What Yala Gave Me (Even Without a Leopard)
Yala arrived with dust, winding roads, and the first real sense that the tour was beginning to exhale.
After the indulgence of Nuwara Eliya, the journey from the cool hills down to the wild south-east felt long in every sense of the word. Hours of winding roads, steep descents, and that particular silence that settles over a bus when everyone is either asleep, exhausted, or pretending they don’t have motion sickness. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was adventurous and pleasantly broken up by a few well-timed stops.
Ella was our first stop. A backpacker hotspot bursting with cafés offering everything from smoothie bowls to tacos. Faced with the radical concept of choice, I briefly abandoned my beloved curry and rice for a cheeky taco lunch (we call this balance). Next up was a waterfall that could have been lifted straight from home (big, green, and grounding), though its serenity was mildly sabotaged by an off-key rendition of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Still counts. And finally, the pièce de résistance: the famous Nine Arch Bridge. Reaching it meant a precarious tuk tuk ride down a muddy ridgeline, complete with a polite collision from another tuk tuk, but every bump was worth it. The bridge itself was breathtaking, and we even had front-row seats to a train thundering past, making the whole experience feel like a movie scene.
By late afternoon, we swapped bus seats for jeep seats and officially entered Yala National Park for our first safari. And something moved within me. Somewhere between scanning the trees and listening for calls, I became… a bird person. A twitcher, if you will. Green bee-eaters stole my heart, closely followed by their blue-tailed cousins, painted storks, blue kingfishers, serpent eagles, and hornbills. Add elephants, spotted deer, mongoose, land monitors, and suddenly I was deeply invested in every rustle of leaves and crackle of sticks like it was my job. It felt like an initiation. A promise. Especially knowing we’d be back at dawn.
And dawn came quickly.
We were up before the sun, bumping along dirt tracks in near-darkness with packed breakfasts and hopeful eyes, visiting two different blocks of the park in search of one very elusive leopard. I’ll spare you the suspense — sadly, no leopard appeared (well, not for my jeep anyway). But somehow, the absence didn’t matter. The park delivered anyway.
The quiet highlight was watching black-faced grey langurs playing gently among spotted deer. No urgency, no fear, just coexistence. Birds sang as we ate breakfast in the jeep, the morning unfolding softly until the heat arrived and reminded us we were very much in the wild. After four dusty hours, we called it and headed back to the hotel.
The afternoon was blissfully still. Naps. Clean hair. Books. Absolute calm. It felt very much earned.
With only a few days left on the tour, Yala felt wild but restful, full but quiet. I was both ready for the tour to end and strangely sad about it (though my patience was admittedly thinning thanks to frequent, lengthy comfort stops from my beloved older companions).
Yala didn’t give us a leopard, but it gave me birds, stillness, and the realisation that slowing down doesn’t mean missing out. Sometimes it means noticing more. (Mostly birds).