Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part five: 2016-2017

in China I saw great swirling swarms of red-billed choughs in the Rouergai area (on the eastern end of the Tibetan plateau). There I only saw a few yellow-billeds I think, and they were in pairs. Basically the opposite of what I saw in Ladakh.

I really like choughs too. I think the yellow-billeds are my favourite ones though.

 

yep, all the airports I've been in so far on this trip (in Asia at least) have prominent warning signs. Apparently you can go the local store in the airports and get a refund on your phone. I was told it was because the battery in that model has proven to be unstable and will randomly overheat and possibly explode.

On the other hand the Indian airports still have huge advertisements for the phone dotted around, even while banning them from flights...

 

..and finally after almost two weeks I am somewhere which has enough internet capabilities for me to get online and post something!

So the story continues...

 

I've been to quite a few countries in Asia now. Sri Lanka is a new one for me. In fact the only other Asian country which I haven't been to yet but which I really want to visit, is Japan (combined with Taiwan). That's not the only country left, it's just that the others don't hold enough appeal for me to make a dedicated trip. Laos I would pass through if in the area but the only animals I'm particularly interested in there are the Laotian rock rat and the Laotian langur. (Side note: I've seen a third of all Asian primates in the wild). The Philippines has a lot of nice animals, the main ones of interest for me being the eagle, tarsier and colugo, but somehow I've never had a great desire to go. Then there's the cluster round India (Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh) which are just sort of "meh"; the Central Asian stans which I've never given much thought to except briefly for Iran; and finally North Korea which I have no need to visit.

So Sri Lanka is now marked off, and Japan is on the cards for the future some time.

My first wildlife port of call in Sri Lanka was Wilpattu National Park, in the northwest of the island. This park was only properly reopened a few years ago, the north having mostly remained extremely volatile until the end of the civil war with the Tamil Tigers in 2009, and it is still little-visited by tourists. The most popular park by far in Sri Lanka is Yala National Park in the south. From all accounts this is an absolute circus with dozens of jeeps at all times of day, the drivers on their radios to alert other drivers of leopards, and then virtual traffic-jams at good sightings. It doesn't sound pleasant which is why I started at Wilpattu. I will be visiting Yala later, because I want to see the comparison between the two, but Wilpattu sounded like more my sort of place. The flip-side of it is that while Yala may be crowded it does have very good wildlife-spotting, especially of elephants, leopards and sloth bears. Wilpattu should be a much nicer experience, but the wildlife-spotting is less reliable because there is less there - by which I mean the same species are there, just fewer in number and harder to find.

Starting off though, I was landing in Colombo airport at 1.40am. The Colombo airport isn't actually in Colombo but north of there, just outside a beach town called Negombo. A lot of people prefer to stay in Negombo rather than Colombo, and who can blame them. I would be heading straight to Wilpattu from the airport, but there aren't buses at that time of the morning, so like the more cash-savvy early-morning arrivals I just lay down in a corner of the arrivals hall with my pack as a pillow and slept there. After a few hours sleep I woke up again around 5am and found a Canadian-Italian girl named Mariana had been sleeping nearby. We took turns watching each others bags while using the toilets, then got some coffee and breakfast at the cafe. She was heading for Galle on the south coast, but after hearing that Wilpattu was quieter than Yala ("more real" as she put it) decided she would like to go there instead. This worked out well for me because it meant I had an automatic second person for the jeep in the national park instead of just having to hope there would be someone else up there to team up with: when I get to the costs of visiting the park you'll see why this was important!

The basic route we would be taking was mainly by bus (of course) - airport to bus stand, then bus from there to the side of the main highway a few kilometres further on to wait for a passing long-distance bus which would take us to a town called Puttalam about three hours north, then another bus from there to a village called Eluvamkulam an hour further on, and then finally by tuktuk to the place I was staying, Wilpattu House, which is about 1.5km along a mud road from the village bus stand.

Buses are really cheap in Sri Lanka, usually around one or two dollars, which is good because it sets off the costs of accommodation a little - it seems really difficult to find cheap rooms anywhere here. "Cheap", of course, is relative. In Asia an expensive room would still be considered ridiculously cheap in New Zealand, but budget is always the most important consideration (for me) when on longer trips. In Sri Lanka a "cheap" room tends to be about NZ$15 to $20. Not in itself expensive, but add in food and (especially) park fees and the daily spend suddenly becomes "expensive" when you're a backpacker. Overall Sri Lanka accommodation is far more expensive than in most other Asian countries I have been to.

