Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part five: 2016-2017
- Thread starter Chlidonias
- Start date
When I was at the Popham Arboretum there was a friend of Jayantha's also staying there for a couple of days. He lives in a village called Katugastota which is the one right before Kandy (which as noted previously is three hours from Dambulla, where the Arboretum is). I ended up staying at his house in Katugastota for the next two nights before catching the train from Kandy to a little mountain village called Ohiya.
My original plans for the Central Highlands had involved only the town of Nuwara Eliya. Everyone goes there to go to the Horton Plains National Park. The park itself is quite expensive to enter and to get to from Nuwara Eliya (because of tourist prices), but there are a couple of botanic gardens in/near the town where you can see all the endemic highland birds as well as the montane purple-faced langurs (the bear monkeys). But when I was at Wilpattu House, Sereno had told me that Nuwara Eliya isn't some nice Bukit Fraser-ish village but a really big town, not my scene at all, and I would be better off going to Ohiya which is surrounded by mountain forest and where I can just walk everywhere for free without having to pay to get to places. Ohiya is also, as it happens, the second entrance way to the National Park, on the opposite side to the Nuwara Eliya entrance, but not many people use it so the entry road is quite free of traffic. This all sounded promising, and more so when I was told by the German girl at my homestay in Sigiriya that Nuwara Eliya is not a place for cheap accommodation (and she even said she had thought it would be like the hill stations in Malaysia, and in reality it's just a big town). So I figured I would go to Ohiya and if it was good for birds stay there for a few days, otherwise move onwards and if need be make my way to Nuwara Eliya because at least there I knew where the bird sites were.
Sereno had given me four hotel names and phone numbers, so while in Katugastota I rang them all to get costs. The first one was the Hill Safari Eco Lodge where their cheapest single room was 4000 LKR (about NZ$40). Next was the Acacia Inn where the chap who answered the phone didn't speak English and told me I had the wrong number. Third was the Forest Inn where the number didn't work. Fourth was Horton Place where, as far as I understood over a bad line and bad accents, they had a room for 2500, and it was right near the train station. Still not cheap but if I was able to just be out birding all day then the room and food would be the only costs.
The train ride from Kandy to the highlands is one of those things that every tourist does. Most of them are going to Ella which is about an hour further on from Ohiya. Whenever I said to someone that I was going to Ohiya from Kandy they would say "you mean Ella". I would say, "no, Ohiya". And they would say, "no, Ella. E. L. L. A. That has all the tourist things in it". I did pass through Ella at a later stge, and I'm glad I didn't go there. It just looked like your standard tourist hang-out, with every streetside cafe filled with backpackers. Also it's about 700 metres lower in altitude than Ohiya so no good for my purposes.
Trains in Sri Lanka are really cheap, only 210 LKR from Kandy to Ohiya. I never got round to talking about the intricacies of train travel in India because I left that country prematurely without having taken any (I will probably come back to the subject when I return to India), but unlike the Indian rail system that of Sri Lanka is as simple as can be. I had gone to the Kandy station the day before to get a ticket and check the schedule but they don't pre-sell second-class tickets, only first-class, so I just had to buy it on the day. First-class has reserved seating and costs about 600 LKR. A second-class ticket is cheaper but does not guarantee a seat - if you are first on you get a seat, otherwise you stand. It's not as bad as it sounds, even when it is five hours to Ohiya. The train is pretty full of locals when it arrives in Kandy (coming from Colombo) but it empties out along the way so it doesn't take too long before you can sit down. Although most of the people on the train when it arrived in Kandy were locals, almost all the passengers getting on at Kandy were tourists. The ratio of tourist to local waiting on the platform was something like twenty to one.
I arrived at the Ohiya station at 1.45pm and was met by a young chap named Umesh. There's not much at the station, just a few lonely buildings on the opposite side of the tracks. I had booked on the phone to stay at Horton Place (or so I thought) but Umesh took me in his tuktuk along a winding road to the three-cabin Angel Inn. This confused me to start with - I thought perhaps Horton Place had changed its name to Angel Inn - but it turned out that Horton Place (which in fact is right next to the shop opposite the station) was fully-booked already for that night. I went back up to the shop for lunch and talked to the owner's wife Kumudu. While Horton Place was 2000 per night, including breakfast and dinner, the Angel Inn cabins were 3500 per night and only included breakfast. This didn't sit so well with me but there wasn't much I could do given the limited accommodation options there, and I was told I could move to Horton Place for the next night. A while late the owner Gamini turned up and said I could have the cabin for 2500, including breakfast and dinner, because that was what he had told me on the phone.
They are really nice people, but everything is run in such a disorganised manner. It sort of seemed like they take a booking, then book someone else in for the same room, and then just shuffle people round to make everything fit. They said I could just stay in the cabin for the next few nights, because it was nice being isolated in the forest (albeit eucalyptus forest with no animals in it), but then the next morning said all three cabins had been booked, so I had to move to Horton Place anyway. It was a bit cheaper, so I didn't mind, but it was difficult knowing from one minute to the next what was going to be happening there. Nevertheless I would definitely recommend staying there if at Ohiya, because it has the best location and prices. Just don't expect anything to be on time or to make sense.
So my first day in Ohiya I spent most of the afternoon at the shop not getting far with anything. At the end of the day I had a wander in the forest around the cabins but it was entirely eucalyptus and of course nothing in Sri Lanka can live in eucalyptus forest. Along the fence by the cabins was a yellow-flowered plant and while I was idly watching this in case a sunbird or something got lost and appeared here, a beautiful orange-breasted bird suddenly popped out and perched on a log. It was a male Kashmir flycatcher. This is quite a special little bird. It breeds only in a small area of Kashmir in the northwest Himalayas and winters only in Sri Lanka and the Western Ghats. You have limited opportunities to see it, and most birders do so at Victoria Park in Nuwara Eliya. At least I would have seen one good bird at Ohiya, even if otherwise things didn't work out. The next morning while having breakfast, the Kashmir flycatcher returned and brought with him another new bird, a yellow-eared bulbul. Yellowy-olive with a black and white head, and with a bright yellow tuft like it has put a flower behind its ear. This was one of the endemic highland birds I was here to find. Endemic bird number eight on day number eleven - I was running a bit behind.
The road from Ohiya up to the Horton Plains National Park is literally right beside the train station. Everyone told me it was 11km to the entrance, except one person who told me it was 6km; the sign at the start of the road also says 6km. I think it might be somewhere in the middle. There are numbered marker stones every kilometre - the station is just before km22 and the park ticket counter just after km29 (I think the stones start at the town of Welimada in the opposite direction: the Angel Inn is at km21). I don't know how accurate the kilometre markers are - the lower ones seem right but the higher ones seem too close to be a kilometre apart.
It probably sounds a bit weird but I wasn't actually going to go into the national park itself. The entry is over 3000 LKR for a foreigner and I was hoping that all the animals I was looking for would be outside the gates along the access road. It would depend entirely on if there was good forest along the road, but if so it would save me quite a bit of money.
Although the road is going upwards the whole way (Ohiya is at 1774m and the Horton Plains at 2130m) the gradient is mostly gentle. It really is an easy walk. If you're not up to walking the distance a tuktuk to the top costs 500 LKR, but that would defeat the purpose of walking along the road looking for wildlife. The first two or three kilometres of the road were useless - it was all forest but exclusively of eucalyptus trees except in a few gullies where the natives remained. It was completely silent, not a single bird calling. At about 2.5km you pass a side road to the Hill Safari Eco Lodge which is on a tea plantation. The lodge is 4km from the station, and the sign at this fork says it is a further 1.5km, hence my "about 2.5km". There's no point walking down the side road if looking for wildlife because it is just eucalyptus and scrub - but about a kilometre along it are some monstrously tall eucalyptus which are well-worth seeing. I've seen the tallest tree in New Zealand which is a mountain ash (a type of eucalyptus), and these seemed much taller. After passing the fork (if remaining on the main road) new trees get mixed in amongst the eucalyptus for about the next 2km, namely conifers and big old tea trees. Tea plantations look like hillsides covered in bright green topiary, all the bushes kept at about waist-height by the constant plucking of young leaves from the top, but if tea is just left to grow it is a proper forest tree and looks quite different.
There weren't any birds in this mixed eucalyptus-conifer forest either, but there were purple-faced langurs. The montane race is popularly called the "bear monkey", a name I quite like and will keep using. The bear monkeys look very different to the lowland dry-zone langurs I had seen a few days before at Sigiriya. Living in colder conditions they have long shaggy fur, hence the popular name. They proved abundant along the road - on this first day I saw six groups. Most of the "groups" were only one to three animals, but the final group of the day had about ten in it. This last group was actually right down the bottom of the road, only about fifty metres from the train station. On the second day I saw even more, with nine sightings (although several were probably repeats as I and the monkeys moved up and down the road). However the second group that day had about twenty animals in it. The call of the bear monkeys sounds sort of like a gibbon. It starts with a bark, followed by a loud whooping. I heard it commonly both days I was along the road.
At about the 4km mark there are a couple of "forest rest houses", which are little wood-and-mud houses built for walkers to take a break in. They are more than a little neglected now, almost ruins in fact. Directly after these rest houses there is an abrupt change from the mixed exotic forest with its bare ground, to pure native forest with an understory of low bamboo. There is literally a straight line between the two forest types. Just as abrupt is the change from the dead-silence of the exotic forest to there suddenly being bird-song everywhere.
The first endemic animal I saw after crossing this threshhold wasn't a bird, although there were a lot of unseen birds making a racket in the vicinity. It was a dusky squirrel. There are three small squirrel species in Sri Lanka (by which I mean "small squirrels" as opposed to the giant squirrel and the flying squirrels). All three are palm squirrels in the genus Funambulus. The commonest is the three-striped palm squirrel which is found everywhere. The other two species also have three stripes on their backs but the flame-striped squirrel of the rainforests has the central stripe bright orange, while the dusky squirrel can be distinguished by its very dark colouration. The dusky squirrel was formerly considered to live in both Sri lanka and southern India (in the Western Ghats) but now the two have been split, with F. obscurus in Sri Lanka and F. sublineatus in India. The dusky squirrels are tiny things, much smaller than the three-striped palm squirrel, and they dart about on the trunks and branches like rockets. I saw three of them on the first day - the first one poorly, the second one better, and the third one very well indeed (and then the first one at the 26km marker post I saw again on the way back down) - but they were so fast and liked to remain in the gloom of the forest that I couldn't get any photos. On the second day I saw four of the squirrels and actually managed to get photos of three of them, although most of the photos weren't exactly spectacular.
The native forest stretch goes for probably three kilometres before you reach the ticket building for the national park. There were birds everywhere along this stretch of the road, including three more of the highland endemics: the Sri Lankan white-eye, the Sri Lankan scimitar-babbler, and the dull-blue flycatcher which is more slate-coloured than dull-blue although when in the sun the crown shines like turquoise. With those three additions my endemics total reached eleven endemics on day eleven. I had caught up. I also saw a Sri Lankan junglefowl, probably the most widespread endemic bird, which I had so far seen at every site I'd been to (Wilpattu, then Sigiriya, then the Popham Arboretum, then here). The very best section was the first 200 metres, where I saw almost all the species at some point, as well as dusky and giant squirrels. The montane race of the giant squirrel looks totally different to the dry-zone race.
When I was at Wilpattu Sereno had told me that from Ohiya you can walk up the road to the entrance gate of the park, then there was a 2km track through the park which you didn't need to pay for because it just joined to another road and you can follow that down to Pattipola (the train station/village before Ohiya). The whole walk would be about 20km, and apparently through forest the entire way. I expressed doubt that they would let a foreigner use that track for free, but he assured me it was free because it lead between the two villages. When I got to the ticket counter I explained to the guy there that I wasn't going to World's End (the reason tourists visit the park) and I had been told there was a path to Pattipola. Yes, he agreed, I could take the path to Pattipola - it would cost me 3600 LKR. Hmm. No chance. I turned around and went back the way I had come. It was fine, the birds I was looking for were along this road; I just spent the rest of the day walking up and down the same 3km stretch.
There were three more endemic birds from the central highlands which I wanted to find. Top of the three was the Sri Lankan woodpigeon, a bird I definitely wanted to see. The other two were the Sri Lankan bush-warbler which prefers to never come out from the undergrowth, and the Sri Lankan whistling thrush. I repeated what I did yesterday - walk up to the native forest and then just cover the same 3km stretch of road looking for birds. Immediately on reaching the native forest I encountered a bird-wave with three of the endemics from yesterday (white-eye, bulbul and flycatcher - I didn't see any scimitar-babblers today although I saw lots the previous day), as well as green warblers, great tits, common tailorbirds, grey-headed canary-flycatchers, dark-fronted babblers, and velvet-fronted nuthatches. The dusky squirrel was in there as well following the birds around (they seem to be regulars in the bird-waves).
The rest of the morning and early afternoon was much the same. The highland endemics which I had already seen were all very common here and seen repeatedly. The other birds were the same as yesterday. I had become resigned to not seeing the three extra birds I was looking for. Then, while watching a mixed flock of canary-flycatchers and white-eyes, a movement near the base of the tree caught my eye and I found myself looking straight at a Sri Lankan bush-warbler. They are actually common enough, just extremely skulky. I don't know how many birders see them without using tapes to lure them out. This one was fairly visible as it moved along the edge of the road, and then it went down the slope and disappeared. That was neat, but what I really wanted to see was a Sri Lankan woodpigeon.
Two bends further down the road, I saw a couple of Indian blackbirds in a fig tree, looking like English blackbirds but with bright red legs and eye-rings, and a deep orange bill. There were some bear monkeys nearby. The blackbirds had left the tree but something else was moving in there. I put the binoculars on it and was stunned to see a pair of Sri Lankan woodpigeons, just hanging out on a branch. They weren't doing much, just preening and being generally lazy, but I watched them for ages. I tried to get some photos but they were too far inside the tree for that. After a while I moved on, and at the very next bend I looked down at the little stream which ran through the forest below and saw another woodpigeon down there drinking. That one I could get some better photos of because it was in the open, although quite far below me.
Before leaving the native forest and heading back to Ohiya I had a little walk down a dirt track which leads off the paved road to the tea plantations. This was more on impulse than anything, but it was a good idea because I saw another bush-warbler and also a dusky squirrel (in another bird-wave) of which I finally got a decent photo.
So a good result for the two days at Ohiya. The only highland endemic I missed out on was the Sri Lankan whistling thrush so I'll be at least one endemic short by the end of the trip. I also didn't see any toque macaques which was a shame. Like the bear monkeys the highland race of toques has long thick fur, and I would liked to have seen those.
The next morning I caught a series of buses to end up in Tissamaharama (aka Tissa for short) which is the town for Yala National Park.
My original plans for the Central Highlands had involved only the town of Nuwara Eliya. Everyone goes there to go to the Horton Plains National Park. The park itself is quite expensive to enter and to get to from Nuwara Eliya (because of tourist prices), but there are a couple of botanic gardens in/near the town where you can see all the endemic highland birds as well as the montane purple-faced langurs (the bear monkeys). But when I was at Wilpattu House, Sereno had told me that Nuwara Eliya isn't some nice Bukit Fraser-ish village but a really big town, not my scene at all, and I would be better off going to Ohiya which is surrounded by mountain forest and where I can just walk everywhere for free without having to pay to get to places. Ohiya is also, as it happens, the second entrance way to the National Park, on the opposite side to the Nuwara Eliya entrance, but not many people use it so the entry road is quite free of traffic. This all sounded promising, and more so when I was told by the German girl at my homestay in Sigiriya that Nuwara Eliya is not a place for cheap accommodation (and she even said she had thought it would be like the hill stations in Malaysia, and in reality it's just a big town). So I figured I would go to Ohiya and if it was good for birds stay there for a few days, otherwise move onwards and if need be make my way to Nuwara Eliya because at least there I knew where the bird sites were.
