10. Moving On
Cutting Udawalawe a day short
08.16.2021 - 08.16.2021 85 °F
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Chapter 10, August 16, 2021
“Sir? Sir?” I’m dreaming.
“Sir?” It is 4:45am, five minutes before my alarm is to go off so that I can be ready for my pot of coffee to be delivered at 5:00. We leave for the park at 5:30, etc., etc.
“Sir?” I’m not dreaming. The coffee is here so I scramble, or more accurately stumble, out of bed, pull on some clothes and unzip the room divider screen so that I can make my way to the screen at the tent’s front entry and unzip that. Once that is completed (and B4 is laughing here because she alone can visualize how that must have looked given how I behave when I first awake), I am handed a cup and saucer filled with cool coffee.
At Yala, this would have been delivered within a few seconds of 5:00am. It would have been what I think is called a “pottle,” a china pot containing at least two full cups of coffee. And, it would have been too hot to drink after pouring out the first cup. At Udawalawa, however, this is to be expected.
The internet era combined with mobile phones is a wonderful time in which to live—if you are an information seeker as am I. My iPhone podcast app delivers to me the National Public Radio hourly news roundup in real time no matter where I am in the world just as long as I can receive a cellular signal. So, as I curse my now cold coffee, I can at least listen to the state of things in the United States. The news is not all that good but when is the news good?
At 5:25 I grab my flashlight, unzip the tent, pick up my camera bag, rezip the tent, and walk toward; no, wait, I need my mask. So I backtrack, unzip and rezip and am on my way to be met on the path by trusty Avinka. We walk together through the dark, past sentinals of kerosene lanterns, to meet Asanka at his Toyota truck. Much to my delight, my driver Mr. Kalinka is joining us on this morning’s drive.
At 6:05am, upon arrival at the Udawalawa Park entrance we find it gated and unmanned. Asanka honks. Asanka disembarks the truck and knocks on a door opposite the ticket taker’s booth. A muffled sound finally comes from within and a bearded young man, looking just like I looked 90 minutes earlier, stumbled out to unlock the gate and retrieve our paperwork. All is well and off we go to, after a ten-minute stop at the museum which also adorns the park entrance, to see what we can see.
Each day in the bush delivers its own chapter to a larger story. This day, we spy three Malabar Pied Hornbills high in a tree. They quickly depart, offended at our intrusion. There is a Crested Hawk Eagle in another tree. A Common Garden Lizard perches on a twig. There was, of course, still tracking to be done: a monitor lizard’s line in the sand had been stepped on by an elephant; storks stood sentry over unoccupied waterholes and there was a final remnant of a life now over. Where there were fifty elephants a day earlier, there were four lone males today, spread across the three hours we spent in the park.
No matter. We four amigos, one client and three drivers/trackers/spotters/guides/naturalists, etc. are out in Lord Budda’s landscape, peering into the bush, up into trees, down dusty sideroads and occasionally even straight ahead, ever careful to lean in so as to dodge thorn branches when the track is narrow and quick to grab a handhold when the ruts turn nasty. There is more leaning and less seeing on this cool morning.
The reason I booked 13 safari game drives during this journey is that I did not want to come all this way only to be denied my quest: spotting the rare and elusive leopard. We saw leopard tracks this morning but not the creature that left them. But then, this final game drive is akin to protecting a three-touchdown lead at the two-minute warning of the fourth quarter. One kneels on every snap, and even though there is nothing to see here, the feeling one has is of victory, overcoming the odds, achieving a difficult goal not worry about the clock running out but cheering it on second by second.
Back at camp (having passed an interesting looking hotel, Saffron Fields, and one more elephant gazing longingly across the road at a woman grilling corn, past the entrepreneurial shops which line our route and by the scores of tuk-tuks and motorbikes which swarm the road) I shower, finish packing and stop briefly at the internet canopy to send a quick email, swatting away the bugs as I do.
Mr. Kalika pops the trunk on his vehicle for my bags (one heavy rollaboard suitcase and one heavy camera backpack) to be loaded, I pass out well earned gratuities to Asanka and Avinka, and I’m soon feeling backseat-of-the-Toyota air conditioning—wonderful—as we begin the four-hour journey to the city of Colombo. We are briefly detained by a herder escorting his domesticated buffalo herd across the road. I’m given the choice of the “regular” route which takes five hours from the roadside store where we stop for a bottle or water, or the “expressway” route which takes three-and-a-half hours. Expressway, here we come.
This journey is in five parts. The first part was the trip over. The second was the brief quarantine at Negombo. The third was safari. Now I begin part four, a couple of days in a hotel in the city to have time for still another negative PCR test to enable me to commence part five, the trip back. Do I regret that I have stolen a day from part three to offer it up to part four? No.
I'm headed to Jetwing Blue Hotel in Negombo which sits on the Indian Ocean. More on that tomorrow.
