The Yala National Park operates a bizarre payment system. If you are Sri Lankan, you pay the equivalent of 25 US cents to get in. If you are a non-local, you pay $25. I calculated that, according to Sri Lankan salary standards, this means that you need to be a European CEO with a minimum €120,000 per annum in order for this to be justified.

You get a lot of time to think on the Kulu Safari jeeps, which is how I figure all this out. Mark Forbes, the owner, picks me up from the car park outside the 14,000 hectares that make up the park and we set off. I thought it was odd that there would be people on board, but there they were, armed with their massive zooms and their video cameras. I was not just being taken to my camp – I was actually on a safari.

In South Africa safari rides are on the right side of short – two hours at most, more if there is anything particularly exciting going on, say, a couple of mating leopards. The rest of the time can be a little boring and you start to appreciate your little private pool outside your villa. In Yala, they rides can go on and on for hours as you glimpse swathes of birds, crocodiles sneaking around, elephants having a dust bath, and, should you be lucky, the elusive leopard.

The only time I camped out was on a trip to the Greek Islands when I was 20. ‘Camping’ is what you are meant to be doing at Kulu but thankfully theirs is the luxury kind. After a day chugging around in the jeep, you want comfort and they deliver it without tainting it with anything truly commercial. The food is wonderful and surprising for such restricted facilities. The shower uses a natural system and is housed in a separate camp, the toilet is chemical (you need to ‘open’ and ‘close’ the flap just in case a snake or spider sneaks in), you get an outside and inside living area and fabulously, an elevated double bed.

It wasn't always like this. In fact, until some time ago, Yala was not even accessible and dangerous for all reasons which had nothing to do with wildlife.  Daniel Nielsen of CNN Traveler has the explanation here:

The Sri Lankan leopard (Panthera pardus kotiya) is a subspecies endemic to the Asian country. Yala National Park has what is thought to be the highest density of leopards in the word, despite them being classified as endangered. In recent times, it’s the tourists who have been scarcer.

In May 2008, the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) advice read: ‘We advise against all travel to Yala National Park and the areas around it following a number of serious security incidents in the park in October and November 2007 and attacks in January 2008 close to the park.’

Advice for the rest of the country, especially the north and east, was even more inauspicious, warning of a high threat of terrorist attacks from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) – known to everyone as the ‘Tamil Tigers’.

By the time I arrived in Sri Lanka in October 2009, the president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, had announced the conflict between the government and a Tamil faction seeking an independent state was over, after the Tamil Tigers’ leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, was killed on 18 May.

Before long, the FCO had retracted its warning about travelling to Trincomalee in the Tamil region of the north east and Yala National Park on the south coast. Sri Lanka’s most visited tourist attraction was open again.

 

When I visited in August of 2010, the most dangerous thing around was the array of insects including massive mosquitos. Yet I lay on that bed all through the night, hardly able to sleep, waiting for the leopard. The night before, it had been prowling outside Mark’s camp and I wondered if it would turn up again. The jungle is loud at night, and the insects take on the co-ordination of an orchestra. In the next camps, other couples snoozed quietly preparing themselves for an early morning start and breakfast by the lazy river. It’s camping, but not as you thought it would ever be.

Get in touch with Mark directly at Kulu Safaris, book through Sri Lanka in Style or as part of your package through Royal Travel.