Saturday 10th August
Dinesh also provided us with some handy tips for the remainder of our travels. One of which was to avoid the elephant orphanage at Kandy, where the elephants are kept longer than necessary, as tourist attractions. He suggested instead that on our way north to Ella, we take a slight detour, to visit Udawalawa Elephant Transit Home. This is a facility, much like the turtle rehab centre we visited near Galle, which actually aims to rehabilitate injured elephants, and transition orphaned elephants, back into the wild.
So, we took the detour.
And along the way, we drove along a fence which was one border of a national park. And there, right beside the road, we found an honest-to-goodness wild elephant.
Admittedly, somewhat domesticated due to the tourists who would stop and give it food in order for it to stick around! We didn’t. But we did grab a few pics.
At the Transit Home, we got to observe the feeding of the elephants, which included a hilarious baby elephant who continually tried to sneak back to the handlers to get some more milk, after he’d been given his alotment.
He wasn’t fooling anybody, though! 🙂
We hit the road back towards Ella, and just short of our destination, stopped to take a shot of Ravana Falls.
We found, and checked into, our Air B’n’B with its awesome balcony views and headed off to view the popular tourist attraction Nine Arches Bridge.
I had already looked up the times of when trains would cross the bridge.
I shot a timelapse of stills as one train went across, and shot video when the next train came past. It’s a very visually-appealing bridge, not least of all, because you can be ON the birdge whilst trains are crossing! Selfie-heaven for the IG-brigade.