Outside the airport the tuktuk drivers were offering their services to take us to the highway or to Negombo or to Puttalam or to Wilpattu. Naturally all at very reasonable prices. After some wandering around we encountered a Thai-Swedish girl heading to Negombo who was also looking for the bus stand. It turned out that it was about a 2km walk from the airport so we all scrunched into a tuktuk for a $2 ride. The Negombo-bound bus could drop Mariana and I at the highway, while the Thai-dish girl could continue on her way. Unfortunately she didn't want to come to Wilpattu as well because her boyfriend was arriving on a later plane.

Wilpattu House is very close to one of the entrances to the national park. It is run by a most-excellent and friendly chap named Sereno. His "business partner" Kumari operates her little roadside eatery at the entrance to the property. It is not particularly cheap staying at Wilpattu House. I don't mean it is like a five-star resort or anything, quite the opposite; there are just two rooms and a cottage, with very basic conditions ("rustic" as I like to say, in a glass-half-full fashion),. The rooms were 2000 and 2500 Sri Lankan rupees [LKR] (about NZ$20 and $25) which is more than I generally would want to pay in Asia but if that's what a room costs then so be it. Some countries are just more expensive than others. I mean $20 doesn't sound much in itself, however the two rooms are worth about $10 each; the next place I stayed (at Sigiriya) cost around NZ$12 per night and was several times better. Maybe if breakfast was included, as is common in Sri Lanka, then that would be better; or maybe if the food in general was not costing over twice what any local restaurant would cost for the same meals then the room cost wouldn't be so bad. But as it is, it's about NZ$40 per day for room and food, and then the costs of the park are added on. Having said all that, Sereno and Kumari were great and I would stay there again. It definitely helped that there are birds everywhere on the property! And almost the first animal I saw when I got there was a couple of tufted grey langurs, my first "new" monkey of the trip. They didn't stick around for long so no photos. The next morning in the coconut trees I saw my first Sri Lankan giant squirrel.

Although I had arrived in Sri Lanka at 1.40am I didn't actually get to Wilpattu House until about 2pm. We didn't leave the airport until about 7am, and then there were bus waiting times, bus travel times, and a delay in Puttalam because I had forgotten to tell Mariana at the airport that there were no ATMs or anything of that sort near the park so she had to go wandering to try and find a machine which would accept her card (it was declined by three in a row). Once there we had lunch, then Mariana went to sleep for the rest of the day, and I spent time birding around the garden.

The property is an old coconut plantation with a river down the far end, so there's a good range of the more common open-country and light-woodland birds, including peacocks. Indian robins were everywhere, looking sort of like all-dark magpie-robins (and there were also actual magpie-robins there); several species of sunbirds and flowerpeckers were buzzing around the flowers; and there was even an Indian pitta calling from one of the trees. I like pittas - I rarely see them because they are sneaky little fellows, but when I do see them I always see them well. This one, however, was perched in an awkward position and while I could see it, it wasn't the best of views. The only pitta species (of those I've seen) with less than ideal viewing. Hopefully I'll see more later, either in Sri Lanka or back in India. Down by the river there was a gull-billed tern roaming back and forth, a white-bellied sea eagle and some openbill storks flapping by, a few darters perched in a distant tree, and barn swallows hawking for insects. One of the swallows, on closer inspection, turned out to be a Sri Lankan swallow - first day, first endemic. For those not up on their biological terms, an endemic animal is one found solely in a certain region: e.g. kiwi are endemic to New Zealand because they are found only there, while pukeko are not endemic (they are native) because they are also found in other places in the world. There are 33 endemic birds in Sri Lanka, so we'll see how many I end up seeing.

The next day was the safari day for Wilpattu National Park. The park is one of those annoying ones which you can't walk around in, you are restricted to being driven around in expensive jeeps. Fortunately in Sri Lanka there are many parks which do allow walking, so overall my wallet won't be too stretched by the park costs while here. Here the jeep costs 10,000 LKR for a full day (there are roughly 100 LKR to one NZ dollar, so about NZ$100) or 6000 for a half-day. The jeeps are private jeeps - apparently the park doesn't have jeeps of its own - so I guess the price depends on the operator. The park entry fees are set by the government though. A foreign adult entry fee is 2130 LKR; the rest of the costs can be split between however many are in your group, with a charge of 1136 LKR for allowing the group in, 60 LKR for the driver [60 LKR is the local entry fee!], 250 LKR vehicle entry, and then there's 15% tax on top of everything. The total entry for one person (if there are two of you to split the shared costs) is 3280 LKR, plus the jeep. So a day at the park cost me over NZ$80; if I'd been alone it would have been closer to NZ$200. On the plus-side the Sri Lankan parks don't have all the additional gouges the Indian parks do, like camera fees and guide fees.

