Udawalee

After a 4-30am start and a 2.5 hour drive, our bus pulls into the Udawalee Safari Park to swap vehicles. We are going on safari ? ? ? with our little breakfast packs from the hotel of yummy chicken sandwiches without the crusts. Unfortunately there is onion on the sambos (all 3 of them) so both Peter and I turn our nose up as I say it smells like onion, Pete says it tastes like onion, so it must be onion- I’ll pretend I’m fasting!

It’s just after 7am and we enter the national park and we head off on some roads with lots of character! We all decide it’s a ploy to make us realise how comfortable our mini bus is!

We see a few little birds water buffalo and a wild dog ? and around the next bump on the road is a dream come true a herd of elephants and a 2 month old baby who’s letting his mumma know he wants a drink of milk now !

We bounce around a few more water holes in our safari trucks checking out crocodiles, water buffalo, eagles and birds and the ‘naughty monkeys’ sitting in a tree teasing Mr crocodile you can’t get me-e !

The water hole is a busy place for breakfast and a bush wee! The buffalo and water birds are off in the distance, as we get handed our 2nd little breakfast packs yep it’s a chicken ? sandwich and a banana ? go figure. They offer us juice and it’s like drinking straight cordial…. no freshly brewed caffeine hit here !

Our trip out of the park will take approximately 1.5 hours so we sit back bounce around and Steve keeps hitting his head on the roof so it’s a pleasure to come to a water hole and stop to see a mum and we think two juvenile elephants playing in the water – they wrestle and roll and have a wonderful time until mum trumpets ? ‘all right you two that’s enough’ . They swiftly exit the water as does she and then we see a small croc ? Not sure if she sensed it or had had enough of play time but our tour has just had a sliding doors moment where if we had been 7 minutes earlier or later we may not have seen this David Attenborough moment ??. This included seeing a very rare bird of Sri Lanka, so rare I don’t know its name but Mr Howell, AKA Pete couldn’t even see the bird, however he thought it was “marvellous” that we had !=

Ahhh the peace and serenity and smiles on our faces tell how amazing our experience has been. The tour bus now heads across and down towards the beach again for our last few days in Sri Lanka ??

An amazing seafood platter is our lunch with some warm beer. Our waiter makes us all individualised serviette characters, which is quite funny, and lunch once the beer gets chilled is super yummy jumbo prawns, crab, lobster, normal size prawns and a tuna steak, before we head to the hotel on the beach at Unawatuna Beach….. a little further around from where we were last week.

Ahhhh in case you were wondering we are having a wonderful time.

Mrs w xx