Elephants

On May 5th and 6th, our ship docked in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is an island to the south of India.

Sri Lanka has native elephants that are a subspecies of Asian Elephant. There are still some in the wild. The estimates of numbers I found ranged quite a bit, and the latest was 7,500. There was no opportunity to see wild elephants, so I chose an excursion into the island to visit the Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage.

Wikipedia says that Pinnawala contains the largest herd of captive elephants in the world. It was a great place to see elephants travel from the orphanage site, come down the road in the town and then spend two hours bathing and cooling down in the river.

Once the elephants reached the river, we could observe them from a porch, where we had great seats and were served a buffet lunch.

A couple from our Trivia team went down to the river and was able to touch and bathe one of two elephants who seemed to enjoy just staying in the river and being pampered.

I enjoyed the trip into the interior of the island of Sri Lanka and the chance to see these elephants and observe their behavior.