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A day spent at Kaudulla National Park is a day spent watching elephants do what elephants have always done here: move in herds across open grassland, wade through a shallow reservoir studded with the bleached trunks of long-dead trees, and graze along the water's edge while egrets pick through the grass around them. This full-day safari collects you from your hotel in Kandy and brings you to one of Sri Lanka's dry-zone parks, built around an ancient irrigation tank, where that movement of elephants is a regular, almost seasonal event rather than a stroke of luck.
Kaudulla National Park lies in the North Central Province near Polonnaruwa, around 22 kilometres north of Habarana on the road to Trincomalee. At its centre is the Kaudulla Reservoir, one of sixteen tanks originally built under the Anuradhapura-era king Mahasena, abandoned for centuries and reconstructed in 1959. The park itself, spanning roughly 6,900 hectares of dry evergreen forest and grassland around the water, was declared Sri Lanka's fifteenth national park in April 2002, and together with neighbouring Minneriya and Girithale it has been recognised by BirdLife International as an Important Bird Area.
Kaudulla forms part of a corridor elephants use to move between Minneriya and Wasgamuwa to the south and Somawathiya further north. In the driest months the herds gather at Minneriya, then shift back towards Kaudulla's tank around September in search of water, often in large numbers. The park's records list 24 species of mammal, 160 of bird, and smaller but notable numbers of reptile and fish alongside them, so the elephants you see moving across the plain or standing among the dead trees in the lake are only part of what the park holds.
The day itself runs from your Kandy hotel and back again, in an air-conditioned private vehicle with an English-speaking chauffeur for the road, and an open safari jeep with its own English-speaking driver and tracker once you reach the park gates. A bottle of water per person is provided for the journey. Food, drinks, gratuities and other personal expenses are not included, and depending on which jeep option you book, the park entrance tickets are either bundled in or left for you to arrange separately.
This is a private tour rather than a shared one, and the minimum age for guests is seven. Expect to be out for the better part of the day, nine hours door to door from Kandy, with the safari jeep itself covering the ground inside the park where the larger vehicle cannot go.