Sereno had given me four hotel names and phone numbers, so while in Katugastota I rang them all to get costs. The first one was the Hill Safari Eco Lodge where their cheapest single room was 4000 LKR (about NZ$40). Next was the Acacia Inn where the chap who answered the phone didn't speak English and told me I had the wrong number. Third was the Forest Inn where the number didn't work. Fourth was Horton Place where, as far as I understood over a bad line and bad accents, they had a room for 2500, and it was right near the train station. Still not cheap but if I was able to just be out birding all day then the room and food would be the only costs.
The train ride from Kandy to the highlands is one of those things that every tourist does. Most of them are going to Ella which is about an hour further on from Ohiya. Whenever I said to someone that I was going to Ohiya from Kandy they would say "you mean Ella". I would say, "no, Ohiya". And they would say, "no, Ella. E. L. L. A. That has all the tourist things in it". I did pass through Ella at a later stge, and I'm glad I didn't go there. It just looked like your standard tourist hang-out, with every streetside cafe filled with backpackers. Also it's about 700 metres lower in altitude than Ohiya so no good for my purposes.
Trains in Sri Lanka are really cheap, only 210 LKR from Kandy to Ohiya. I never got round to talking about the intricacies of train travel in India because I left that country prematurely without having taken any (I will probably come back to the subject when I return to India), but unlike the Indian rail system that of Sri Lanka is as simple as can be. I had gone to the Kandy station the day before to get a ticket and check the schedule but they don't pre-sell second-class tickets, only first-class, so I just had to buy it on the day. First-class has reserved seating and costs about 600 LKR. A second-class ticket is cheaper but does not guarantee a seat - if you are first on you get a seat, otherwise you stand. It's not as bad as it sounds, even when it is five hours to Ohiya. The train is pretty full of locals when it arrives in Kandy (coming from Colombo) but it empties out along the way so it doesn't take too long before you can sit down. Although most of the people on the train when it arrived in Kandy were locals, almost all the passengers getting on at Kandy were tourists. The ratio of tourist to local waiting on the platform was something like twenty to one.
I arrived at the Ohiya station at 1.45pm and was met by a young chap named Umesh. There's not much at the station, just a few lonely buildings on the opposite side of the tracks. I had booked on the phone to stay at Horton Place (or so I thought) but Umesh took me in his tuktuk along a winding road to the three-cabin Angel Inn. This confused me to start with - I thought perhaps Horton Place had changed its name to Angel Inn - but it turned out that Horton Place (which in fact is right next to the shop opposite the station) was fully-booked already for that night. I went back up to the shop for lunch and talked to the owner's wife Kumudu. While Horton Place was 2000 per night, including breakfast and dinner, the Angel Inn cabins were 3500 per night and only included breakfast. This didn't sit so well with me but there wasn't much I could do given the limited accommodation options there, and I was told I could move to Horton Place for the next night. A while late the owner Gamini turned up and said I could have the cabin for 2500, including breakfast and dinner, because that was what he had told me on the phone.
They are really nice people, but everything is run in such a disorganised manner. It sort of seemed like they take a booking, then book someone else in for the same room, and then just shuffle people round to make everything fit. They said I could just stay in the cabin for the next few nights, because it was nice being isolated in the forest (albeit eucalyptus forest with no animals in it), but then the next morning said all three cabins had been booked, so I had to move to Horton Place anyway. It was a bit cheaper, so I didn't mind, but it was difficult knowing from one minute to the next what was going to be happening there. Nevertheless I would definitely recommend staying there if at Ohiya, because it has the best location and prices. Just don't expect anything to be on time or to make sense.
So my first day in Ohiya I spent most of the afternoon at the shop not getting far with anything. At the end of the day I had a wander in the forest around the cabins but it was entirely eucalyptus and of course nothing in Sri Lanka can live in eucalyptus forest. Along the fence by the cabins was a yellow-flowered plant and while I was idly watching this in case a sunbird or something got lost and appeared here, a beautiful orange-breasted bird suddenly popped out and perched on a log. It was a male Kashmir flycatcher. This is quite a special little bird. It breeds only in a small area of Kashmir in the northwest Himalayas and winters only in Sri Lanka and the Western Ghats. You have limited opportunities to see it, and most birders do so at Victoria Park in Nuwara Eliya. At least I would have seen one good bird at Ohiya, even if otherwise things didn't work out. The next morning while having breakfast, the Kashmir flycatcher returned and brought with him another new bird, a yellow-eared bulbul. Yellowy-olive with a black and white head, and with a bright yellow tuft like it has put a flower behind its ear. This was one of the endemic highland birds I was here to find. Endemic bird number eight on day number eleven - I was running a bit behind.
The road from Ohiya up to the Horton Plains National Park is literally right beside the train station. Everyone told me it was 11km to the entrance, except one person who told me it was 6km; the sign at the start of the road also says 6km. I think it might be somewhere in the middle. There are numbered marker stones every kilometre - the station is just before km22 and the park ticket counter just after km29 (I think the stones start at the town of Welimada in the opposite direction: the Angel Inn is at km21). I don't know how accurate the kilometre markers are - the lower ones seem right but the higher ones seem too close to be a kilometre apart.
It probably sounds a bit weird but I wasn't actually going to go into the national park itself. The entry is over 3000 LKR for a foreigner and I was hoping that all the animals I was looking for would be outside the gates along the access road. It would depend entirely on if there was good forest along the road, but if so it would save me quite a bit of money.
Although the road is going upwards the whole way (Ohiya is at 1774m and the Horton Plains at 2130m) the gradient is mostly gentle. It really is an easy walk. If you're not up to walking the distance a tuktuk to the top costs 500 LKR, but that would defeat the purpose of walking along the road looking for wildlife. The first two or three kilometres of the road were useless - it was all forest but exclusively of eucalyptus trees except in a few gullies where the natives remained. It was completely silent, not a single bird calling. At about 2.5km you pass a side road to the Hill Safari Eco Lodge which is on a tea plantation. The lodge is 4km from the station, and the sign at this fork says it is a further 1.5km, hence my "about 2.5km". There's no point walking down the side road if looking for wildlife because it is just eucalyptus and scrub - but about a kilometre along it are some monstrously tall eucalyptus which are well-worth seeing. I've seen the tallest tree in New Zealand which is a mountain ash (a type of eucalyptus), and these seemed much taller. After passing the fork (if remaining on the main road) new trees get mixed in amongst the eucalyptus for about the next 2km, namely conifers and big old tea trees. Tea plantations look like hillsides covered in bright green topiary, all the bushes kept at about waist-height by the constant plucking of young leaves from the top, but if tea is just left to grow it is a proper forest tree and looks quite different.
There weren't any birds in this mixed eucalyptus-conifer forest either, but there were purple-faced langurs. The montane race is popularly called the "bear monkey", a name I quite like and will keep using. The bear monkeys look very different to the lowland dry-zone langurs I had seen a few days before at Sigiriya. Living in colder conditions they have long shaggy fur, hence the popular name. They proved abundant along the road - on this first day I saw six groups. Most of the "groups" were only one to three animals, but the final group of the day had about ten in it. This last group was actually right down the bottom of the road, only about fifty metres from the train station. On the second day I saw even more, with nine sightings (although several were probably repeats as I and the monkeys moved up and down the road). However the second group that day had about twenty animals in it. The call of the bear monkeys sounds sort of like a gibbon. It starts with a bark, followed by a loud whooping. I heard it commonly both days I was along the road.
At about the 4km mark there are a couple of "forest rest houses", which are little wood-and-mud houses built for walkers to take a break in. They are more than a little neglected now, almost ruins in fact. Directly after these rest houses there is an abrupt change from the mixed exotic forest with its bare ground, to pure native forest with an understory of low bamboo. There is literally a straight line between the two forest types. Just as abrupt is the change from the dead-silence of the exotic forest to there suddenly being bird-song everywhere.
The first endemic animal I saw after crossing this threshhold wasn't a bird, although there were a lot of unseen birds making a racket in the vicinity. It was a dusky squirrel. There are three small squirrel species in Sri Lanka (by which I mean "small squirrels" as opposed to the giant squirrel and the flying squirrels). All three are palm squirrels in the genus Funambulus. The commonest is the three-striped palm squirrel which is found everywhere. The other two species also have three stripes on their backs but the flame-striped squirrel of the rainforests has the central stripe bright orange, while the dusky squirrel can be distinguished by its very dark colouration. The dusky squirrel was formerly considered to live in both Sri lanka and southern India (in the Western Ghats) but now the two have been split, with F. obscurus in Sri Lanka and F. sublineatus in India. The dusky squirrels are tiny things, much smaller than the three-striped palm squirrel, and they dart about on the trunks and branches like rockets. I saw three of them on the first day - the first one poorly, the second one better, and the third one very well indeed (and then the first one at the 26km marker post I saw again on the way back down) - but they were so fast and liked to remain in the gloom of the forest that I couldn't get any photos. On the second day I saw four of the squirrels and actually managed to get photos of three of them, although most of the photos weren't exactly spectacular.
The native forest stretch goes for probably three kilometres before you reach the ticket building for the national park. There were birds everywhere along this stretch of the road, including three more of the highland endemics: the Sri Lankan white-eye, the Sri Lankan scimitar-babbler, and the dull-blue flycatcher which is more slate-coloured than dull-blue although when in the sun the crown shines like turquoise. With those three additions my endemics total reached eleven endemics on day eleven. I had caught up. I also saw a Sri Lankan junglefowl, probably the most widespread endemic bird, which I had so far seen at every site I'd been to (Wilpattu, then Sigiriya, then the Popham Arboretum, then here). The very best section was the first 200 metres, where I saw almost all the species at some point, as well as dusky and giant squirrels. The montane race of the giant squirrel looks totally different to the dry-zone race.
When I was at Wilpattu Sereno had told me that from Ohiya you can walk up the road to the entrance gate of the park, then there was a 2km track through the park which you didn't need to pay for because it just joined to another road and you can follow that down to Pattipola (the train station/village before Ohiya). The whole walk would be about 20km, and apparently through forest the entire way. I expressed doubt that they would let a foreigner use that track for free, but he assured me it was free because it lead between the two villages. When I got to the ticket counter I explained to the guy there that I wasn't going to World's End (the reason tourists visit the park) and I had been told there was a path to Pattipola. Yes, he agreed, I could take the path to Pattipola - it would cost me 3600 LKR. Hmm. No chance. I turned around and went back the way I had come. It was fine, the birds I was looking for were along this road; I just spent the rest of the day walking up and down the same 3km stretch.
There were three more endemic birds from the central highlands which I wanted to find. Top of the three was the Sri Lankan woodpigeon, a bird I definitely wanted to see. The other two were the Sri Lankan bush-warbler which prefers to never come out from the undergrowth, and the Sri Lankan whistling thrush. I repeated what I did yesterday - walk up to the native forest and then just cover the same 3km stretch of road looking for birds. Immediately on reaching the native forest I encountered a bird-wave with three of the endemics from yesterday (white-eye, bulbul and flycatcher - I didn't see any scimitar-babblers today although I saw lots the previous day), as well as green warblers, great tits, common tailorbirds, grey-headed canary-flycatchers, dark-fronted babblers, and velvet-fronted nuthatches. The dusky squirrel was in there as well following the birds around (they seem to be regulars in the bird-waves).
The rest of the morning and early afternoon was much the same. The highland endemics which I had already seen were all very common here and seen repeatedly. The other birds were the same as yesterday. I had become resigned to not seeing the three extra birds I was looking for. Then, while watching a mixed flock of canary-flycatchers and white-eyes, a movement near the base of the tree caught my eye and I found myself looking straight at a Sri Lankan bush-warbler. They are actually common enough, just extremely skulky. I don't know how many birders see them without using tapes to lure them out. This one was fairly visible as it moved along the edge of the road, and then it went down the slope and disappeared. That was neat, but what I really wanted to see was a Sri Lankan woodpigeon.
Two bends further down the road, I saw a couple of Indian blackbirds in a fig tree, looking like English blackbirds but with bright red legs and eye-rings, and a deep orange bill. There were some bear monkeys nearby. The blackbirds had left the tree but something else was moving in there. I put the binoculars on it and was stunned to see a pair of Sri Lankan woodpigeons, just hanging out on a branch. They weren't doing much, just preening and being generally lazy, but I watched them for ages. I tried to get some photos but they were too far inside the tree for that. After a while I moved on, and at the very next bend I looked down at the little stream which ran through the forest below and saw another woodpigeon down there drinking. That one I could get some better photos of because it was in the open, although quite far below me.
Before leaving the native forest and heading back to Ohiya I had a little walk down a dirt track which leads off the paved road to the tea plantations. This was more on impulse than anything, but it was a good idea because I saw another bush-warbler and also a dusky squirrel (in another bird-wave) of which I finally got a decent photo.
So a good result for the two days at Ohiya. The only highland endemic I missed out on was the Sri Lankan whistling thrush so I'll be at least one endemic short by the end of the trip. I also didn't see any toque macaques which was a shame. Like the bear monkeys the highland race of toques has long thick fur, and I would liked to have seen those.
The next morning I caught a series of buses to end up in Tissamaharama (aka Tissa for short) which is the town for Yala National Park.
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I had to take four buses to reach the town of Tissamaharama from Ohiya. First was a bus to Welimada (22km, one hour, 60 LKR), then to Bandarewella (22km, one hour and twenty minutes, 52 LKR), then to Weerawila Junction (95km, two and a half hours, 139 LKR), and then finally to Tissamaharama (one hour, 30 LKR). I didn't have anywhere booked in Tissa because I hadn't had any internet for a while, but I figured I'd be able to find somewhere near the bus station. At Weerawila Junction a guy had approached me and said his brother had a hotel in Tissa for 1500 LKR and gave me his card, so at least I had that option. At the Tissa bus station I had no sooner got off the bus than a guy in a tuktuk zoomed up and said he had a hotel just round the corner for 1000 LKR. This would be my cheapest room yet. I was a bit sceptical given the prices of rooms in the other places I'd been, but figured this was a tourist town so there could well be more budget hotels. Tuktuk Guy's friend turned up as well (I'll call them "Tuktuk Guy" and "Safari Guy" for convenience), and we all went to the hotel. It was called the Moon Lanka Yala - presumably they just chose some random words out of a hat and put them on a sign - and sure enough the room was 1000 LKR and approximately double the size I had been expecting for the price. Their safari to Yala National Park, though, was not so cheap.
Safari Guy said he already had three people at the hotel going the next day for a full-day safari, and he was charging a whopping 12,000 LKR per person. I checked his figures and found that it was a major money-gouging effort. First up he was duplicitly claiming that the entry ticket was almost 4000 per person when it was just over 2000 each if there were four people (he was totalling all the costs as being per person when only the "foreign adult" was per person, everything else was shared costs). When I pointed this out he immediately said the prices on his laminated card were "last year's prices" and they have gone up to what he was claiming they were. Secondly the private costs (i.e. the jeep and food, as opposed to the official government entry ticket prices) were ridiculous. Breakfast and lunch were both charged at 600 each (he feigned surprise that lunch at almost any restaurant would cost about 250 or 300; and the breakfast was just toast and fruit which is about 150-worth). That left the total jeep cost (before splitting between the four people) at about 26,000 LKR! (Remember there are about 100 LKR to one NZ dollar, so just remove the last two zeros to get the amount - in this case NZ$260 just for the jeep). Although I told Safari Guy his prices were ridiculous and also why they were ridiculous (e.g. I spelled out what the ticket price should really be, and also that I knew a full-day four-person safari should cost about 8000 LKR maximum per person not 12,000), I was also being careful what I said because he was giving the impression he was also the hotel owner. So I ended with saying that I would think about it and let him know later after I'd had lunch, intending to just go find a more realistic safari price somewhere else.