Sri Lanka is climatically divided (in simple terms) into dry-zone in the north, wet-zone in the south, and montane in the central highlands. Most animals are found everywhere, but some are restricted to just one or two of the zones. Wilpattu is in the dry-zone, although you wouldn't think so right now with the torrential rains! Most of the park is dry forest, dotted with lakes (called tanks in Sri Lanka) with varying amounts of open grass around the shores. The amount of forest makes it frustrating being driven around because you can't see very far through the trees. On a full-day safari this makes for a lot of driving with little reward. And the jeeps are roofed by the regulations of the park (in case leopards jump down into the jeep, apparently) so you can only see horizontally - i.e. the bases of the trees. Both of us just wanted to get out and walk through the forest along the roads but we weren't allowed. In the afternoon when it started to rain (as in, RAIN) the side flaps of the jeep were put down and the visibility was reduced to near-zero. Fortunately, as is common in Asia, even in the rainy season the downpours are only one or two hours at most, not all day long.

Chital or axis deer are common in the park, and in the open areas by the lakes the herds could be seen easily. Also near the lakes were sounders of wild pigs and a few sambar. Otherwise we only saw lots of three-striped palm squirrels, one tufted grey langur, and (barely) one Indian muntjac. I did see some leopard tracks along one of the roads, and the people in one of the other jeeps we passed had seen a leopard the previous afternoon, but we were not so lucky. It seems that the leopard population is as good at Wilpattu as it is at Yala, but sightings are less common - possibly simply because there are fewer jeeps. We only passed seven other jeeps over the course of the day.

Despite the lack of mammals on our visit, there were loads of birds so I was happy enough. Even being mostly restricted to a moving vehicle, with a couple of stops for breakfast and lunch, I saw about 50 species. A lot of those were around the lake shores of course, while able to walk around a bit, including some really nice species like lesser adjutant, painted, openbill and woolly-necked storks (a four-stork day), spot-billed pelican, and Eurasian spoonbill. Common snipe were, in fact, common; and there were lots of other waders too like black-tailed godwits, marsh sandpipers, and golden plovers, although a lot of them were too far back to see what else there might have been. Sri Lankan junglefowl, easily the best-looking of all the junglefowl species, made endemic number two on day number two. The best bird for me was a blue-faced malkoha. I like all the malkohas, but the blue-faced is better than most. The one I really want to see though is the red-faced malkoha which is a Sri Lankan endemic from the southern rainforests.

Mariana was fairly done with the safari by around midday, after about six hours of just sitting watching trees pass by. Not being a total wildlife nut she wasn't that interested in most of the birds, and deer and pigs get boring after a while. The best thing from her point of view was having a free guide in the jeep (i.e. me) to tell her about everything we were seeing. Things took a turn for the better later in the afternoon around 4pm when we finally found some elephants, a small herd with babies. This perked her right up because elephants were what she really wanted to see. A short while later we stopped at a church behind which there was a lone elephant browsing, so she got to see one reasonably close up.

The next morning I saw some toque macaques in Sereno's garden. They look somewhat similar to the crab-eating macaques of southeast Asia, but with a fancy hairdo (hence their common name). Unlike the tufted grey langur which is also found in southern India, the toques are endemic to Sri Lanka. They were the fifth "new" mammal I had seen in two days.

My thoughts on Wilpattu National Park are that it is a nice park, but for a drive-only park there is just too much forest and a full-day is really too long in that respect. Of course the more time you put in the more chances there are of seeing wildlife. The park fees are, I think, standard through the Sri Lankan parks, but the jeep fee is way too high. I'd still recommend going there if in Sri Lanka. It will be interesting to see how I feel about Yala National Park if I do visit there, and what my comparisons will be.

 

Close kin to one another but distinct; the Toque Macaque is present in small numbers in Europe whilst the Bonnet is more commonplace, so naturally I have somehow managed only to see the former so I cannot fully articulate what the differences are between the two, but judging from photographs of Bonnet they are a much darker brey-brown than Toque, which are closer to a pleasant caramel colour.

 

I haven't seen a bonnet macaque (wild) yet.

I think when Pertinax was in India the bonnet and toque macaques were still considered to be the same species. I remember when that was the case, although it was quite a long time ago.