we welcomed the cooling spray from this waterfall. 

The afternoon was spent descending to Yala on the south coast via a series of winding roads and hairpin bends. We arrived at our hotel on New Year’s Eve and saw on the TV in the lobby that Sydney was already celebrating with their famous firework display. Unfortunately Sri Lankans celebrate their New Year on 13th April and, due to low occupancy at the hotel, the gala dinner that we had been promised was cancelled. However, we enjoyed a feast of western and Sri Lankan dishes, drank a few cocktails, then saw in the New Year in room 101 (!) whilst sipping the local arrack drink and watching the President giving a speech on TV, although we didn’t understand a word, as it was in Sinhalese!

On New Year’s Day we were going on safari in Yala National Park and were given the option of leaving at 5.30 am or 2.30 pm. Having checked that we would see the same animals, guess which time we chose!? So we had a lie-in, enjoyed a sumptuous Sri Lankan breakfast – including curry, rice and a fresh fruit platter – and a couple of hours with the hotel pool to ourselves before our next adventure. Yala National Park is well recognised as one of the best parks in the world to observe leopards, although we only managed to spot one. The park covers an area of over 100,000 hectares and contains jungle, beaches, freshwater lakes, rivers and scrubland. In a few hours we managed to spot wild elephants, crocodiles, water buffalo, deer, a mongoose, peacocks, painted storks and a variety of other birds. We travelled in a soft-topped jeep with a guide pointing out the flora and fauna. We stopped near the beach to see the memorial to the 47 tsunami victims (German and Japanese tourists and locals) who died in the park on 26 December 2004. Our guide Amaranga was lucky and had been at the park 30 minutes before the wave struck but was well inland by the time the disaster occurred. We were told the animals sensed danger and ran inland, so none died (although reports on the internet say otherwise).

We then moved on to Galle, the capital of the southern province, a city with a colourful history and another UNESCO World Heritage Site. En route we saw the famous stilt fishermen near Ahangama on the south coast, although those nearest the beach now pose for tourists, then hop off their perch and come demanding tips for photographing them! Though there are fishermen further out to sea who are earning a living by actually fishing. Although first established by the Portuguese, the magnificent 300 year old Dutch fort and lighthouse are the most popular attractions in Galle.

In the soaring temperatures we managed a saunter along the bastions and a cooling visit to the Dutch Reformed Church before returning to our beach hotel 6km away in Unawatuna. During our sunset swim, we heard firecrackers being let off a little further down the beach as locals celebrated the news that prominent members of the Tamil Tigers had been captured and Elephant Pass, a strategic point in the ongoing fighting, had been taken by the government. As our return flight didn’t depart until evening our final day was spent taking a boat trip at the Hikkaduwa Coral Gardens, which are a coral formation out at sea. Having all our valuables with us in our hand luggage on the tiny boat we – as well as the guys steering – were rather alarmed when a large wave approached and we didn’t manage to turn quickly enough and very nearly capsized! Despite the coral not being great and nearly going for an involuntary swim, we still found ourselves automatically giving a tip! 

We enjoyed a visit to the Kosgoda Turtle Hatchery where we were able to pick up one day old, two day old and three day old turtles, all kept in separate tanks. Visitors can also see an albino turtle and the sandy area where rescued eggs are buried and labelled ready for hatching. We made several purchases in the shop with our remaining rupees and, although the goods were not particularly cheap, the proceeds all go to saving the turtles.

We were surprised at how few tourists we met on our tour. It appears three quarters of visitors to the island base themselves at a beach resort and don’t explore which is a great shame as there is so much to see and do. Sri Lanka has not yet fully recovered from the tsunami and the current economic crisis is not helping their tourist industry. So everywhere we went, we were made very welcome. My only negative comment about the country is the food. There was rice and curry for breakfast, lunch and dinner and, although I enjoy curry, the Sri Lankan variety was far too spicy. Even the tomato soup that I tried one day as a safe option was really spicy! But we had a great time and lots of happy memories.


First published in VISA 84 (Apr 2009)