I went up to my room to get my wallet and Safari Guy followed me up there to "talk", and he made it clear I was not to talk to the other guests about the prices "because this is just business"! After the two guys left I was on my way out as well when I was intercepted by another man who said he was the owner and that I wasn't to pay the other guys the money for the room. Apparently they had a habit of telling guests to pay them and then denying it so either the guests had to pay twice or the owner didn't get the money for the room. I had to be sure, he said, to only pay the people inside the house. This was getting more and more dodgy. I asked if the safari guys even worked there, and was told that they did inasmuch as they found stray tourists at the bus station and did the safari sales. But they didn't have anything else to do with the hotel itself. As I was talking to him, Tuktuk Guy suddenly reappeared and sternly told me I was not to book a safari with anybody else except them. I just made a sort of uh-huh noise rather than tell him to mind his own business.
After lunch I found another hotel down the road where I asked what their jeep safari cost. The lady rang the company they dealt with - 8000 total per person for a full day, or 5500 for a half-day. That was much more like the real price so I booked the half-day one. I had done a full day at Wilpattu and it gets a bit much just sitting in a jeep being thrown around on rutted dirt roads for twelve hours. It should be noted that unlike Wilpattu and probably all the other parks where the per person cost depends on the actual number of people, here there always seems to be a fixed per person rate so each person pays (for example) 8000 whether there are two or six people in the jeep.
I don't think there's really any way to entirely avoid the pricing scams when visiting Yala unless you are travelling with a big international tour company, but that's a whole different kind of money-gouger. On the one I went on I was charged 5500 for the half-day which was reasonable and I didn't have a problem with it. Afterwards I asked two Germans who were in the jeep what they were charged, and it was 5000 each - but they said they'd seen the manifest when they were picked up, as the driver was crossing off the names, and there was one below theirs marked at 8000 which, as it wasn't me, had to be the French guy we picked up last. I think all the tours overcharge on the official entry tickets as well, because they don't let the tourists pay for these - they tell them only the driver can do this "because it is a group" and then tell them it is 4000 each or whatever.
At the end of that first day, after I'd come back to the hotel from getting dinner, Tuktuk Guy was waiting for me outside my room to see if I was doing the safari the next morning. I told him I was going with someone else, and did he ever get mad! He said he had told me I wasn't allowed to book with anyone else and wanted to know who it was with. Now that I knew these guys didn't have any control over the hotel rooms I gave him an absolute tongue-lashing, telling him it was none of his business who I was booked with, that I could book with whoever I liked, that they were scamming people out of thousands of rupees and they knew full well what a real safari price should be, and that I wouldn't do business with them under any circumstances. Then he tried the different tack of pretending that he had nothing to do with the safari stuff, he had just brought me to the cheap room, and we were friends; basically playing me off against Safari Guy to try and keep on my side. I told him to get lost and went into my room. I could hear him downstairs in the courtyard on his phone. Then he calls out "sir, sir!" from below. When I went out he says "my boss says you have to take your bags and leave". So I laid into him again, telling him that him and "his boss" didn't own or run the hotel, they had no say who stays there, and if this other guy wanted to throw threats at me to come down here and try it to my face. This argument went on for some time, with the guy saying "his boss" was on his way but he was coming from a long way and would take a long time. Of course the other guy wasn't coming down there because he didn't want to deal with me. Funnily enough, neither guy showed up at the hotel at all the next day while I was there.
Next morning I headed off at 4am (!) to the other hotel, to meet the jeep at 4.30. I took my smaller pack with me containing everything I couldn't afford to lose (like my laptop) because I wasn't convinced my stuff would still be in the room when I got back. That might sound a bit paranoid, but the guys at the hotel were obviously crooked. Later I did a google search and came up with just two hits for the hotel, both from this year - one about the owner being caught at night in a room going through a guest's pack (from Tripadvisor, since removed but it still comes up in searches), and the other about being charged for a safari which never happened and then claiming it was some other company's fault so the people lost their money. Basically what I'm saying is don't stay at the Moon Lanka Yala.
There were four other people on my safari. Already in the jeep when it arrived to pick me up was a nice German couple, and a girl from Portugal who was also very pleasant but didn't seem very smart (she was asking questions like did they feed the leopards at the park so they had enough to eat). After I was in the jeep we headed off to pick up a French guy at a hotel outside town, but on the road to the park.
I was interested in seeing the comparisons between Wilpattu and Yala, especially with regards to the visitor numbers. Wilpattu is very quiet because not many tourists visit the north and even if they do they still have Yala as their one-off safari. I saw seven jeeps all day in Wilpattu. When we arrived at the entrance to Yala at about 5.30am there must have been forty jeeps there already, with more arriving. The park opens at 6am. The short road between the ticket counter and the gate had a queue a couple of hundred metres long. At one point in the morning where there was a sleeping leopard our jeep was in a traffic jam with jeeps in front and behind as far along the road as the eye could see, and the other side of the road also had a similar jam going in the opposite direction. Each jeep had a minute to try and spot the leopard and then had to move on for the next jeep to get into position. There must have been close to a hundred jeeps, and it was slow and tedious.
Nevertheless, for most of the time we were in the park (6am to about 11.30am) we didn't see many jeeps. I mean, we saw them almost continuously but only in ones or twos because the park is so big that it is only at the leopard-jams that you see the total numbers. So despite my concerns prior to coming here, Yala is actually a great park to visit and the wildlife is quite abundant. This is still the off-season though, so maybe avoid the high-season!
I wasn't actively birding because I was in a jeep with others, although the driver did stop and point out large or colourful species, like storks and kingfishers. (He even stopped for a dung beetle which was creating and then rolling a ball of dung). Yala is a dry-zone park too, so the birds are the same as at Wilpattu. I spotted fifty species, but only about six were ones I hadn't seen in Sri Lanka yet, like green imperial pigeons and black-necked storks.
Although it makes me sound like a regular tourist, I was at Yala not for birds but for mammals, specifically - in order of how much I wanted to see them - sloth bear, leopard, and golden jackal. It isn't the best time of year for sloth bears, for that you need the fruit season when they are up in the trees and easy to see, so I did not see any, but I did see two golden jackals and three leopards. Other mammals were four ruddy mongooses, multitudes of feral water buffalo and chital, quite a lot of wild pigs, three sambar, one elephant, one three-striped palm squirrel, and a small troop of tufted grey langurs. The mongooses were a welcome addition to my Sri Lanka trip. Despite there being four species in the country, and them being diurnal, I hadn't seen any up to visiting Yala which was a bit of a worry for me.
The first leopard we saw was a fair distance away. In a grassy area near a waterhole there were a few jeeps parked up, a sure sign of leopard. It was somewhere back in the scrub. I scanned the terrain and spotted it pretty quickly sitting next to a bush. As we watched it moved under the bush and waited as a buffalo and calf walked past, then it slipped out into the open and trotted rapidly after the animals. I thought we were going to witness a kill, but instead the buffalo just kept walking, completely unaware there was a leopard behind them, and the leopard simply went behind more bushes and never reappeared. I got some photos as it was crossing the open ground but they just show a tiny fuzzy leopard.
The second leopard was much better. This was where the jeep queue was that I mentioned earlier. There were actually two leopards within a few hundred metres of each other, the first one walking through the forest right by the road and the second one asleep in a tree. The walking one I saw really well through my binoculars - in fact it stopped level with our jeep and stared right at us - but even though it was within ten metres of the road the undergrowth was so thick there was no point trying to get a photo. The next one, the one asleep in the tree, was quite far back and mostly obscured except from just the right angle. I took photos of this one but they were even less use than the useless photos of the first leopard.
Back at the hotel I found my room untouched - just as well for them! - and the next morning I left Tissamaharama without regrets for the whale-watching town of Mirissa.
Safari Guy said he already had three people at the hotel going the next day for a full-day safari, and he was charging a whopping 12,000 LKR per person. I checked his figures and found that it was a major money-gouging effort. First up he was duplicitly claiming that the entry ticket was almost 4000 per person when it was just over 2000 each if there were four people (he was totalling all the costs as being per person when only the "foreign adult" was per person, everything else was shared costs). When I pointed this out he immediately said the prices on his laminated card were "last year's prices" and they have gone up to what he was claiming they were. Secondly the private costs (i.e. the jeep and food, as opposed to the official government entry ticket prices) were ridiculous. Breakfast and lunch were both charged at 600 each (he feigned surprise that lunch at almost any restaurant would cost about 250 or 300; and the breakfast was just toast and fruit which is about 150-worth). That left the total jeep cost (before splitting between the four people) at about 26,000 LKR! (Remember there are about 100 LKR to one NZ dollar, so just remove the last two zeros to get the amount - in this case NZ$260 just for the jeep). Although I told Safari Guy his prices were ridiculous and also why they were ridiculous (e.g. I spelled out what the ticket price should really be, and also that I knew a full-day four-person safari should cost about 8000 LKR maximum per person not 12,000), I was also being careful what I said because he was giving the impression he was also the hotel owner. So I ended with saying that I would think about it and let him know later after I'd had lunch, intending to just go find a more realistic safari price somewhere else.
I went up to my room to get my wallet and Safari Guy followed me up there to "talk", and he made it clear I was not to talk to the other guests about the prices "because this is just business"! After the two guys left I was on my way out as well when I was intercepted by another man who said he was the owner and that I wasn't to pay the other guys the money for the room. Apparently they had a habit of telling guests to pay them and then denying it so either the guests had to pay twice or the owner didn't get the money for the room. I had to be sure, he said, to only pay the people inside the house. This was getting more and more dodgy. I asked if the safari guys even worked there, and was told that they did inasmuch as they found stray tourists at the bus station and did the safari sales. But they didn't have anything else to do with the hotel itself. As I was talking to him, Tuktuk Guy suddenly reappeared and sternly told me I was not to book a safari with anybody else except them. I just made a sort of uh-huh noise rather than tell him to mind his own business.
After lunch I found another hotel down the road where I asked what their jeep safari cost. The lady rang the company they dealt with - 8000 total per person for a full day, or 5500 for a half-day. That was much more like the real price so I booked the half-day one. I had done a full day at Wilpattu and it gets a bit much just sitting in a jeep being thrown around on rutted dirt roads for twelve hours. It should be noted that unlike Wilpattu and probably all the other parks where the per person cost depends on the actual number of people, here there always seems to be a fixed per person rate so each person pays (for example) 8000 whether there are two or six people in the jeep.
I don't think there's really any way to entirely avoid the pricing scams when visiting Yala unless you are travelling with a big international tour company, but that's a whole different kind of money-gouger. On the one I went on I was charged 5500 for the half-day which was reasonable and I didn't have a problem with it. Afterwards I asked two Germans who were in the jeep what they were charged, and it was 5000 each - but they said they'd seen the manifest when they were picked up, as the driver was crossing off the names, and there was one below theirs marked at 8000 which, as it wasn't me, had to be the French guy we picked up last. I think all the tours overcharge on the official entry tickets as well, because they don't let the tourists pay for these - they tell them only the driver can do this "because it is a group" and then tell them it is 4000 each or whatever.
At the end of that first day, after I'd come back to the hotel from getting dinner, Tuktuk Guy was waiting for me outside my room to see if I was doing the safari the next morning. I told him I was going with someone else, and did he ever get mad! He said he had told me I wasn't allowed to book with anyone else and wanted to know who it was with. Now that I knew these guys didn't have any control over the hotel rooms I gave him an absolute tongue-lashing, telling him it was none of his business who I was booked with, that I could book with whoever I liked, that they were scamming people out of thousands of rupees and they knew full well what a real safari price should be, and that I wouldn't do business with them under any circumstances. Then he tried the different tack of pretending that he had nothing to do with the safari stuff, he had just brought me to the cheap room, and we were friends; basically playing me off against Safari Guy to try and keep on my side. I told him to get lost and went into my room. I could hear him downstairs in the courtyard on his phone. Then he calls out "sir, sir!" from below. When I went out he says "my boss says you have to take your bags and leave". So I laid into him again, telling him that him and "his boss" didn't own or run the hotel, they had no say who stays there, and if this other guy wanted to throw threats at me to come down here and try it to my face. This argument went on for some time, with the guy saying "his boss" was on his way but he was coming from a long way and would take a long time. Of course the other guy wasn't coming down there because he didn't want to deal with me. Funnily enough, neither guy showed up at the hotel at all the next day while I was there.
Next morning I headed off at 4am (!) to the other hotel, to meet the jeep at 4.30. I took my smaller pack with me containing everything I couldn't afford to lose (like my laptop) because I wasn't convinced my stuff would still be in the room when I got back. That might sound a bit paranoid, but the guys at the hotel were obviously crooked. Later I did a google search and came up with just two hits for the hotel, both from this year - one about the owner being caught at night in a room going through a guest's pack (from Tripadvisor, since removed but it still comes up in searches), and the other about being charged for a safari which never happened and then claiming it was some other company's fault so the people lost their money. Basically what I'm saying is don't stay at the Moon Lanka Yala.
There were four other people on my safari. Already in the jeep when it arrived to pick me up was a nice German couple, and a girl from Portugal who was also very pleasant but didn't seem very smart (she was asking questions like did they feed the leopards at the park so they had enough to eat). After I was in the jeep we headed off to pick up a French guy at a hotel outside town, but on the road to the park.
I was interested in seeing the comparisons between Wilpattu and Yala, especially with regards to the visitor numbers. Wilpattu is very quiet because not many tourists visit the north and even if they do they still have Yala as their one-off safari. I saw seven jeeps all day in Wilpattu. When we arrived at the entrance to Yala at about 5.30am there must have been forty jeeps there already, with more arriving. The park opens at 6am. The short road between the ticket counter and the gate had a queue a couple of hundred metres long. At one point in the morning where there was a sleeping leopard our jeep was in a traffic jam with jeeps in front and behind as far along the road as the eye could see, and the other side of the road also had a similar jam going in the opposite direction. Each jeep had a minute to try and spot the leopard and then had to move on for the next jeep to get into position. There must have been close to a hundred jeeps, and it was slow and tedious.
Nevertheless, for most of the time we were in the park (6am to about 11.30am) we didn't see many jeeps. I mean, we saw them almost continuously but only in ones or twos because the park is so big that it is only at the leopard-jams that you see the total numbers. So despite my concerns prior to coming here, Yala is actually a great park to visit and the wildlife is quite abundant. This is still the off-season though, so maybe avoid the high-season!
I wasn't actively birding because I was in a jeep with others, although the driver did stop and point out large or colourful species, like storks and kingfishers. (He even stopped for a dung beetle which was creating and then rolling a ball of dung). Yala is a dry-zone park too, so the birds are the same as at Wilpattu. I spotted fifty species, but only about six were ones I hadn't seen in Sri Lanka yet, like green imperial pigeons and black-necked storks.
Although it makes me sound like a regular tourist, I was at Yala not for birds but for mammals, specifically - in order of how much I wanted to see them - sloth bear, leopard, and golden jackal. It isn't the best time of year for sloth bears, for that you need the fruit season when they are up in the trees and easy to see, so I did not see any, but I did see two golden jackals and three leopards. Other mammals were four ruddy mongooses, multitudes of feral water buffalo and chital, quite a lot of wild pigs, three sambar, one elephant, one three-striped palm squirrel, and a small troop of tufted grey langurs. The mongooses were a welcome addition to my Sri Lanka trip. Despite there being four species in the country, and them being diurnal, I hadn't seen any up to visiting Yala which was a bit of a worry for me.
The first leopard we saw was a fair distance away. In a grassy area near a waterhole there were a few jeeps parked up, a sure sign of leopard. It was somewhere back in the scrub. I scanned the terrain and spotted it pretty quickly sitting next to a bush. As we watched it moved under the bush and waited as a buffalo and calf walked past, then it slipped out into the open and trotted rapidly after the animals. I thought we were going to witness a kill, but instead the buffalo just kept walking, completely unaware there was a leopard behind them, and the leopard simply went behind more bushes and never reappeared. I got some photos as it was crossing the open ground but they just show a tiny fuzzy leopard.
