Saturday, April 16th, 2022 – Tissahamarama
Apr 23rd, 2022 by rallyadmin
Breakfast and then load up the tuktuks and head back down to the low land. The cooler air up in the mountains was a pleasant respite from the heat and humidity of the coast but it’s now time to head back down the mountain.
As we drive through the flats, the woodlands get lower and more savanna like. It’s a bright sunny day and there’s no shortage of wildlife to look at and the road has a nice rolling nature.
As we get closer to Tissamaharama, oncoming cars start flashing their lights at us. This usually means that there is a police checkpoint ahead of us. This is not an area where we would have expected a checkpoint but we slow down just to be safe.
Over a rise and we see a couple of cars stopped at the edge of the road and as we get closer we see that there is an elephant on the side of the road. Even closer, we see that the elephant is picking up small bananas that cars and tuktuks have dropped along the road.
He’s a good sized elephant but to my inexperienced eye, any elephant is large and the one that is coming down the road toward my stopped tuktuk is even larger. But this is a wild elephant, not a domesticated work or display animal, and that difference speeds up the pulse a bit.
When we left the previous hotel, we were given bananas to give to any elephants that we might see. I was of two minds by this habit of giving food to wild animals. In most places, this is usually strongly discouraged if not outright forbidden. The usual attitude is that this makes the animals habituated to humans and human feeding and this often leads to a bad ending for the animal and sometimes for the humans also. Think bears in North America.
However, the Buddhists see things differently. We’ve often seen people leaving food out for the hordes of stray dogs, cats, monkeys and apparently elephants and many of those people see it as their duty to provide for all animals, both stray and wild. So, leaning to the feeding side of the argument, I toss my bananas to the side of the road in front of the elephant and as he gets closer he picks up each banana with his tusk and stuffs in in his mouth.
When he finishes all of the bananas that I have tossed to the side of the road, he continues down the road past me looking very closely at Kevin, the little yellow minion plush that I have hanging from the roof of my tuktuk. The bright yellow color of the little plush must have caused the elephant to wonder if there was one more banana that I was withholding. And if he had decided to come c loser to investigate or take Kevin, the tuktuk and Kevin would have been on their own.
In the end, he must have decided that Kevin was not a bright little banana and he continued past me a few meters. Then he stopped and backed into the brush on the side of the road with a final raise of his trunk. I realize that this animal is more habituated than wild but this moment could not have worked out any better. Bananas gone and the elephant backed into the brush until the next car or tuktuk brings another load of said bananas, we reluctantly move on.
The rest of the drive is uneventful but, as usual, finding and getting fuel is “complicated”. We are down on the flats and we find a petrol station that is open but, again, as usual, the there are long lines for both petrol and diesel. WE use what has become a very successful modus operandi: wait together across the road from the petrol station and wait for the station manager or armed police to wave us over for the “tourist line-jump”.
What is truly amazing is the the locals who may have been waiting in line for hours don’t react. They continue to smile and wave. This would never work in the US or the UK. It must be the predominant Buddhism that protects all of us from what could be a very ugly incident if they felt differently. Fueled, we’re back on the road to Tissamaharama just a few kilometers farther.
We turn on to the road where our hotel for the night is according to the GPS says, we drive a kilometer and there is a grove of trees completely covered in hanging fruit bats. They look like huge crows that are oddly hanging upside down by their feet. Push on to the hotel.
We finally find the hotel after the GPS runs us around in a “circle to land” procedure. I will never understand how a simple route can be made so complicated by a GPS receiver. It happens.
At the hotel, park the tuktuks, unload, bring the fuel jugs into the hotel. Finally, a beer. Order dinner for the night. Generally just unwind.
At 6:00, we leave for the trees where the bats are spending the day to watch them mass depart for their night feeding forays. We wait. A few of the more adventurous of our band walk down towards a small pond only 20 meters across. The locals promptly shout out a warning that there are crocodiles in the pond. As soon as they get near the pool, the crocs emerge, not aggressively, just curiosity. The locals are convinced that the Brits are looney and keep motioning for them to come back away from the pond which they finally do.
The locals are fully aware that the crocs aren’t really that dangerous, they are small and probably the few that are seen in the water are the only ones here but a croc is a croc and they do attack large animals and humans. It would be highly inconvenient to have to extract a tourist ankle from a croc’s mouth when we’re supposedly waiting for the fruit bat departure.
Around 6:30, suddenly the bats drop from the branches and the sky above is crowded with the huge flying mammals. They seem much larger flying than they seemed hanging from the branches. They circle in this dense whirlwind for about 5 minutes and then they are gone, just a few stragglers remain circling above the trees.
Back up the road in the dark with the tuktuks meager headlights shining the way to the hotel. Sit down for the dinner and more beers. And then bed. Tomorrow morning, a truck safari into the nearby national park.
Obi