The next and final day at Yala

The next morning, Sunday, as we entered into the park there was a snake across the road hurriedly trying to swallow it prey - a rat. When we first observed it the rat was halfway down and a little wriggle by the snake and the rat would go down a little, another little wriggle by the snake and the rat would go in a little bit more. We left it and continued in our pursuit of hopefully encountering more wild animals.

We thought we would try "roundwala" again. As we proceeded to "roundwala" we came across our previous days tusker "Thilak" who was ambling along the road towards us. He saw us and then took a right turn into the jungle. Approaching our destination there was a whole convoy of vehicles and we knew it could only mean one thing. We positioned ourselves far from the madding crowd in anticipation that it would come to water or even climb the tree which it had been on the previous day. We were informed by a jeep that passed us that the previous evening this leopard had made a kill of a spotted deer. It was now up on a tree with the kill having its breakfast. We thought we would try and approach this tree hoping for maybe just a glimpse. We could not see the leopard on the tree because of the leaf cover, but what we saw were some branches which were moving very vigorously and next moment we saw a leopard fall to the ground from the tree. It was probably trying to pull the carcass down to the ground. Suddenly the leopard decided to run pell mell into the jungle as though he had ants in his pants. Since there was no more news as to the visibility of the leopard we left.

Continuing on our rounds we came across a jeep which told us that they had come across a leopard a little way in front of us. The leopard had gone into the jungle. We had a vague idea as to where it might emerge - so - we went in pursuit of it and true enough we came across a huge specimen of a leopard too far to tell if it was male or female but it had a huge dewlap. We just saw this leopard for only a brief second before it decided to go out of our sight. We decided to call it a day as we had to leave that day. We therefore headed back to the bungalow, packed, showered, had brunch and departed for Colombo at about 11.45 a.m. We stopped at Silverray at Pelmadulla for a snack and came home around 5.45 p.m.


A country is known by the way it treats its animals - Jawaharlal Nehru