The second leopard was much better. This was where the jeep queue was that I mentioned earlier. There were actually two leopards within a few hundred metres of each other, the first one walking through the forest right by the road and the second one asleep in a tree. The walking one I saw really well through my binoculars - in fact it stopped level with our jeep and stared right at us - but even though it was within ten metres of the road the undergrowth was so thick there was no point trying to get a photo. The next one, the one asleep in the tree, was quite far back and mostly obscured except from just the right angle. I took photos of this one but they were even less use than the useless photos of the first leopard.
Back at the hotel I found my room untouched - just as well for them! - and the next morning I left Tissamaharama without regrets for the whale-watching town of Mirissa.
no bears at all for me. I did see the bear monkeys if that counts. I won't see any sloth bears in Sri Lanka now - or if I do I'd have to be extraordinarily lucky. They are in India as well, and I'm heading back there in a week-ish, but it doesn't seem like the financial situation in India has settled at all so I may not be there long!!Shame about the sloth bear but we'll done on the mongoose and leopard sightings!
Any other chances for bear sightings whilst in Sri Lanka? And have you seen any bears in the wild before? I don't recall you mentioning any sightings, just panda droppings...
Whales. Sri Lanka has lots of them. For part of the year the best places are off the northeast coast, at other times the west coast. Right now the best place is the south coast, offshore from the town of Mirissa to be exact. What sort of whales, you may ask? Only the biggest of them all, the blue whale. (I can't write or read that without hearing David Attenborough excitedly exclaiming "the blue whale!"). But not only blue whales, although that is the species for which Sri Lanka has become famous in whale-watching circles. There are also sperm whales, fin whales, sei whales, humpback whales, minke whales, pilot whales, killer whales, false killer whales, spinner dolphins, common dolphins, bottlenose dolphins, and more. It's a cetacean buffet.
To get to Mirissa I took a bus for three hours from Tissamaharama to Matara, and then another one for about an hour to Mirissa. I had found a place called Nature Inn on booking. com which cost 1100 LKR per night. To my mild surprise there were very many places advertised for around that price. It does seem like the south of Sri Lanka is the opposite of the north, with cheap accommodation (in the 1000 LKR range) being easy to find but restaurants being more expensive (the difference being something like 250 LKR for lunch in the north versus 350 or 400 in the south). Nature Inn was okay to stay at, not great but perfectly good. I spent the first night itching away like something was biting me all over but there were no bites and I was under a mosquito net. The next day I found the bed covered in ants. Just one of the many Bed Faunas I have encountered. There were also toque macaques in the garden every day; in the morning I wouldn't let them steal my breakfast so they stole one of my socks instead. Nature Inn also run their own whale-watching boat, or are an agent for one - sometimes in Sri Lanka it can be difficult to determine who owns what - which costs 2000 LKR for a trip. Their WIFI was down that day so I couldn't check reviews of their operation or of the many other whale-watch advertisers around the town, so I booked a trip on their boat for the next morning and hoped it was an ethical whale-watch and not a cowboy outfit.
The whale trip turned out to be fine with no harrassment of the whales as can happen in some places or with some operators. The owner of Nature Inn didn't own the boat as he had said, it was a company called Whale Horizon (or "Whale Horizen" according to their life jacket branding). The owner of Nature Inn was using an advertisement for a company called Mirissa Bay Watching to sell tickets for the other company, or something like that. It seemed complicated. There are several real companies with boats, and no doubt a hundred or more "companies" which are just names to sell tickets through for the real companies. Every hotel in town sells whale tours. All the boats go out at 7am for a few hours - I think just until they see whales rather than being for a specific time period. The trip I was on was back at the dock by about 10am. That was okay by me because I was frightfully seasick.
I like the idea of going out on boats to look for cetaceans and seabirds on the open ocean, but as soon as I'm out there I remember why I simultaneously hate it so much. I really am not a good sailor. What's worse is that I am such a bad sailor that nowadays even the knowledge that I am going out on a boat that day makes me start to feel sick in advance. It is rather inconvenient. Generally I'm alright when the boat is moving, it is when it stops and starts bobbing up and down that the bad seasickness comes in. And no matter how you try, once it starts to well up you have no choice but to hurl over the side. Then you feel fine for ten or twenty minutes before suddenly needing to vomit again, except this time you have nothing left to throw up so you're just stripping out the lining of your stomach instead. By then you're past caring about the animals, you just want to get off the boat, but you can't because you're in the middle of the ocean. There's not much of a worse feeling to have to endure.
I had brushed up on my Sri Lankan seabirds before the trip, making sure I knew the distinctions between the petrel species, which frigatebirds were which, the gulls and terns found there, and I had spent a lot of time looking at photos of boobies on the internet. I didn't need to do any of that because the only seabirds I saw close enough to ID were great crested terns. Some dolphin backs were seen briefly, not well enough for me to say what they were - and this particular company didn't seem interested in letting people know what things were beyond "dolphins" or "whales". I think some of the other companies, like Raja And The Whales (which is 6000 LKR per person), may be more professional in that regard.
After maybe two hours my stomach suddenly decided enough was enough, annoyingly right when the first whale was spotted. I couldn't see it from where I was - it was somewhere directly ahead because the people at the bow were pointing - and right then was when I needed to rush for the toilet to throw up. I came back feeling better, but the whale had gone and the boat was moving on. It wasn't long before more were seen luckily, with two or maybe three blue whales off the left of the boat. I thought there were three, one of the boat crew said two and they probably know better than me. Blue whales are so much better to see than sperm whales. Sperm whales just float at the surface, like big logs, and the only interesting bit is when they dive and the tail comes straight up in the air. With blue whales they are actually swimming along at the surface, rising and disappearing, spouting every time the blowhole breaks the surface, and then the tail comes up when they dive. They were pretty close to the boat, so despite sitting firmly in place to reduce the motion, I could see them clearly as they swam. A short while later we came across another two and I saw these just as clearly. Then I went and threw up again.
In 2006 I saw the world's smallest mammal in Thailand (Kitti's hog-nosed bat). It took me ten more years but now I have finally seen the world's biggest mammal.
I was going to leave Mirissa the next day for the Sinharaja rainforest where I could see a whole lot more different birds than in the dry-zone parks, but somewhat inconveniently a strike was called for that day on all private buses, tuktuks, and motorbike taxis, so I had to stay put for an extra night. Presumably the red government buses would still be running but there didn't appear to be any of those going through Mirissa. The strike wasn't about better pay or better hours or anything like that, it was because the government wanted to increase to 25,000 LKR the fine for certain very illegal activities, such as allowing a person with no licence to drive the bus, for driving the bus while drunk, for entering train crossings while a train is coming. You know, things that in most developed countries would likely result in some jail time.
On the strike day there were tuktuks everywhere as normal - apparently the only ones who actually followed the strike were those who didn't want to earn any money that day. The private buses weren't running, but I did see a couple of the red government buses pass through, presumably having been put on the route for the day. So I could have left that day after all. Never mind, at least I got to waste a day needlessly.
And now I'm all caught up with my travels. This morning I go to Sinharaja.
To get to Mirissa I took a bus for three hours from Tissamaharama to Matara, and then another one for about an hour to Mirissa. I had found a place called Nature Inn on booking. com which cost 1100 LKR per night. To my mild surprise there were very many places advertised for around that price. It does seem like the south of Sri Lanka is the opposite of the north, with cheap accommodation (in the 1000 LKR range) being easy to find but restaurants being more expensive (the difference being something like 250 LKR for lunch in the north versus 350 or 400 in the south). Nature Inn was okay to stay at, not great but perfectly good. I spent the first night itching away like something was biting me all over but there were no bites and I was under a mosquito net. The next day I found the bed covered in ants. Just one of the many Bed Faunas I have encountered. There were also toque macaques in the garden every day; in the morning I wouldn't let them steal my breakfast so they stole one of my socks instead. Nature Inn also run their own whale-watching boat, or are an agent for one - sometimes in Sri Lanka it can be difficult to determine who owns what - which costs 2000 LKR for a trip. Their WIFI was down that day so I couldn't check reviews of their operation or of the many other whale-watch advertisers around the town, so I booked a trip on their boat for the next morning and hoped it was an ethical whale-watch and not a cowboy outfit.
The whale trip turned out to be fine with no harrassment of the whales as can happen in some places or with some operators. The owner of Nature Inn didn't own the boat as he had said, it was a company called Whale Horizon (or "Whale Horizen" according to their life jacket branding). The owner of Nature Inn was using an advertisement for a company called Mirissa Bay Watching to sell tickets for the other company, or something like that. It seemed complicated. There are several real companies with boats, and no doubt a hundred or more "companies" which are just names to sell tickets through for the real companies. Every hotel in town sells whale tours. All the boats go out at 7am for a few hours - I think just until they see whales rather than being for a specific time period. The trip I was on was back at the dock by about 10am. That was okay by me because I was frightfully seasick.
I like the idea of going out on boats to look for cetaceans and seabirds on the open ocean, but as soon as I'm out there I remember why I simultaneously hate it so much. I really am not a good sailor. What's worse is that I am such a bad sailor that nowadays even the knowledge that I am going out on a boat that day makes me start to feel sick in advance. It is rather inconvenient. Generally I'm alright when the boat is moving, it is when it stops and starts bobbing up and down that the bad seasickness comes in. And no matter how you try, once it starts to well up you have no choice but to hurl over the side. Then you feel fine for ten or twenty minutes before suddenly needing to vomit again, except this time you have nothing left to throw up so you're just stripping out the lining of your stomach instead. By then you're past caring about the animals, you just want to get off the boat, but you can't because you're in the middle of the ocean. There's not much of a worse feeling to have to endure.
I had brushed up on my Sri Lankan seabirds before the trip, making sure I knew the distinctions between the petrel species, which frigatebirds were which, the gulls and terns found there, and I had spent a lot of time looking at photos of boobies on the internet. I didn't need to do any of that because the only seabirds I saw close enough to ID were great crested terns. Some dolphin backs were seen briefly, not well enough for me to say what they were - and this particular company didn't seem interested in letting people know what things were beyond "dolphins" or "whales". I think some of the other companies, like Raja And The Whales (which is 6000 LKR per person), may be more professional in that regard.
After maybe two hours my stomach suddenly decided enough was enough, annoyingly right when the first whale was spotted. I couldn't see it from where I was - it was somewhere directly ahead because the people at the bow were pointing - and right then was when I needed to rush for the toilet to throw up. I came back feeling better, but the whale had gone and the boat was moving on. It wasn't long before more were seen luckily, with two or maybe three blue whales off the left of the boat. I thought there were three, one of the boat crew said two and they probably know better than me. Blue whales are so much better to see than sperm whales. Sperm whales just float at the surface, like big logs, and the only interesting bit is when they dive and the tail comes straight up in the air. With blue whales they are actually swimming along at the surface, rising and disappearing, spouting every time the blowhole breaks the surface, and then the tail comes up when they dive. They were pretty close to the boat, so despite sitting firmly in place to reduce the motion, I could see them clearly as they swam. A short while later we came across another two and I saw these just as clearly. Then I went and threw up again.
In 2006 I saw the world's smallest mammal in Thailand (Kitti's hog-nosed bat). It took me ten more years but now I have finally seen the world's biggest mammal.
I was going to leave Mirissa the next day for the Sinharaja rainforest where I could see a whole lot more different birds than in the dry-zone parks, but somewhat inconveniently a strike was called for that day on all private buses, tuktuks, and motorbike taxis, so I had to stay put for an extra night. Presumably the red government buses would still be running but there didn't appear to be any of those going through Mirissa. The strike wasn't about better pay or better hours or anything like that, it was because the government wanted to increase to 25,000 LKR the fine for certain very illegal activities, such as allowing a person with no licence to drive the bus, for driving the bus while drunk, for entering train crossings while a train is coming. You know, things that in most developed countries would likely result in some jail time.
On the strike day there were tuktuks everywhere as normal - apparently the only ones who actually followed the strike were those who didn't want to earn any money that day. The private buses weren't running, but I did see a couple of the red government buses pass through, presumably having been put on the route for the day. So I could have left that day after all. Never mind, at least I got to waste a day needlessly.
And now I'm all caught up with my travels. This morning I go to Sinharaja.
FunkyGibbon
Well-Known Member
Presumably the fact that people who are angry about not being allowed to drive drunk are refusing to drive is not going to be a big worry for the government
Me and my sister had a similar, but much less dramatic experience in Lovina. Hilariously cheap room followed by a hard sell on the dolphin watching and all other possible activities. Actually the prices were not so terrible but we booked through a different company just because we were so fed up of their crappy attitude (It turns out the cheapest prices are actually on the beach, if anyone goes in the future). When they found out we'd done that they were clearly angry, but never actually said anything to us about it.
Anyone who travels on a budget will probably tell you these kind of interactions are the worst part of it. It sucks because people are probably just trying to get by but it's so dehumanising for everyone involved. The worst thing of course is that any gesture of kindness becomes suspicious.
Loving this thread.
Me and my sister had a similar, but much less dramatic experience in Lovina. Hilariously cheap room followed by a hard sell on the dolphin watching and all other possible activities. Actually the prices were not so terrible but we booked through a different company just because we were so fed up of their crappy attitude (It turns out the cheapest prices are actually on the beach, if anyone goes in the future). When they found out we'd done that they were clearly angry, but never actually said anything to us about it.
Anyone who travels on a budget will probably tell you these kind of interactions are the worst part of it. It sucks because people are probably just trying to get by but it's so dehumanising for everyone involved. The worst thing of course is that any gesture of kindness becomes suspicious.
Loving this thread.
sooty mangabey
Well-Known Member
As an interesting parallel to this, there is a series of articles in this morning's (Manchester) Guardian about travel in Sri Lanka. One of these - Don't do that, do this: dodging the crowds in Sri Lanka - discusses places away from the obvious destinations, and suggests Yala as an alternative to Wilpattu (for the reasons described above). It also suggests Trincomalee, in the north, as an alternative hub for whale-watching (although, apparently, only at certain times of the year).
As always, a thoroughly enjoyable opportunity to travel, vicariously, through South Asia. Thank you!
As always, a thoroughly enjoyable opportunity to travel, vicariously, through South Asia. Thank you!
Unlucky, fingers crossed for a bit of luck in India! If the money situation is still dire then do you have a backup plan?
I had to quickly google Lovina to see where it is (Bali, for anyone else wondering). Did you like Bali? I hated it, the place is so money-grubbing and a blot on Indonesia really. I love Indonesia in general, just not that particular island...Presumably the fact that people who are angry about not being allowed to drive drunk are refusing to drive is not going to be a big worry for the government
Me and my sister had a similar, but much less dramatic experience in Lovina. Hilariously cheap room followed by a hard sell on the dolphin watching and all other possible activities. Actually the prices were not so terrible but we booked through a different company just because we were so fed up of their crappy attitude (It turns out the cheapest prices are actually on the beach, if anyone goes in the future). When they found out we'd done that they were clearly angry, but never actually said anything to us about it.
Anyone who travels on a budget will probably tell you these kind of interactions are the worst part of it. It sucks because people are probably just trying to get by but it's so dehumanising for everyone involved. The worst thing of course is that any gesture of kindness becomes suspicious.
Loving this thread.
thanks.
I had, before going to Sri Lanka, been under the mistaken impression that the whale-watching sites moved during the year because the whales themselves were moving (as in migrating past different parts of the island). But apparently it is actually due to the weather patterns making it either safe or not safe to go out in boats during different times of the year.
I will have some money with me which I will have changed in Sri Lanka (or at least that is my intention), hopefully to get me through the first few weeks at least. What happens next falls into worst case or best case territories. If I can keep getting money from ATMs then I'll complete my plans for India. If not I already have a flight out to Bangkok from Kochi on 11th January (i.e. my original departure, before going to Sri Lanka messed that up), and will just need to stretch my money until then. But that means I won't be able to get up to Gujarat or the Chambal River or other places in the north.
