Ancient cities and Safari’s

Starting in Anuradhapura I spent the morning being driven to many different sites around this cultural city. The highlights can be managed in a morning but to do it justice you would probably need a day - it will require you to remove your shoes several times, so best to wear slip on ones (mine were of course boots and required some fiddling!!).
I travelled to the Sri Maha Bodhi, which is a Bodhi tree in the very centre of Sri Lanka, it is surrounded by trees and has a brick walkway to get to it from the car park. However, it is worth the walk as you arrive to find a tree supported by golden pillars and there is an attached annex where devotees come to offer puja to the Buddha. Within the same area is the Brazen Palace but more impressively the Ruvanvelisaya Dogoba which is HUGE and stands in gleaming white contrast to its surroundings, towering above the tress and small buildings. There are also many, many monkeys here but they seem content with sitting in the trees and feeding off the detritus of the human traffic. There are also several Buddhist ruins and temples surrounding the area and these can be visited by car - it would be a challenge to do it on foot!! And there is quite a bit of shoeless climbing to do when you get to them!!
In the afternoon came the highlight of my trip to Sri Lanka so far - My driver knew a man who worked at a Safari Jeep stand catering for ‘Kandulla National Park’, which specialises in tours related to elephants :)
Well after a quick negotiation a price was decided of 3500r for the jeep and 2700r for the park entry fee, and it was sooooo worth it ;) I had my own private jeep on a fantastic safari. The landscape changed dramatically from rice fields to forest and then to open grassland surrounding a lake and river. Other jeeps were filled to capacity and they all looked on as we passed with just the one of me in the back standing up and viewing the scenes while riding the rough terrain like ‘Ben Hur’ in his chariot… Amazing. The sky was an incredible pastel blue with floating white clouds leading to a pink horizon as the sun began to set… And within all of this wonderful landscape they appeared, a grey mass on the horizon coming into focus over the flowing dark course of the river - an opportunity to take stock of these elegant and powerful creatures as they selected the finest pieces of grass the graze. My driver and guide spent the next 3 hours on the hunt for elephants and this did not prove to be to hard, around the lake there were 4 different families of elephants and on Q they arrived at the waters edge as we travelled around :) It was magnificent. Each group in turn demonstrated wild character and were a little unsettled by the jeeps (as wild animals should be, not docile and accepting of these alien metal objects!!). The Elephants were generally grazing in groups with the younger ones playing a game of who can push the hardest and the adults swishing the grass before raising it to their mouths for mastication. I witnessed no tusked bulls as only 5% of the elephants have tusks - but the shear number of elephants in the park was a wonder - If you want to see elephants then come here. One word ‘Fabulous’