With a size comparable to Singapore the Wilpattu national park is the biggest national park in Sri Lanka. It is a unique nature reserve with more than 60 lakes and famous for its Leopard population.
Many times on our world trip friends and relatives traveled with us. And for Sri Lanka Daniela’s mother Edith and her friend Judith joined us. For them it was their first visit to Asia in their entire life. And for us it was absolutely wonderful to see how they reacted to things that were completely normal for us. But what wasn’t normal was the experience we made in Wilpatu NP.
Right after arriving at the Big Game Camp we took off with our safari jeep. We were accompanied by our fantastic guide Sameera, a studied naturalist, with an enormous knowledge about the park and its inhabitants. And right after arriving we already saw several spotted deer, hares, peacocks, macaques a mongoose and a serpent eagle.
But this was all just the built up to the absolute highlight. When we saw several safari jeeps lined up at the side of the street we knew something big was happening. And when we stopped we saw a majestic male leopard relaxing on the thick branch of a tree no more than 40m from us. This was the closest encounter we ever had with this beautiful animal. But as if this would not have been enough, we soon spotted a second leopard on that tree, this time a female. This explained why he didn’t care much about us, as during mating they don’t care about anything. They stay together for about a week and mate for at least 250 times. Therefore we knew that if we just waited long enough we might got lucky. And then it happened – the female leopard stood up from her branch and positioned herself in front of the male leopard and the act begun. Recording this felt a bit like recording porn, but in the end it was a wonderful spectacle of nature and how she scared him away after he was finished was unique.
But after this once in a lifetime experience our wonderful safari wasn’t over. We further on managed to see an elephant, a water buffalo, a crocodile and to top it all a chameleon.
In the evening we had a delicious BBQ-dinner in the forest before we spent the night in our safari tent while listening to the sounds of nature. The next morning brought even more surprises. Right after a delicious dinner our guide invited us to a cooking class where we prepared a Sri Lankan daal. All this convinced us that we had taken the right choice when booking with Big Game Camp and will recommend it to everyone who loves nature.
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