SINHARAJA, DAY ONE
In one of the earlier posts I mentioned how Sri Lanka has several climatic zones, broadly divided into dry-zone, wet-zone, and montane. And I also mentioned a couple of times that Sri Lanka has 33 species of endemic birds. So far I have been to the dry-zone (at Wilpattu, Sigiriya, and Yala) and the highland areas (at Ohiya). Now it was time for the wet-zone forest, where the bulk of the endemic birds are found (roughly two-thirds of them). In my original plans which I scribbled up in Delhi I was going to visit two sites, the Kitulgala forest and the Sinharaja forest, because although they have the same birds some are more common at one site or the other. However Kitulgala does not appear to have any budget options for accommodation and so I thought it would make more sense to just spend longer at Sinharaja. There didn't seem to be any budget options there either, but It would save on a couple of travel days at least.
Sinharaja has been protected since as far back as 1875, originally as a 6000 acre "Reserved Forest". In 1909 the size was increased to 7910 acres and in 1926 to 9203 acres. In 1988 it was named as a National Heritage Site, and the following year became a World Heritage Site. Today it is 18,900 acres. It is a rainforest park, strangely with almost no mosquitoes but there are leeches. If I have to choose between mosquitoes and leeches I would choose leeches. They are gross and creepy but they are harmless apart for a little blood loss.
There is more than one "entrance" for Sinharaja Forest Reserve but only the northern one at the village of Kudawa has any trails into the forest; the southern points seem to just have roads running around the outside. The cheapest place to stay at Kudawa is Martin's Simple Lodge which charges close to NZ$40, just because he can. The next cheapest seemed to be the Blue Magpie Lodge which is over NZ$100 per night. There is also the Sinharaja Birders Lodge near the Blue Magpie Lodge, which I think is about the same price. I had been going to stay at Martin's because even though it is too expensive there weren't any other options I knew of and he has the endemic blue magpies coming to the breakfast table every morning. However while at the Popham Arboretum the manager Jayantha gave me the phone number of one of the park guides named Sunil who has a room available at his house. I rang him up the day before going to Sinharaja and arranged to stay there for 2000 LKR (about NZ$20) per night - the usual price is 3000 LKR but he gave me a discount because Jayantha had told him to. His house was not in Kudawa, Sunil told me, but in another village three kilometres away called Miyanapalawa, so at first glance not as ideal as being right by the park entrance but cost-wise much more sensible - basically, the cheaper the accommodation the longer I can stay in the area.
It is quite a long way from Mirissa to Sinharaja's northern entrance. There was also a little added complication in that I didn't know what time I would be getting to Miyanapalawa, I didn't know where Sunil's house was (or even really where the village itself was because it doesn't show up on the internet), and that Sunil wouldn't even be there until after 5pm because he would be in the park guiding during the day. I figured it would all work out.
I had found a page for Sri Lanka's southern bus routes on Wikipedia, so I knew it was reliable, and it said there was a bus from Galle to Kalawana, which is the nearest town to Sinharaja. So in the morning I got a bus from Mirissa to Galle, about an hour away, where I found that there was indeed a bus from Galle to Kalawana but only one per day and it wasn't leaving until 12.50pm. I waited around for about three hours and then I was off on my way. For anyone who likes following these things on maps, the bus route went from Galle to Ambalangoda to Aluthgama to Matugama to Baduraliya to Kalawana. The trip took around four hours (and only cost 180 LKR), and is perfect for anyone who wants to know what sardines in a can feel like. I wasn't sure if there was a bus for the next stage from Kalawana to Miyanapalawa, or even if anyone would know where I was going considering I couldn't pronounce it, but I was in luck and there was a bus heading that way at 5.40pm. I was a little unsure about what would happen when I got dropped in this village in the dark with no idea where I was, so I got the bus ticket guy to ring up Sunil on his phone so he could tell him where to drop me (I don't travel with a phone, in case you're wondering). Miyanapalawa, as it turns out, isn't the typical village strung along the road as I was expecting, instead it is on its own road off the main road, so if looking for it from the bus I wouldn't have even seen it. Sunil had come up to the junction on his motorbike to meet me, and we went off to his house. Everything worked out just fine.
The location of Sunil's house in relation to the park was no issue at all. It is actually about 4.5km rather than 3km but he obviously goes in to work every morning, so at 6.30am I would just get a lift on his bike to the park. Easy-peasy. The village, and particularly his garden, is very lively with birds including several of the endemics (I'll come back to that later). If walking, the road between his house and the park is a mix of cultivation, scrub and proper forest so there are birds along the way. There's also the bus if needed, which passes several times a day and costs 12 LKR to Kudawa (and then the park entrance is about 500 metres further uphill). Martin's Simple Lodge is only slightly closer in actual fact because it is up a four-wheel drive track about 3.5km long which you need to walk down before going the final 500m to the park gate (or if you're like most birders and detest walking anywhere they have jeeps for 3500 LKR per trip up and down their road). The other two lodges are closest of all, Sinharaja Birders Lodge about 700 metres from the entrance and the Blue Magpie Lodge less than a kilometre, but they are also very expensive (bird-tour groups stay there). Sunil just has one room for guests so is best for a solo traveller or a couple, although he is in the process if building a new house just for people to stay in and that will have four rooms. His wife Rohini cooks excellent meals, I think the best I've had at any of the homestays I've been at in Sri Lanka. I definitely recommend staying at Sunil's place if going to Sinharaja as a budget birder. (His phone number is 071 048 4677).
There is a mandatory guide when visiting the park, I'm not quite sure why, but it's not too expensive. The entry price is 650 LKR and the guide is 1000 LKR for as many hours as you are in there. Most visitors who aren't birders probably spend about two hours, just a quick walk through having flowers and lizards pointed out, then they're off again. The guides are on a roster system, so you don't get to choose - you get whichever guide is next on the list - but I ended up with Sunil luckily. He has been at the park for 24 years and knows everything. If you have to have a guide in a park, then you should always hope to get a good one! I didn't actually start out with Sunil, but the young guy I got assigned looked so dismayed that I was going to be in the park all day that I think there was an "arrangement" made to give me to Sunil.
Before getting onto the birds, which will take up most of the remainder of this post, the wet-zone race of purple-faced langurs were commonly seen here (so I've now seen three of the four races - just western left, hopefully when I get to Colombo), and also the wet-zone races of toque macaques and giant squirrels. I even managed to get some photos of the giant squirrels for the first time but they were really just "record shots" because leaves were obscuring most of the animal. It was a good reptile day too, with firstly a green tree viper (Trimeresurus trigonocephala) next to the entrance building, followed by several green vine snakes (Ahaetulla nasutus) through the day - very common along the trails here! - and in the lizard department, the endemic kangaroo lizard (Otocryptis weigmanni), the green garden lizard (Calotes calotes) and a water monitor.
At Ohiya I had reach thirteen endemic birds by day twelve, but since then I had fallen beind again due to the next six days being at Yala and Mirissa interspersed with travel days. My first day at Sinharaja was day nineteen of the Sri Lankan trip. I had six endemics to make up. This wasn't a problem at all. Right at the entrance building to the park there's a hollow-topped stump in which rice is placed as a bird-feeder. While I was lingering there a band of orange-billed babblers rolled on up, and while I was trying to get photos of them (unsuccessfully, due to the low light) a spot-winged thrush hopped past. In the trees there were some Sri Lankan crested drongos, and round the corner a party of ashy-headed laughing thrushes. Four endemics down right off the bat. Also the bird-feeder was frequented by a couple of flame-striped squirrels which are also endemic (a subspecies formerly named for southern India was based on a juvenile squirrel and is now considered to be baseless). The central stripe down their back really does almost glow bright orange. The next day I saw more flame-striped squirrels in better lighting conditions and saw that the belly and underside of the tail are also bright orange. There are dusky squirrels here too - the first Funambulus I saw at the bird-feeder was a dusky squirrel although I was told the "only" species here was the flame-striped squirrel; and in the open country and around the villages there are the common three-striped palm squirrels, so be aware of what you are looking at if searching for flame-striped squirrels.
One of the birds I most wanted to see while here was the Sri Lankan frogmouth (despite the name also found in southern India). They are nocturnal but mostly sleep in tree ferns, usually in bonded pairs, and the guides tend to know their regular roost-sites. Sunil was checking various spots as we walked along the jungle trails but without any luck. After a while one of the other guides we passed said he had already seen one, so we went back along the road to the place. It took some finding, but eventually there was a female frogmouth on her perch. I was astounded by how small it was, no bigger than an English blackbird. I am more used to the Australian Podargus species which are pretty big, and I had been wondering how they could roost in the spindly Sri Lankan tree ferns. Later in the day while looking unsuccessfully for a roost-site of Serendip scops owl Sunil found a pair of frogmouths in a dense tangle, the female rufous-brown and the male grey. Amazing birds, frogmouths.
The eighteenth endemic (not counting repeat sightings of grey hornbill and Sri Lankan junglefowl, which I had seen previously at, respectively, Sigiriya and everywhere) was the Sri Lankan scaly thrush, one of the more difficult of the endemics to find. Like some of the others this is the result of splitting but it really does look very different from the usual scaly thrushes elsewhere.
Endemic number nineteen was my very top "wanted" bird in Sri Lanka, even more-so than the frogmouth, the red-faced malkoha. You should google a photo of this one (because I never got one!). Malkohas are a type of giant cuckoo but they rear their own young and like to run through the trees like squirrels rather than fly like normal forest birds. I saw the malkohas in a bird-wave moving through the canopy far above. Canopy birds are the most frustrating because most of the time you are looking up at their bellies against the light, which can make identifications difficult. At least red-faced malkohas are easy - they are big and boldly-coloured, sort of like a magpie from below, but if they turn their head the right way you see the scarlet face. The other birds in the feeding flock were not so easy. Sunil could see white-faced starlings - another endemic, and a really rare one to boot - but every time I thought I saw one there would be leaves in front of it. I never did manage to get a look at one. Then there were several big red birds which may have been crimson-backed woodpeckers (yes, another endemic) but I only got glimpses of them flying, never a proper view. And there were non-endemic Malabar trogons as well (also red, but not on the wings), of which I got an untickable view of one bird. Further along on the same trail we encountered the same mixed flock, but much lower down, enabling excellent views of the malkohas and trogons - but the starlings and woodpeckers had unfortunately gone.
Rain-clouds had been gathering in the afternoon and it was while we were looking at the malkohas that it started drizzling, quickly turning into a torrential downpour. They don't call it rainforest for nothing. Luckily we made it back to the entrance building right on time so didn't get soaked. This was about 3pm and Sunil finishes at 4pm, so we just sat under shelter until then. I kept a watch on the bird-feeder and this paid off when a group of blue magpies flew in to feed. This is one of the endemics that everybody wants to see, and it's big and colourful enough to entertain even non-birders. If you imagine a typical English magpie but turn the black parts chocolate-brown and the white parts and the tail bright blue, then that's pretty much what it looks like. Endemic number twenty. I was one ahead for tomorrow.
We waited until the rain died off before heading back to Sunil's place. I was on the back of the bike so was shielded from most of the rain. Sitting outside his house I asked him the best place in the village to look for hanging parrots. That's one calling right now, he says, pointing into a coconut tree literally right next to the house. I jumped up and soon had a Sri Lankan hanging parrot in my sights, endemic number twenty-one. The next morning the very first bird I saw was a hanging parrot in the fruiting tree behind the house.
In one of the earlier posts I mentioned how Sri Lanka has several climatic zones, broadly divided into dry-zone, wet-zone, and montane. And I also mentioned a couple of times that Sri Lanka has 33 species of endemic birds. So far I have been to the dry-zone (at Wilpattu, Sigiriya, and Yala) and the highland areas (at Ohiya). Now it was time for the wet-zone forest, where the bulk of the endemic birds are found (roughly two-thirds of them). In my original plans which I scribbled up in Delhi I was going to visit two sites, the Kitulgala forest and the Sinharaja forest, because although they have the same birds some are more common at one site or the other. However Kitulgala does not appear to have any budget options for accommodation and so I thought it would make more sense to just spend longer at Sinharaja. There didn't seem to be any budget options there either, but It would save on a couple of travel days at least.
Sinharaja has been protected since as far back as 1875, originally as a 6000 acre "Reserved Forest". In 1909 the size was increased to 7910 acres and in 1926 to 9203 acres. In 1988 it was named as a National Heritage Site, and the following year became a World Heritage Site. Today it is 18,900 acres. It is a rainforest park, strangely with almost no mosquitoes but there are leeches. If I have to choose between mosquitoes and leeches I would choose leeches. They are gross and creepy but they are harmless apart for a little blood loss.
There is more than one "entrance" for Sinharaja Forest Reserve but only the northern one at the village of Kudawa has any trails into the forest; the southern points seem to just have roads running around the outside. The cheapest place to stay at Kudawa is Martin's Simple Lodge which charges close to NZ$40, just because he can. The next cheapest seemed to be the Blue Magpie Lodge which is over NZ$100 per night. There is also the Sinharaja Birders Lodge near the Blue Magpie Lodge, which I think is about the same price. I had been going to stay at Martin's because even though it is too expensive there weren't any other options I knew of and he has the endemic blue magpies coming to the breakfast table every morning. However while at the Popham Arboretum the manager Jayantha gave me the phone number of one of the park guides named Sunil who has a room available at his house. I rang him up the day before going to Sinharaja and arranged to stay there for 2000 LKR (about NZ$20) per night - the usual price is 3000 LKR but he gave me a discount because Jayantha had told him to. His house was not in Kudawa, Sunil told me, but in another village three kilometres away called Miyanapalawa, so at first glance not as ideal as being right by the park entrance but cost-wise much more sensible - basically, the cheaper the accommodation the longer I can stay in the area.
It is quite a long way from Mirissa to Sinharaja's northern entrance. There was also a little added complication in that I didn't know what time I would be getting to Miyanapalawa, I didn't know where Sunil's house was (or even really where the village itself was because it doesn't show up on the internet), and that Sunil wouldn't even be there until after 5pm because he would be in the park guiding during the day. I figured it would all work out.
I had found a page for Sri Lanka's southern bus routes on Wikipedia, so I knew it was reliable, and it said there was a bus from Galle to Kalawana, which is the nearest town to Sinharaja. So in the morning I got a bus from Mirissa to Galle, about an hour away, where I found that there was indeed a bus from Galle to Kalawana but only one per day and it wasn't leaving until 12.50pm. I waited around for about three hours and then I was off on my way. For anyone who likes following these things on maps, the bus route went from Galle to Ambalangoda to Aluthgama to Matugama to Baduraliya to Kalawana. The trip took around four hours (and only cost 180 LKR), and is perfect for anyone who wants to know what sardines in a can feel like. I wasn't sure if there was a bus for the next stage from Kalawana to Miyanapalawa, or even if anyone would know where I was going considering I couldn't pronounce it, but I was in luck and there was a bus heading that way at 5.40pm. I was a little unsure about what would happen when I got dropped in this village in the dark with no idea where I was, so I got the bus ticket guy to ring up Sunil on his phone so he could tell him where to drop me (I don't travel with a phone, in case you're wondering). Miyanapalawa, as it turns out, isn't the typical village strung along the road as I was expecting, instead it is on its own road off the main road, so if looking for it from the bus I wouldn't have even seen it. Sunil had come up to the junction on his motorbike to meet me, and we went off to his house. Everything worked out just fine.
The location of Sunil's house in relation to the park was no issue at all. It is actually about 4.5km rather than 3km but he obviously goes in to work every morning, so at 6.30am I would just get a lift on his bike to the park. Easy-peasy. The village, and particularly his garden, is very lively with birds including several of the endemics (I'll come back to that later). If walking, the road between his house and the park is a mix of cultivation, scrub and proper forest so there are birds along the way. There's also the bus if needed, which passes several times a day and costs 12 LKR to Kudawa (and then the park entrance is about 500 metres further uphill). Martin's Simple Lodge is only slightly closer in actual fact because it is up a four-wheel drive track about 3.5km long which you need to walk down before going the final 500m to the park gate (or if you're like most birders and detest walking anywhere they have jeeps for 3500 LKR per trip up and down their road). The other two lodges are closest of all, Sinharaja Birders Lodge about 700 metres from the entrance and the Blue Magpie Lodge less than a kilometre, but they are also very expensive (bird-tour groups stay there). Sunil just has one room for guests so is best for a solo traveller or a couple, although he is in the process if building a new house just for people to stay in and that will have four rooms. His wife Rohini cooks excellent meals, I think the best I've had at any of the homestays I've been at in Sri Lanka. I definitely recommend staying at Sunil's place if going to Sinharaja as a budget birder. (His phone number is 071 048 4677).
