It’s our 17th Anniversary today and the kids have made us the best cards and gifted us massage vouchers ( my favourite thing).
Said goodbye to Kandalama and headed to Dambulla. I have not managed to see the cave temples before but made it this time. We were pouring sweat by the time we got to the top. We seem to always have one child happy to do the walking and not the other (keeps changing to keep it entertaining) - bribery with spicy mango did the trick. There are 5 caves in the complex with 153 Buddha statues in there. I think there are more than 153 monkeys there too terrorising the humans ! Jeevan met an aunt up there, what a small world .
A 2 hour drive got us to Wilpattu. We transferred on to an open jeep and went into the national park. At the entrance they had photos of things we might see , I was very very surprised that we saw them all. It was hot and sticky but if the jeep was moving we were ok and I had stocked up on snacks for the 4 hours . We were very excited initially to see deer but by the end we were like - Oh dear, another deer. Then spotted a sloth bear, it lumbered along on the side of us and then crossed the road to the water. That got us very excited .
I was joking to Savik that if he ate the apple that I was offering him he would get good karma for listening to his mum and see a leopard (he really wanted to see one). Literally as he finished his apple we met other jeeps that were tracking a leopard and saw the corpse of a wild boar that it had devoured (Aanya’s least favourite thing in the park). Then saw the leopard lounging on a log !
We drove off, very happy with what we had seen and not expecting more but we ended up seeing elephants in the water with crocodiles bathing in the sun and even a fox trotting along. We saw heaps of peacocks and varieties of birds, ending with the rooster (the Sri Lankan National bird).
Hot and happy, ended the day with a swim in the pool .
What a wonderful 17th Anniversary!
No comments:
Post a Comment