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This is a day-long jeep safari into Bundala National Park, collected and returned by private vehicle from your hotel in Dikwella. The park sits on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, a stretch of dry-zone lagoons, sandbars and scrub that was Sri Lanka's first Ramsar wetland and is now the country's only coastal UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. It is a working landscape of saltwater lagoons and tidal mudflats rather than dense jungle, which is precisely what makes it so good for watching birds and animals move across open ground and shallow water.
Your driver collects you from your hotel in Dikwella at midday and takes you down to Bundala in an air-conditioned vehicle, arriving at the park in the early afternoon. There you transfer into a safari jeep for a three-hour drive through the park, with your English-speaking driver staying with the vehicle throughout the day. The terrain opens and closes as you move between grassland, lagoon edge and scrub, and sightings tend to come in quick succession rather than long waits.
Bundala's reputation rests on its birdlife. Close to two hundred species have been recorded here, and the park is best known for the greater flamingos that arrive in large flocks during the migration season. Expect painted storks and black-necked storks at the water's edge, cormorants and darters drying their wings in low trees, spoonbills and ducks working the shallows, and the occasional purple swamphen picking its way across lily pads near a pond. Peacocks are a common sight on open grass, tails sometimes fully fanned.
It is not only a birding trip. Bundala is the one park in Sri Lanka where both of the country's crocodile species, the freshwater mugger and the estuarine crocodile, can be seen, and small herds of elephants move through its interior along with deer, wild boar, jackals and langurs. The lagoons and beaches also host nesting turtles and a long list of reptile life. After the safari you return to the jeep and are driven back to your hotel in Dikwella by early evening, the tour lasting around six hours door to door.
The tour runs as a private excursion, suited to a minimum age of five, with hotel pickup and drop-off, air-conditioned transport, an English-speaking driver and the jeep safari itself included. Park entrance tickets, food and drink, gratuities and anything of a personal nature are not included and should be arranged separately.