There is a mandatory guide when visiting the park, I'm not quite sure why, but it's not too expensive. The entry price is 650 LKR and the guide is 1000 LKR for as many hours as you are in there. Most visitors who aren't birders probably spend about two hours, just a quick walk through having flowers and lizards pointed out, then they're off again. The guides are on a roster system, so you don't get to choose - you get whichever guide is next on the list - but I ended up with Sunil luckily. He has been at the park for 24 years and knows everything. If you have to have a guide in a park, then you should always hope to get a good one! I didn't actually start out with Sunil, but the young guy I got assigned looked so dismayed that I was going to be in the park all day that I think there was an "arrangement" made to give me to Sunil.
Before getting onto the birds, which will take up most of the remainder of this post, the wet-zone race of purple-faced langurs were commonly seen here (so I've now seen three of the four races - just western left, hopefully when I get to Colombo), and also the wet-zone races of toque macaques and giant squirrels. I even managed to get some photos of the giant squirrels for the first time but they were really just "record shots" because leaves were obscuring most of the animal. It was a good reptile day too, with firstly a green tree viper (Trimeresurus trigonocephala) next to the entrance building, followed by several green vine snakes (Ahaetulla nasutus) through the day - very common along the trails here! - and in the lizard department, the endemic kangaroo lizard (Otocryptis weigmanni), the green garden lizard (Calotes calotes) and a water monitor.
At Ohiya I had reach thirteen endemic birds by day twelve, but since then I had fallen beind again due to the next six days being at Yala and Mirissa interspersed with travel days. My first day at Sinharaja was day nineteen of the Sri Lankan trip. I had six endemics to make up. This wasn't a problem at all. Right at the entrance building to the park there's a hollow-topped stump in which rice is placed as a bird-feeder. While I was lingering there a band of orange-billed babblers rolled on up, and while I was trying to get photos of them (unsuccessfully, due to the low light) a spot-winged thrush hopped past. In the trees there were some Sri Lankan crested drongos, and round the corner a party of ashy-headed laughing thrushes. Four endemics down right off the bat. Also the bird-feeder was frequented by a couple of flame-striped squirrels which are also endemic (a subspecies formerly named for southern India was based on a juvenile squirrel and is now considered to be baseless). The central stripe down their back really does almost glow bright orange. The next day I saw more flame-striped squirrels in better lighting conditions and saw that the belly and underside of the tail are also bright orange. There are dusky squirrels here too - the first Funambulus I saw at the bird-feeder was a dusky squirrel although I was told the "only" species here was the flame-striped squirrel; and in the open country and around the villages there are the common three-striped palm squirrels, so be aware of what you are looking at if searching for flame-striped squirrels.
One of the birds I most wanted to see while here was the Sri Lankan frogmouth (despite the name also found in southern India). They are nocturnal but mostly sleep in tree ferns, usually in bonded pairs, and the guides tend to know their regular roost-sites. Sunil was checking various spots as we walked along the jungle trails but without any luck. After a while one of the other guides we passed said he had already seen one, so we went back along the road to the place. It took some finding, but eventually there was a female frogmouth on her perch. I was astounded by how small it was, no bigger than an English blackbird. I am more used to the Australian Podargus species which are pretty big, and I had been wondering how they could roost in the spindly Sri Lankan tree ferns. Later in the day while looking unsuccessfully for a roost-site of Serendip scops owl Sunil found a pair of frogmouths in a dense tangle, the female rufous-brown and the male grey. Amazing birds, frogmouths.
The eighteenth endemic (not counting repeat sightings of grey hornbill and Sri Lankan junglefowl, which I had seen previously at, respectively, Sigiriya and everywhere) was the Sri Lankan scaly thrush, one of the more difficult of the endemics to find. Like some of the others this is the result of splitting but it really does look very different from the usual scaly thrushes elsewhere.
Endemic number nineteen was my very top "wanted" bird in Sri Lanka, even more-so than the frogmouth, the red-faced malkoha. You should google a photo of this one (because I never got one!). Malkohas are a type of giant cuckoo but they rear their own young and like to run through the trees like squirrels rather than fly like normal forest birds. I saw the malkohas in a bird-wave moving through the canopy far above. Canopy birds are the most frustrating because most of the time you are looking up at their bellies against the light, which can make identifications difficult. At least red-faced malkohas are easy - they are big and boldly-coloured, sort of like a magpie from below, but if they turn their head the right way you see the scarlet face. The other birds in the feeding flock were not so easy. Sunil could see white-faced starlings - another endemic, and a really rare one to boot - but every time I thought I saw one there would be leaves in front of it. I never did manage to get a look at one. Then there were several big red birds which may have been crimson-backed woodpeckers (yes, another endemic) but I only got glimpses of them flying, never a proper view. And there were non-endemic Malabar trogons as well (also red, but not on the wings), of which I got an untickable view of one bird. Further along on the same trail we encountered the same mixed flock, but much lower down, enabling excellent views of the malkohas and trogons - but the starlings and woodpeckers had unfortunately gone.
Rain-clouds had been gathering in the afternoon and it was while we were looking at the malkohas that it started drizzling, quickly turning into a torrential downpour. They don't call it rainforest for nothing. Luckily we made it back to the entrance building right on time so didn't get soaked. This was about 3pm and Sunil finishes at 4pm, so we just sat under shelter until then. I kept a watch on the bird-feeder and this paid off when a group of blue magpies flew in to feed. This is one of the endemics that everybody wants to see, and it's big and colourful enough to entertain even non-birders. If you imagine a typical English magpie but turn the black parts chocolate-brown and the white parts and the tail bright blue, then that's pretty much what it looks like. Endemic number twenty. I was one ahead for tomorrow.
We waited until the rain died off before heading back to Sunil's place. I was on the back of the bike so was shielded from most of the rain. Sitting outside his house I asked him the best place in the village to look for hanging parrots. That's one calling right now, he says, pointing into a coconut tree literally right next to the house. I jumped up and soon had a Sri Lankan hanging parrot in my sights, endemic number twenty-one. The next morning the very first bird I saw was a hanging parrot in the fruiting tree behind the house.
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SINHARAJA, PART TWO
I didn't want to spend every day inside the park at Sinharaja due to costs (given that, as was the case at Ohiya, many of the birds can potentially be seen in the forest directly outside the park). My plan for my second morning was to head up the road which leads to Martin's Simple Lodge and look around in the forest there, and then in the afternoon wander round Miyanapalawa village because Sunil said a number of the endemics could be easily seen.
I started off at the park entrance to see what was at the bird-feeder, which was nothing. Unlike yesterday's birdy bonanza today there were just emerald doves and a flame-backed squirrel. I walked back down the road, seeing a water monitor at the rubbish site and some purple-faced langurs in the trees. It wasn't until I came out of the forest into the cultivated land around the village that I started seeing some birds. Right before the road branches off towards Martin's there was a particularly good spot. I had stopped to photograph a three-striped palm squirrel on a roof on the hillside below when I was distracted by a hanging parrot in the tree behind, which was then joined by a yellow-fronted barbet. Some blue magpies flew overhead, attracting my attention to another tree in which were quietly sitting a number of Sri Lankan green pigeons and a pair of grey hornbills. That's five endemics in one spot, of which the barbet and pigeons were my numbers twenty-two and twenty-three (on day twenty).
The road up to Martin's was mostly uninteresting. The first 2km or so are through village and tea plantation, although I did see several of the open-country birds I hadn't expected here like yellow-billed babblers and white-browed bulbuls, as well as a crested hawk-eagle watching for prey from the top of a palm, and crested tree-swifts. It is all uphill too, and even in the early morning the sun was blazing hot. I didn't see much in the forest once I reached it - in fact the only forest bird I saw until I reached the park barrier, which I couldn't pass without a ticket, was a Malabar trogon. But at the park barrier there was a little bird-wave amongst which was endemic number twenty-four, a pair of Legge's flowerpeckers. So not much to show for a lot of walking, but three new endemics was alright by me.
I was going to spend the afternoon strolling around Miyanapalawa village looking for birds but when I got back to the house there were Sri Lankan hanging parrots and black-capped bulbuls there waiting, so I just sat outside in a chair like a lazy person. This strategy worked well when a male Layard's parakeet flew in and landed in a tree about ten feet away. It wasn't a perfect view - it had cleverly perched so that it was behind an upright branch, with the wings and tail visible on one side and only part of the head showing on the other. Still counts though. Endemic number twenty-five. A bit later a group of Sri Lankan green pigeons appeared in the fruiting tree behind the house. Then a noisy party of orange-billed babblers passed by followed by a flock of more Layard's parakeets, and this time one of them (again, a male) perched in plain view on top of a small tree showing off his emerald collar and powder-grey head and wings. Possibly the most attractive species of Psittacula I have seen. Other endemics around the village at times were Sri Lankan swallows (seen previously at Wilpattu but here I saw them perched on wires and got better looks at them), crimson-fronted barbets (seen previously, and much better, at Sigiriya), and (in non-birds) purple-faced langurs.
When Sunil came home he said that after lunch he had come looking for me on his bike along Martin's road because a pair of Sri Lankan spurfowl had come visiting the bird-feeder area at the park entrance, but I'd already been home by then. We were going to go for a walk to a place in the village where he knew Sri Lankan hill mynahs were found, but heavy rain put a stop to that. Two endemics missed.
I had intended to spend the third day outside the park and the fourth day back inside the park, but yesterday's spurfowl encouraged me to swap these days around. This was a mistake because I didn't see the spurfowl and the roost-sites for Serendib scops owl were all unoccupied - but on the fourth day the scops owls were back in their usual spots and I didn't have the money to go back in! This third day was pretty much wasted money with a guide (not Sunil) who seemed disinterested and no birds seen that I hadn't seen on the first day, although red-faced malkohas are always worth seeing. I did find a new snake, the Merrem's hump-nosed viper which has the great scientific name of Hypnale hypnale; there were some cool lantern bugs; and I got some better photos of flame-striped squirrels.
Back at the house Sunil and I went to find these hill mynahs of his. The tea plantations on the open hillsides had more leeches than there were inside the forest! Every second step there would be a new leech on my boots. I wasn't wearing my leech socks either, having thought we would just be on the village roads, so I had to keep stopping to flick them off. Sunil suddenly pointed ahead and said "Sri Lankan mynah!". Great. Except it was a lesser hill mynah, not a Sri Lankan hill mynah. They look quite similar, and if they didn't live in exactly the same place I would say they may well not be separate species, but they can be told apart by the lesser hill mynah having more wattles and a fully-orange bill (the Sri Lankan hill mynah has a black base to the bill and only has wattles on the back of the head - not differences which sound substantial, but easily seen when looking at a bird).
The fourth day at Sinharaja was going to be my last. I was spending this one outside the park and it didn't go a whole lot better than the day before inside the park. Sunil dropped me at Kudawa village on his way up to the park, and I attempted to look for the green-billed coucals which were supposed to be living along the river there. A coucal is a type of giant cuckoo, almost like a small pheasant in appearance. As far as giant cuckoos go, they are quite a bit more giant than malkohas are. There were certainly coucals calling in the riverside vegetation - they are colloquially called "water-bottle birds" because their glooping call sounds like water being poured out of a bottle - but I was a bit wary that green-billed coucals are supposed to be rainforest birds and this area seemed like better habitat for the much more widespread greater coucal. I continued stalking my way along a narrow road leading off to another village, trying to peer into the undergrowth. Suddenly a coucal flew overhead into a tree. It was definitely a coucal, they are pretty distinctive, but which one was it? I could see where the bird was, but only its tail. I had to wait until it flew into another tree, where it proved to be a greater coucal. That was the only coucal I saw that day. Just afterwards I saw a couple of woodpeckers with red backs in a tree - I quickly got my binoculars onto them but they weren't the endemic crimson-backed woodpecker, just the local subspecies of lesser goldenback woodpecker which I had earlier seen in Sigiriya. Like the green-billed coucal vs greater coucal the two woodpeckers can be easily told apart by bill colour, even if you can't judge the size of the birds themselves - crimson-backed woodpeckers have yellow bills and lesser goldenbacks have black bills.
A passing guide from the park stopped his motorbike to ask if I had managed to see any the endemic Serendib scops owls yesterday. When I said no he said I could do so today because they were back at their roost. Unfortunately I didn't think I would have enough money left in my wallet to pay for another park visit as well as what I would owe for my stay at Sunil's house. If only I hadn't swapped my planned days around! Almost as compensation, though, just a few minutes later while looking at a mixed feeding flock I saw a smallish bird shoot past and land inside the forest. I couldn't quite see it properly but it was a brown dumpy sort of bird; probably a female trogon, I thought, except I couldn't see its tail. I moved around a bit until I finally had it dead-on, and just then it swivelled its head 180 degrees to look at me straight over its back. A chestnut-backed owlet, one of only two endemic owls in Sri Lanka, making endemic number twenty-six on day number twenty-two. Still ahead for now, even if I was inevitably going to be leaving the island without a full set. That owlet was the 300th bird species for this trip, incidentally.
Sunil turned up just then on his bike to say he was rostered to be at the information centre today, and this was accessible from Martin's road without needing a park ticket. If I went up there he would keep an ear out for white-faced starlings for me. These starlings had become a bit of a bug-bear for me. Sunil had seen them on my first day but I couldn't get onto any of them in time, and both he and the other guide on both days had been hearing them calling without us seeing any. I made my way back up the road to Martin's Simple Lodge. A short way above the lodge there is a fork in the path - the left leads to a park barrier (the one where I'd seen Legge's flowerpeckers) and the right leads to the information centre, on the other side of which is another park barrier. The information centre doesn't have much in it, just some old skulls and animals in preservation jars. It kind of looks like it was half set up and then forgotten about for a decade or so. I sat around here until midday but didn't see much except Indian swiftlets. No starlings. Sunil had a look at some nearby scops owl roosts but nothing was there. So another pretty poor day, but at least I saw the chestnut-backed owlet.
That fourth day had been going to be my last at Sinharaja but in the evening Sunil said he had the next day off work and he knew a site outside the park where I could see Sri Lankan spurfowl and green-billed coucals for sure. I checked my wallet, we added up what I would owe him for the room and food, and found I could stay an extra night. After leaving Sinharaja I wouldn't have any more chances for endemic birds (I would be going to Colombo and flying out a day or two later), so needs must.
In the morning we rode to the same road where yesterday I had failed to see the coucal. This road is on your left immediately before the bridge at Kudawa, with a sign-board saying it leads to Thurusevana. After the road leaves the river it runs through forest for what seemed a good distance - in hindsight I should have stayed here the day before rather than going to the information centre; I'm pretty sure I would have seen some extra birds along there. After a while we stopped outside a house and Sunil asked a question to a girl who came out. She glanced out a back window and pointed. There was a pair of Sri Lankan scrubfowl right outside! The female is all brown, a basic pheasanty-bird, but the male is black with white spangles all over. Much nicer than the painting in the field guide. The people in the house feed the birds each morning and so it is a regular stop for the bird-watcher groups who come to Sinharaja (although they take a 3500 LKR four-wheel drive jeep to get there rather than a free motorbike ride). I took a load of photos out the window but they were moving around so much that only two of them (of the male) were any good.
