Sri Lanka

New country for us—Sri Lanka. What a delightful place! It’s like India without the chaos. The people are wonderful—everyone smiles and waves—and outside the city, the country is lush and green. The island nation is slightly smaller than Ireland and sits like a teardrop off the southeastern coast of India.

We decided to leave Colombo, where we docked, and head inland using several types of transportation. From Colombo we took a train 2 hours to Rambukkana. This is a tourist train that was built in 1986 to replicate the Mountbatten, which dated from the 1940s. The original train carried Lord Mountbatten, the Viceroy of India, from his summer home in Sri Lanka’s mountains to the coast. Picture 1 shows the interior of one of the cars.

Upon arrival in Rambukkana, we were to take a bus to our destination, but roadwork prevented that and we hopped aboard a tuk-tuk (red 3-wheeled vehicle shown on the right in Picture 2) to get around town to the bus. Traffic, even in this small town, did not seem to follow “rules of the road”, as picture 2 shows. A short bus ride later we arrived at our destination, Pinnawela, home of an Asian elephant orphanage and refuge—what a treat!

The elephants spend 10:00-12:00 in the morning and 2:00-4:00 in the afternoon bathing in the river. Elephants don’t sweat, so they spray water and dirt on themselves to cool down. When you arrive at the river, you get the view shown in Picture 3. A number of young men, with switches from trees, kept the elephants corralled, so they didn’t take off down the river.

There are mothers and babies (Picture 4). There are social groups (Picture 5). By the way, they’ve found that providing socialization experiences is key to getting elephants to breed in captivity. There are loners, like the forlorn elephant in Picture 6. There was even one that tried to climb up to check Betsy out (Picture 7).

When it’s time to leave, the elephants get doused with water (Picture 8), herded out to the road (Picture 9) and walked down the road back to the orphanage (Picture  10).

Then it’s feeding time at the orphanage. Mothers feed babies. Orphans are fed by hand. While they wait for their milk, they take little split logs, run their feet over the inside and eat the shredded wood from the log (Picture 11). When the milk arrives, however, attention turns to the bottles (Picture 12) and they can empty one of the bottles in about 30 seconds. They were pretty cute!

Older elephants are fed in socialization areas or in pens, where guests feed them.  The elephant in Picture 13 gladly took fruit from guests. And the elephant in Picture 14 even tolerated pictures with guests.

We retraced our steps, bus, tuk-tuk and train, back to Colombo. On to India!