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# Udawalawe
- URL: https://tombrewer.co.uk/udawalawe/
- Published: 2026-03-19T13:03:27.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-21T09:31:07.000Z
- Author: Tom Brewer
- Tags: Newsletter, #Migrated-1789982889005, #Import 2026-09-21 09:29

Udawalawe. The name alone hints at the terrain. All those undulations, those rolling syllables, prepare you for what six hours in the back of a jeep actually feels like.

The alarm was set for five. Camera gear went outside the room first, sealed in a bag to acclimatise to the humidity. Leave a cold lens to meet warm, wet air and you’ll spend the first hour of a safari shooting in soft focus. By six, a jeep was waiting outside the hotel entrance. The hotel had made us breakfast to take away: an egg sandwich of some distinction, fruit, juice, and a selection of sweet things. We loaded our gear and headed for the park gates.

Udawalawe National Park sits on the boundary of Sabaragamuwa and Uva Provinces in the south of the island, a position that places it at the meeting point of Sri Lanka’s wet and dry zones. The landscape runs to open grasslands, scrub forest, marshes and the vast Udawalawe Reservoir, all framed to the north by the Kalthota Mountain Range.  The park was established in 1972, but its creation was a consequence rather than a plan: the reservoir had displaced wild animals from the Walawe River valley, and the park was the attempt to give them somewhere to go.

Things were not immediately promising on the expertise front. As we were trying to identify one of the first sightings of the morning, our driver reached back and tossed a copy of A Pictorial Guide to Uda Walawe National Park into the rear of the jeep. We were on our own. We thought of Sagara, our guide in Sinharaja, and his knowledge of every rustle in the canopy. We would continue to think of him for most of the next six hours.

![](https://tombrewer.co.uk/content/images/2026/09/30ae1828-ae16-4b33-a978-63305150885e_2048x1365-jpeg-1.jpg)

What saved the day was the elephants. Udawalawe has a permanently resident herd of around 250 animals, drawn to the park partly by the reservoir, roaming freely in herds of up to 30\. Access into the park is strictly controlled, and the elephants behave as though they know it. You are somewhere you are merely tolerated.

![](https://tombrewer.co.uk/content/images/2026/09/139a3d0f-c406-46b1-9003-613137cfb9f8_1365x2048-jpeg.jpg)

We watched them dust-bathe - the slow, deliberate process of scooping earth with the trunk and releasing it across the body in a fine cloud. It looks chaotic, but the act serves a number of purposes: temperature regulation, protection from the sun’s UV rays, a barrier against biting insects.  It is also social, a shared activity that seems to play some role in holding the herd together.

![](https://tombrewer.co.uk/content/images/2026/09/1bafd24f-18c2-42b7-87b5-2b3552ed0db9_2048x1365-jpeg.jpg)

We also found, in between the elephants: green bee-eaters, eating bees and a close encounter with a changeable hawk-eagle. And several crocodiles unsettlingly close to the reservoir’s edge with the particular menace of things that don’t need to move to look dangerous.

![](https://tombrewer.co.uk/content/images/2026/09/9d458b51-ede0-45ab-934f-5bc6bfd300de_2048x1365-jpeg.jpg)

After lunch, we took a tuktuk to the Elephant Transit Home, about twenty minutes from the park entrance. The centre has been operating since 1995, caring for orphaned calves until they are old enough to be released back into the national park.  More than 200 elephants have passed through since it opened, all returned to the wild at around five years old. 

![](https://tombrewer.co.uk/content/images/2026/09/575d800b-e334-4ddf-b1c3-64786a6fcd01_2048x1365-jpeg.jpg)

Feeding sessions are open to visitors three times a day, each lasting around twenty to thirty-five minutes.  We’d timed it for the afternoon session. You watch from an elevated viewing platform, kept at a meaningful distance from the elephants, which is exactly the point. The distance is deliberate. No touching, no feeding by visitors, no posing for photographs alongside the animals.  It’s a conservation project, not a photo op.

When the calves come in, they come quickly. They stamp and trumpet into their feeding area with abject impatience , lining up to have milk delivered through plastic hoses with funnels on the end. The smallest ones, still working out how to operate a trunk, manage to make the whole procedure look extremely difficult. The bigger ones who have done this before barge straight in, they know they don’t have long.

Udawalawe exists because a reservoir displaced its wildlife and a national park was built to catch them. Sri Lanka has been absorbing disruption for millennia. Sometimes what follows is worth travelling a long way to see.

![](https://tombrewer.co.uk/content/images/2026/09/9b8267b0-32aa-469a-b637-268900bf1d3e_2048x2048-jpeg.jpg)