After the scrubfowl had left, Sunil said he had heard a coucal calling. About ten metres along the road, there was a green-billed coucal sitting in a tree! Again, much nicer in person than you might think from the field guide, and with a much larger beak than I had imagined. So endemics number twenty-seven and twenty-eight on day number twenty-three. Sunil checked out a few roost sites for Serendib scops owl along the road, but none were occupied unfortunately. We went back to Kudawa and checked a few gardens for other birds, adding plum-headed parakeet to my trip-list. I also saw a pair of black-headed cuckoo-shrikes (the first time I'd seen a male), and a ruddy mongoose trotting along the road.
Later in the afternoon I went looking for hill mynahs in Sunil's village, hoping to get in one last endemic (assuming both species of hill mynahs were around the village of course) but no luck.
The next morning I took a bus to Kalawana, and on to Colombo.
I didn't want to spend every day inside the park at Sinharaja due to costs (given that, as was the case at Ohiya, many of the birds can potentially be seen in the forest directly outside the park). My plan for my second morning was to head up the road which leads to Martin's Simple Lodge and look around in the forest there, and then in the afternoon wander round Miyanapalawa village because Sunil said a number of the endemics could be easily seen.
I started off at the park entrance to see what was at the bird-feeder, which was nothing. Unlike yesterday's birdy bonanza today there were just emerald doves and a flame-backed squirrel. I walked back down the road, seeing a water monitor at the rubbish site and some purple-faced langurs in the trees. It wasn't until I came out of the forest into the cultivated land around the village that I started seeing some birds. Right before the road branches off towards Martin's there was a particularly good spot. I had stopped to photograph a three-striped palm squirrel on a roof on the hillside below when I was distracted by a hanging parrot in the tree behind, which was then joined by a yellow-fronted barbet. Some blue magpies flew overhead, attracting my attention to another tree in which were quietly sitting a number of Sri Lankan green pigeons and a pair of grey hornbills. That's five endemics in one spot, of which the barbet and pigeons were my numbers twenty-two and twenty-three (on day twenty).
The road up to Martin's was mostly uninteresting. The first 2km or so are through village and tea plantation, although I did see several of the open-country birds I hadn't expected here like yellow-billed babblers and white-browed bulbuls, as well as a crested hawk-eagle watching for prey from the top of a palm, and crested tree-swifts. It is all uphill too, and even in the early morning the sun was blazing hot. I didn't see much in the forest once I reached it - in fact the only forest bird I saw until I reached the park barrier, which I couldn't pass without a ticket, was a Malabar trogon. But at the park barrier there was a little bird-wave amongst which was endemic number twenty-four, a pair of Legge's flowerpeckers. So not much to show for a lot of walking, but three new endemics was alright by me.
I was going to spend the afternoon strolling around Miyanapalawa village looking for birds but when I got back to the house there were Sri Lankan hanging parrots and black-capped bulbuls there waiting, so I just sat outside in a chair like a lazy person. This strategy worked well when a male Layard's parakeet flew in and landed in a tree about ten feet away. It wasn't a perfect view - it had cleverly perched so that it was behind an upright branch, with the wings and tail visible on one side and only part of the head showing on the other. Still counts though. Endemic number twenty-five. A bit later a group of Sri Lankan green pigeons appeared in the fruiting tree behind the house. Then a noisy party of orange-billed babblers passed by followed by a flock of more Layard's parakeets, and this time one of them (again, a male) perched in plain view on top of a small tree showing off his emerald collar and powder-grey head and wings. Possibly the most attractive species of Psittacula I have seen. Other endemics around the village at times were Sri Lankan swallows (seen previously at Wilpattu but here I saw them perched on wires and got better looks at them), crimson-fronted barbets (seen previously, and much better, at Sigiriya), and (in non-birds) purple-faced langurs.
When Sunil came home he said that after lunch he had come looking for me on his bike along Martin's road because a pair of Sri Lankan spurfowl had come visiting the bird-feeder area at the park entrance, but I'd already been home by then. We were going to go for a walk to a place in the village where he knew Sri Lankan hill mynahs were found, but heavy rain put a stop to that. Two endemics missed.
I had intended to spend the third day outside the park and the fourth day back inside the park, but yesterday's spurfowl encouraged me to swap these days around. This was a mistake because I didn't see the spurfowl and the roost-sites for Serendib scops owl were all unoccupied - but on the fourth day the scops owls were back in their usual spots and I didn't have the money to go back in! This third day was pretty much wasted money with a guide (not Sunil) who seemed disinterested and no birds seen that I hadn't seen on the first day, although red-faced malkohas are always worth seeing. I did find a new snake, the Merrem's hump-nosed viper which has the great scientific name of Hypnale hypnale; there were some cool lantern bugs; and I got some better photos of flame-striped squirrels.
Back at the house Sunil and I went to find these hill mynahs of his. The tea plantations on the open hillsides had more leeches than there were inside the forest! Every second step there would be a new leech on my boots. I wasn't wearing my leech socks either, having thought we would just be on the village roads, so I had to keep stopping to flick them off. Sunil suddenly pointed ahead and said "Sri Lankan mynah!". Great. Except it was a lesser hill mynah, not a Sri Lankan hill mynah. They look quite similar, and if they didn't live in exactly the same place I would say they may well not be separate species, but they can be told apart by the lesser hill mynah having more wattles and a fully-orange bill (the Sri Lankan hill mynah has a black base to the bill and only has wattles on the back of the head - not differences which sound substantial, but easily seen when looking at a bird).
The fourth day at Sinharaja was going to be my last. I was spending this one outside the park and it didn't go a whole lot better than the day before inside the park. Sunil dropped me at Kudawa village on his way up to the park, and I attempted to look for the green-billed coucals which were supposed to be living along the river there. A coucal is a type of giant cuckoo, almost like a small pheasant in appearance. As far as giant cuckoos go, they are quite a bit more giant than malkohas are. There were certainly coucals calling in the riverside vegetation - they are colloquially called "water-bottle birds" because their glooping call sounds like water being poured out of a bottle - but I was a bit wary that green-billed coucals are supposed to be rainforest birds and this area seemed like better habitat for the much more widespread greater coucal. I continued stalking my way along a narrow road leading off to another village, trying to peer into the undergrowth. Suddenly a coucal flew overhead into a tree. It was definitely a coucal, they are pretty distinctive, but which one was it? I could see where the bird was, but only its tail. I had to wait until it flew into another tree, where it proved to be a greater coucal. That was the only coucal I saw that day. Just afterwards I saw a couple of woodpeckers with red backs in a tree - I quickly got my binoculars onto them but they weren't the endemic crimson-backed woodpecker, just the local subspecies of lesser goldenback woodpecker which I had earlier seen in Sigiriya. Like the green-billed coucal vs greater coucal the two woodpeckers can be easily told apart by bill colour, even if you can't judge the size of the birds themselves - crimson-backed woodpeckers have yellow bills and lesser goldenbacks have black bills.
A passing guide from the park stopped his motorbike to ask if I had managed to see any the endemic Serendib scops owls yesterday. When I said no he said I could do so today because they were back at their roost. Unfortunately I didn't think I would have enough money left in my wallet to pay for another park visit as well as what I would owe for my stay at Sunil's house. If only I hadn't swapped my planned days around! Almost as compensation, though, just a few minutes later while looking at a mixed feeding flock I saw a smallish bird shoot past and land inside the forest. I couldn't quite see it properly but it was a brown dumpy sort of bird; probably a female trogon, I thought, except I couldn't see its tail. I moved around a bit until I finally had it dead-on, and just then it swivelled its head 180 degrees to look at me straight over its back. A chestnut-backed owlet, one of only two endemic owls in Sri Lanka, making endemic number twenty-six on day number twenty-two. Still ahead for now, even if I was inevitably going to be leaving the island without a full set. That owlet was the 300th bird species for this trip, incidentally.
Sunil turned up just then on his bike to say he was rostered to be at the information centre today, and this was accessible from Martin's road without needing a park ticket. If I went up there he would keep an ear out for white-faced starlings for me. These starlings had become a bit of a bug-bear for me. Sunil had seen them on my first day but I couldn't get onto any of them in time, and both he and the other guide on both days had been hearing them calling without us seeing any. I made my way back up the road to Martin's Simple Lodge. A short way above the lodge there is a fork in the path - the left leads to a park barrier (the one where I'd seen Legge's flowerpeckers) and the right leads to the information centre, on the other side of which is another park barrier. The information centre doesn't have much in it, just some old skulls and animals in preservation jars. It kind of looks like it was half set up and then forgotten about for a decade or so. I sat around here until midday but didn't see much except Indian swiftlets. No starlings. Sunil had a look at some nearby scops owl roosts but nothing was there. So another pretty poor day, but at least I saw the chestnut-backed owlet.
That fourth day had been going to be my last at Sinharaja but in the evening Sunil said he had the next day off work and he knew a site outside the park where I could see Sri Lankan spurfowl and green-billed coucals for sure. I checked my wallet, we added up what I would owe him for the room and food, and found I could stay an extra night. After leaving Sinharaja I wouldn't have any more chances for endemic birds (I would be going to Colombo and flying out a day or two later), so needs must.
In the morning we rode to the same road where yesterday I had failed to see the coucal. This road is on your left immediately before the bridge at Kudawa, with a sign-board saying it leads to Thurusevana. After the road leaves the river it runs through forest for what seemed a good distance - in hindsight I should have stayed here the day before rather than going to the information centre; I'm pretty sure I would have seen some extra birds along there. After a while we stopped outside a house and Sunil asked a question to a girl who came out. She glanced out a back window and pointed. There was a pair of Sri Lankan scrubfowl right outside! The female is all brown, a basic pheasanty-bird, but the male is black with white spangles all over. Much nicer than the painting in the field guide. The people in the house feed the birds each morning and so it is a regular stop for the bird-watcher groups who come to Sinharaja (although they take a 3500 LKR four-wheel drive jeep to get there rather than a free motorbike ride). I took a load of photos out the window but they were moving around so much that only two of them (of the male) were any good.
After the scrubfowl had left, Sunil said he had heard a coucal calling. About ten metres along the road, there was a green-billed coucal sitting in a tree! Again, much nicer in person than you might think from the field guide, and with a much larger beak than I had imagined. So endemics number twenty-seven and twenty-eight on day number twenty-three. Sunil checked out a few roost sites for Serendib scops owl along the road, but none were occupied unfortunately. We went back to Kudawa and checked a few gardens for other birds, adding plum-headed parakeet to my trip-list. I also saw a pair of black-headed cuckoo-shrikes (the first time I'd seen a male), and a ruddy mongoose trotting along the road.
Later in the afternoon I went looking for hill mynahs in Sunil's village, hoping to get in one last endemic (assuming both species of hill mynahs were around the village of course) but no luck.
The next morning I took a bus to Kalawana, and on to Colombo.
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Last year the "top 25 most endangered primates" was put out, and one of the monkeys featured in there was the western race of purple-faced langur (the pdf can be viewed here: https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documents/2015-033.pdf). I had seen the dry-zone race at Sigiriya, the montane race at Ohiya, and then the wet-zone race at Sinharaja. The western race was the last of the four, and oddly-enough it is easy to see in the country's capital city - not usually the case for critically-endangered wildlife! The best place to go to spot them is the Talangama Wetlands.
I had arrived in Colombo in the afternoon from Kalawana and found a hotel called the New Colonial Hotel just along from the Pettah Bus Stand, which the guy at the door said was the oldest in Colombo at eighty years old. Usually the historical hotels charge more for the ambience, but this one not so much - for both price and ambience. It's a bit shabby really with simple rooms suitable for sleeping in and not much else, but that's fine for 1200 LKR. There's a restaurant/bar downstairs which is equally tired and should be avoided if you like your food to be edible. I was here for two nights before leaving for India again.
The next morning I took a tuktuk to Talangama Lake for 500 LKR. I left a little later than I had intended (not until 6am) and then the trip itself took longer than intended because the tuktuk driver didn't actually know where we were going. It should be about 30-45 minutes, and instead it took over an hour. And then just after I'd arrived and was trying to photograph a pheasant-tailed jacana, I was intercepted by a passing walker who felt the need to tell me his entire life story for the next twenty minutes. I wasn't very interested in his life, to be honest, but I was trying to be polite instead of telling him to just keep walking. I was even less interested when he started repeating the things he had already told me.
Eventually he went on his way and I could focus on the birds, although there weren't very many. In fact the best birds of the morning were a spot-billed pelican, a couple of yellow bitterns, and a flock of rosy starlings. Otherwise it was just same-old same-old. However I was really there for the monkeys and I did see three different troops of them in the trees, although two of the groups were too far away for photographing and the third (composed of females with new babies) took off as soon as they realised I had seen them. So no photographs at all, but at least I saw them. They seemed somewhat more brownish than the other subspecies, but otherwise very similar.
Next destination for the morning was the National Zoo. A passing tuktuk driver told me it would be 1500 LKR to get there, which was ridiculous even if it was a fair distance away, so I kept walking. Funny thing with public transport in Asia - when you don't want one you will constantly have tuktuks and motorbikes stopping to see if you want a ride, but when you do want a ride there are none to be found! Eventually another empty tuktuk came past and this driver said it would be 750 to the zoo, so I took that. Getting back to my hotel afterwards was quite a bit cheaper, with a tuktuk fom the zoo to Dehiwala Junction for 150 LKR and then a bus to Pettah for 30 LKR.
Jayantha, the manager at the Popham Arboretum had started out at Colombo's National Zoo back in the 1970s. When Singapore was deciding to build a zoo they came to Sri Lanka to see how to do it, and some of the Colombo Zoo people, including Jayantha, went to Singapore to help set the new zoo up. I was suspecting that the Colombo Zoo had probably not aged as well as the Singapore Zoo, and I had heard some pretty negative things about it. It wasn't an absolutely terrible zoo, but it really wasn't a good zoo at all either. It made me think of Singapore Zoo in some ways - the small stage-type enclosures for example - but in a more Indian sort of way if that makes sense. I think a lot of the enclosures would have been cutting-edge when first constructed, but nowadays it's pretty poor all-round.
The Colombo Zoo was my first zoo visit on this trip! The review is here: National Zoological Gardens, Colombo
I had arrived in Colombo in the afternoon from Kalawana and found a hotel called the New Colonial Hotel just along from the Pettah Bus Stand, which the guy at the door said was the oldest in Colombo at eighty years old. Usually the historical hotels charge more for the ambience, but this one not so much - for both price and ambience. It's a bit shabby really with simple rooms suitable for sleeping in and not much else, but that's fine for 1200 LKR. There's a restaurant/bar downstairs which is equally tired and should be avoided if you like your food to be edible. I was here for two nights before leaving for India again.
The next morning I took a tuktuk to Talangama Lake for 500 LKR. I left a little later than I had intended (not until 6am) and then the trip itself took longer than intended because the tuktuk driver didn't actually know where we were going. It should be about 30-45 minutes, and instead it took over an hour. And then just after I'd arrived and was trying to photograph a pheasant-tailed jacana, I was intercepted by a passing walker who felt the need to tell me his entire life story for the next twenty minutes. I wasn't very interested in his life, to be honest, but I was trying to be polite instead of telling him to just keep walking. I was even less interested when he started repeating the things he had already told me.
Eventually he went on his way and I could focus on the birds, although there weren't very many. In fact the best birds of the morning were a spot-billed pelican, a couple of yellow bitterns, and a flock of rosy starlings. Otherwise it was just same-old same-old. However I was really there for the monkeys and I did see three different troops of them in the trees, although two of the groups were too far away for photographing and the third (composed of females with new babies) took off as soon as they realised I had seen them. So no photographs at all, but at least I saw them. They seemed somewhat more brownish than the other subspecies, but otherwise very similar.
Next destination for the morning was the National Zoo. A passing tuktuk driver told me it would be 1500 LKR to get there, which was ridiculous even if it was a fair distance away, so I kept walking. Funny thing with public transport in Asia - when you don't want one you will constantly have tuktuks and motorbikes stopping to see if you want a ride, but when you do want a ride there are none to be found! Eventually another empty tuktuk came past and this driver said it would be 750 to the zoo, so I took that. Getting back to my hotel afterwards was quite a bit cheaper, with a tuktuk fom the zoo to Dehiwala Junction for 150 LKR and then a bus to Pettah for 30 LKR.
