It was our first day in Sri Lanka. After landing in Colombo (we took a flight from Chennai, as was mentioned in my earlier post), we met our travel agent at the airport. The immigration at Sri Lanka airport was done quite smoothly and we had no issues. There was Visa exemption for Indians when we visited Sri Lanka, we just had to apply for ETA i.e. Electronic Travel Authorization. ETA is a digital pass which one applies while visiting a foreign country. We applied for it before reaching Sri Lanka and received the authorization via mail within a few hours. Our tour guide suggested converting the currency en-route. We also decided to collect local sims on the way and not at the airport.
Our first day itinerary was to travel from Colombo to Sigiriya with a night stay at Sigiriya. We were ought to visit the most amazing Pinna Wala elephant orphanage on the way to our hotel.
Pinna Wala elephant orphanage:
Pinna Wala is a place where captive breeding and conservation of elephants is done. It was established in 1975 to care and protect the orphaned and injured elephants. There are 2 kinds of tourist activities at the orphanage as per the brief provided by our guide.
The first one is to watch the elephants come as a herd and take bath in the river. It is done from a distance so that the elephants don’t get disturbed by our presence. The other one is interacting with the elephants by bathing and feeding them. Most of the tourists prefer the second choice since it seems a lot more fun to do. Still, we opted for neither of the options. These initiatives are great for caring for the elephants. They help us understand them better. Nonetheless, we did not encourage them being displayed as props to entertain the tourists. That was our personal opinion and thus we gave it a miss.
Slots: Elephants come as a herd during bathing slots. They take a bath in the nearby Maha Oya River. It occurs twice a day. One slot is at 10 AM, and the other is at 2 PM. Each session usually lasts for around 2 hours.
Next, we had lunch at the nearby Pinna Wala Reach restaurant. The food and the views from the restaurant were awesome, but the prices were on the higher side. Since we had nothing else to do, we proceeded with our journey to Sigiriya. By the time we reached there, it was almost 7 in the evening. We were greeted with a delicious welcome drink at the hotel. We had our dinner (which was included in the package) and rested for the night. The real adventure was to start the next day with our climb to the mighty Sigiriya rock fortress.
Day 2 of our trip will be covered in the next post.
Points to note:
- Tour operator- Steeple tours
- No. of days: 6 days and 5 nights package
- Hotel at Sigiriya: Wewa Addara
- Entry ticket for Pinna Wala: Around 5000 LKR for adults
Travel Diary 