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This is a full day's safari to Udawalawe National Park, collected and returned to your hotel in Panadura. The tour runs across ten hours, door to door, with an air-conditioned vehicle and English-speaking chauffeur handling the road journey, and a dedicated safari jeep and driver for the three hours spent inside the park itself. It suits a private group, with children welcome from age five upward.
Udawalawe sits on the border of the Sabaragamuwa and Uva Provinces in the south of the country, a journey of around 165 kilometres from Panadura. The park was established in 1972, created as a sanctuary for animals displaced when the Walawe River was dammed to form the Udawalawe Reservoir, and to protect the land feeding it. Before that it was farmed in the shifting chena tradition; the farmers moved on once the park was declared, and the grassland, marsh and scattered forest they left behind has become one of the more reliable places in Sri Lanka to see wild elephants in the open, rather than glimpsed through dense cover. The park also holds the Elephant Transit Home, set up in 1995 to look after orphaned calves until they are old enough to return to the wild.
Your chauffeur collects you from your Panadura hotel at 8.30 in the morning for the drive south, arriving in Udawalawe around midday and reaching the park gates by half past one. There you hand over to a safari jeep and its driver, who doubles as your tracker through the three-hour drive across the park's open plains and waterways, watching for elephants, water birds and whatever else crosses the track that afternoon. Afterwards you rejoin your original vehicle for the return leg, arriving back at your hotel by around 8.30 in the evening.
A litre of bottled water per person is provided for the day, along with the air-conditioned transport, chauffeur, jeep and driver. Food, drinks beyond the water, gratuities and park entrance tickets are not included, so check which ticket option you need before booking. Bring whatever else the day calls for: a hat, sun protection and a camera with some reach, given how much of the park unfolds across open grassland with the hills visible in the distance.