Jayantha, the manager at the Popham Arboretum had started out at Colombo's National Zoo back in the 1970s. When Singapore was deciding to build a zoo they came to Sri Lanka to see how to do it, and some of the Colombo Zoo people, including Jayantha, went to Singapore to help set the new zoo up. I was suspecting that the Colombo Zoo had probably not aged as well as the Singapore Zoo, and I had heard some pretty negative things about it. It wasn't an absolutely terrible zoo, but it really wasn't a good zoo at all either. It made me think of Singapore Zoo in some ways - the small stage-type enclosures for example - but in a more Indian sort of way if that makes sense. I think a lot of the enclosures would have been cutting-edge when first constructed, but nowadays it's pretty poor all-round.
The Colombo Zoo was my first zoo visit on this trip! The review is here: National Zoological Gardens, Colombo
SRI LANKA WRAP-UP
So my trip through Sri Lanka is over. It was a great place and I thoroughly recommend it for anyone wanting to go looking for wildlife. Having said that, I probably won't be going back. I only missed a handful of birds and while there were some prime mammals I didn't get to see (like sloth bear) they are generally species which are also found elsewhere. If I'd only been there for a week and only visited one or two sites, I'd definitely be wanting to return, but I think I got all I wanted from the country during the month I had.
General thoughts and opinions:
*Everyone is really friendly and helpful, except the thieves who populate Tissamaharama. In fact I think the reason Tissa stood out so much was because the mercenary attitudes of the people there were so different to those shown everywhere else.
*Buses and trains are cheap as chips, usually about one or two dollars for long distances. Most of the buses appear to be centuries old. The government buses are red, and the conductors have electronic ticket-machines with the fares pre-set so they can't rip you off. These are always the cheapest buses to take. The ticket handily shows the route, the specific place-to-place of your journey, the fare, and the number of kilometres of the trip. The private buses are blue and white. While some have the electronic ticket-machines most either give you a ticket from a book on which they have hand-written your fare, or they just tell you the fare. In both cases they tend to overcharge, by maybe ten or twenty cents, so not a big deal. The A/C buses are more expensive, usually two or three times the other bus fares, so when they overcharge you it is by a larger margin. Also as a backpacker you always have to pay for two seats on the A/C mini-buses because there's nowhere to put your bags except on another seat (the coach-style A/C buses have holds under the bus for luggage).
*The dogs are completely friendly and/or harmless. Dogs are always my biggest issue when travelling because in Asia they can be unpredictable and often dangerous, and there are always lots of stray animals. In Sri Lanka I think I only had three dogs, out of probably a couple of hundred, act aggressively towards me but even they were just for show - a couple of steps in their direction and they turned and ran.
*The weather was a bit up and down. I arrived to the rainy season in the north, but the rain mostly came down some time in the afternoon in massive downpours for an hour or two and then petered out to drizzle. Most of the time it wasn't really a big issue during the day. About the only places where the rain was noticeable (as in heavy and/or an annoyance) was at Wilpattu and Sinharaja. Wilpattu was hot, very very hot. Sigiriya was also hot but surprisingly not so much as at Wilpattu, even though the distance between them isn't great and they are in the same climate zone. Tissamaharama was far too hot, hotter than Wilpattu, and Mirissa was even hotter again. I was not happy in those places! Sinharaja was hot and humid - every day I was drenched in sweat from morning to night, and even after showering and putting on clean clothes after coming back from the forest I still felt filthy. Ohiya, on the other hand, was an ideal temperature for me. Not quite the minus-degrees of the Himalayas, but at probably 15 degrees it was perfect for just walking and walking without dying of heatstroke.
..................
Accommodation is "expensive" (by my standards) almost everywhere, and there isn't any real difference in quality versus price. A lot of places seem to just charge a high price because they can rather than because it is justified. It did seem like the south was cheaper than the north for accommodation, but this may not be an accurate observation. Sri Lanka is a difficult country for "just turning up" and finding rooms. In some towns or villages it would work, in others not at all, mostly because they tend to be very spread out along roads rather than there being clusters of hotels and guesthouses. Pre-booking is the way to go here.
Places I stayed:
*Wilpattu House (near Wilpattu National Park): 2500 LKR per night, food not included. No WIFI. Only has two rooms and a cottage (all at different prices). Nice owners, good location, overpriced rooms, overpriced food. I may have thought better of the cost if it hadn't been my first stop, because I wasn't expecting "budget" accommodation to be the price it generally is in Sri Lanka. Lots of wildlife in the garden.
*Fortuna Heritage Hotel (Kandy): 2500 LKR per night, food not included. WIFI available and worked well. A perfectly good hotel. Just by the flying fox colony at the lakeside.
*Bandulla Homestay (Sigiriya): 1350 LKR per night, breakfast included. WIFI available most of the time. Only has three or four rooms. Up to this point the best homestay I had been at in either Sri Lanka or India (it was later beaten by Sunil's place at Sinharaja). It also seems to be the cheapest place to stay at Sigiriya. Definitely recommended.
*Popham Arboretum (Dambulla): 2500 or 3000 LKR per night [I stayed for 2000], food not included. No WIFI. Only has two rooms, and the only food option is a little restaurant out on the road about 100 metres from the gate. This is the best place to stay (obviously) if looking for grey slender loris and mouse deer in the Arboretum. Definitely recommended.
*Horton Place (Ohiya): 2000 LKR per night, breakfast and dinner included. No WIFI. Run pretty shambolically but perfect for accessing the Horton Plains National Park, and literally across the tracks from the Ohiya railway station. The best-priced accommodation in Ohiya, especially given that most of your meals are included. They also own Angel Inn about half a kilometre from the station, which is 3500 per night, breakfast included.
*Moon Lanka Yala (Tissamaharama): the cheapest place I stayed at 1000 LKR per night but, yeah, just avoid entirely.
*Nature Inn (Mirissa): 1100 LKR per night, food not included. WIFI works well when it works. Each of the three or four rooms is a stand-alone cottage. This place is fine to stay at, though there are probably better options for the same sort of price.
*Sunil's house (Sinharaja): 3000 LKR per night [I stayed for 2000], food not included. No WIFI. Only one room at the moment. The cheapest place to stay in the area. My favourite place in Sri Lanka. Excellent owners, excellent food, loads of birds in the garden. Very definitely recommended if you are going to Sinharaja.
*New Colonial Hotel (Colombo): 1200 LKR per night, food not included. WIFI for 200 LKR per 12 hours. It's no better than okay. It's directly opposite the Fort Railway Station and a few minutes walk from the Pettah Bus Stand, and you can catch the 187 airport bus from outside (apparently - I hope!) so that's some good points. Avoid the restaurant though.
..................
I was in Sri Lanka for 26 days, during which time I saw 158 species of birds, 64 of which were lifers (about 40 percent), and 25 species of mammals, 18 of which were lifers (abut 72 percent). Of the 33 endemic birds the only ones I missed out on were the Sri Lankan whistling thrush at the highlands in Ohiya, and at Sinharaja the crimson-backed woodpecker, Serendib scops owl, Sri Lankan hill mynah and white-faced starling. The woodpecker is a split from greater flameback, but the others are all "proper" species.
These are the mammals I saw:
Toque Macaque Macaca sinica
Tufted Grey Langur Semnopithecus priam
Purple-faced Langur Trachypithecus vetulus
Grey Slender Loris Loris lydekkerianus
Three-striped Palm Squirrel Funambulus palmarum
Dusky Squirrel Funambulus sublineatus
Flame-striped (Layard's) Squirrel Funambulus layardi
Sri Lankan (Grizzled) Giant Squirrel Ratufa macroura
Black-naped Hare Lepus nigricollis
Indian Flying Fox Pteropus giganteus
Lesser False Vampire Bat Megaderma spasma
Rufous Horsehoe Bat Rhinolophus rouxi
Leopard Panthera pardus
Rusty-spotted Cat Prionailurus rubiginosus
Golden Jackal Canis aureus
Small Indian Civet Viverricula indica
Ruddy Mongoose Herpestes smithii
Blue Whale Balaenoptera musculus
Chital Axis axis
Sambar Cervus unicolor
Indian Muntjac Muntiacus muntjak
Sri Lankan Mouse Deer Moschiola meminna
Feral Water Buffalo Bubalus bubalis
Wild Pig Sus scrofa
Asian Elephant Elephas maximus
So my trip through Sri Lanka is over. It was a great place and I thoroughly recommend it for anyone wanting to go looking for wildlife. Having said that, I probably won't be going back. I only missed a handful of birds and while there were some prime mammals I didn't get to see (like sloth bear) they are generally species which are also found elsewhere. If I'd only been there for a week and only visited one or two sites, I'd definitely be wanting to return, but I think I got all I wanted from the country during the month I had.
General thoughts and opinions:
*Everyone is really friendly and helpful, except the thieves who populate Tissamaharama. In fact I think the reason Tissa stood out so much was because the mercenary attitudes of the people there were so different to those shown everywhere else.
*Buses and trains are cheap as chips, usually about one or two dollars for long distances. Most of the buses appear to be centuries old. The government buses are red, and the conductors have electronic ticket-machines with the fares pre-set so they can't rip you off. These are always the cheapest buses to take. The ticket handily shows the route, the specific place-to-place of your journey, the fare, and the number of kilometres of the trip. The private buses are blue and white. While some have the electronic ticket-machines most either give you a ticket from a book on which they have hand-written your fare, or they just tell you the fare. In both cases they tend to overcharge, by maybe ten or twenty cents, so not a big deal. The A/C buses are more expensive, usually two or three times the other bus fares, so when they overcharge you it is by a larger margin. Also as a backpacker you always have to pay for two seats on the A/C mini-buses because there's nowhere to put your bags except on another seat (the coach-style A/C buses have holds under the bus for luggage).
*The dogs are completely friendly and/or harmless. Dogs are always my biggest issue when travelling because in Asia they can be unpredictable and often dangerous, and there are always lots of stray animals. In Sri Lanka I think I only had three dogs, out of probably a couple of hundred, act aggressively towards me but even they were just for show - a couple of steps in their direction and they turned and ran.
*The weather was a bit up and down. I arrived to the rainy season in the north, but the rain mostly came down some time in the afternoon in massive downpours for an hour or two and then petered out to drizzle. Most of the time it wasn't really a big issue during the day. About the only places where the rain was noticeable (as in heavy and/or an annoyance) was at Wilpattu and Sinharaja. Wilpattu was hot, very very hot. Sigiriya was also hot but surprisingly not so much as at Wilpattu, even though the distance between them isn't great and they are in the same climate zone. Tissamaharama was far too hot, hotter than Wilpattu, and Mirissa was even hotter again. I was not happy in those places! Sinharaja was hot and humid - every day I was drenched in sweat from morning to night, and even after showering and putting on clean clothes after coming back from the forest I still felt filthy. Ohiya, on the other hand, was an ideal temperature for me. Not quite the minus-degrees of the Himalayas, but at probably 15 degrees it was perfect for just walking and walking without dying of heatstroke.
..................
Accommodation is "expensive" (by my standards) almost everywhere, and there isn't any real difference in quality versus price. A lot of places seem to just charge a high price because they can rather than because it is justified. It did seem like the south was cheaper than the north for accommodation, but this may not be an accurate observation. Sri Lanka is a difficult country for "just turning up" and finding rooms. In some towns or villages it would work, in others not at all, mostly because they tend to be very spread out along roads rather than there being clusters of hotels and guesthouses. Pre-booking is the way to go here.
Places I stayed:
*Wilpattu House (near Wilpattu National Park): 2500 LKR per night, food not included. No WIFI. Only has two rooms and a cottage (all at different prices). Nice owners, good location, overpriced rooms, overpriced food. I may have thought better of the cost if it hadn't been my first stop, because I wasn't expecting "budget" accommodation to be the price it generally is in Sri Lanka. Lots of wildlife in the garden.
*Fortuna Heritage Hotel (Kandy): 2500 LKR per night, food not included. WIFI available and worked well. A perfectly good hotel. Just by the flying fox colony at the lakeside.
*Bandulla Homestay (Sigiriya): 1350 LKR per night, breakfast included. WIFI available most of the time. Only has three or four rooms. Up to this point the best homestay I had been at in either Sri Lanka or India (it was later beaten by Sunil's place at Sinharaja). It also seems to be the cheapest place to stay at Sigiriya. Definitely recommended.
*Popham Arboretum (Dambulla): 2500 or 3000 LKR per night [I stayed for 2000], food not included. No WIFI. Only has two rooms, and the only food option is a little restaurant out on the road about 100 metres from the gate. This is the best place to stay (obviously) if looking for grey slender loris and mouse deer in the Arboretum. Definitely recommended.
*Horton Place (Ohiya): 2000 LKR per night, breakfast and dinner included. No WIFI. Run pretty shambolically but perfect for accessing the Horton Plains National Park, and literally across the tracks from the Ohiya railway station. The best-priced accommodation in Ohiya, especially given that most of your meals are included. They also own Angel Inn about half a kilometre from the station, which is 3500 per night, breakfast included.
*Moon Lanka Yala (Tissamaharama): the cheapest place I stayed at 1000 LKR per night but, yeah, just avoid entirely.
*Nature Inn (Mirissa): 1100 LKR per night, food not included. WIFI works well when it works. Each of the three or four rooms is a stand-alone cottage. This place is fine to stay at, though there are probably better options for the same sort of price.
*Sunil's house (Sinharaja): 3000 LKR per night [I stayed for 2000], food not included. No WIFI. Only one room at the moment. The cheapest place to stay in the area. My favourite place in Sri Lanka. Excellent owners, excellent food, loads of birds in the garden. Very definitely recommended if you are going to Sinharaja.
*New Colonial Hotel (Colombo): 1200 LKR per night, food not included. WIFI for 200 LKR per 12 hours. It's no better than okay. It's directly opposite the Fort Railway Station and a few minutes walk from the Pettah Bus Stand, and you can catch the 187 airport bus from outside (apparently - I hope!) so that's some good points. Avoid the restaurant though.
..................
I was in Sri Lanka for 26 days, during which time I saw 158 species of birds, 64 of which were lifers (about 40 percent), and 25 species of mammals, 18 of which were lifers (abut 72 percent). Of the 33 endemic birds the only ones I missed out on were the Sri Lankan whistling thrush at the highlands in Ohiya, and at Sinharaja the crimson-backed woodpecker, Serendib scops owl, Sri Lankan hill mynah and white-faced starling. The woodpecker is a split from greater flameback, but the others are all "proper" species.
These are the mammals I saw:
Toque Macaque Macaca sinica
Tufted Grey Langur Semnopithecus priam
Purple-faced Langur Trachypithecus vetulus
Grey Slender Loris Loris lydekkerianus
Three-striped Palm Squirrel Funambulus palmarum
Dusky Squirrel Funambulus sublineatus
Flame-striped (Layard's) Squirrel Funambulus layardi
Sri Lankan (Grizzled) Giant Squirrel Ratufa macroura
Black-naped Hare Lepus nigricollis
Indian Flying Fox Pteropus giganteus
Lesser False Vampire Bat Megaderma spasma
Rufous Horsehoe Bat Rhinolophus rouxi
Leopard Panthera pardus
Rusty-spotted Cat Prionailurus rubiginosus
Golden Jackal Canis aureus
Small Indian Civet Viverricula indica
Ruddy Mongoose Herpestes smithii
Blue Whale Balaenoptera musculus
Chital Axis axis
Sambar Cervus unicolor
Indian Muntjac Muntiacus muntjak
Sri Lankan Mouse Deer Moschiola meminna
Feral Water Buffalo Bubalus bubalis
Wild Pig Sus scrofa
Asian Elephant Elephas maximus
So back to India I presume?
What's the situation over there as of now?
What's the situation over there as of now?