Selle kogemuse kohta
A private safari into Kaudulla National Park puts you at the edge of one of Sri Lanka's great elephant gatherings, with a naturalist beside you to make sense of what you are seeing. The park sits in the North Central Province near Polonnaruwa, built around the Kaudulla reservoir, and the jeep is yours alone, shared with nobody outside your own party. Over three hours you cover the grassland fringes and forest tracks where herds come down to feed and drink, adults and calves together, often close enough to watch without binoculars.
Kaudulla's reservoir has been here since the 3rd century AD, one of the irrigation tanks attributed to King Mahasena and later reconstructed in 1959. The park itself became Sri Lanka's fifteenth national park in 2002, created in part to protect the corridor that links it to Minneriya, Hurulu Eco Park and Somawathiya, the chain of reserves along which elephants move as the seasons turn. That connectivity is the reason herds appear here at certain times of year, drawn by water as it recedes and leaves grass exposed along the tank edges.
The landscape does the rest of the work: open grassland running down to the water, stands of dead trees standing half-submerged where the reservoir has risen over them, and a tree line of dry mixed evergreen forest beyond. Egrets work the shallows and the ground near the herds, and the park's bird list runs well beyond that, recorded at some 160 species, alongside deer, wild boar and smaller mammals that share the same ground. Your naturalist, also your driver and tracker, reads the terrain and the animals' movement to put you in the right place at the right moment.
The jeep seats up to six and the safari runs for three hours, with the Park Gate as the designated meeting point. Pickup and drop-off from anywhere within five kilometres of the gate is included, along with the driver, the private vehicle, and all taxes and service charges; park entrance fees are included when the jeep-with-tickets option is booked, and payable in cash separately if the jeep-only option is chosen. Children are welcome from age five, and anything beyond the five-kilometre radius, food and drink, and gratuities are arranged separately.
