Hatton to Yala: behind Sri Lanka's wildlife curtain

We thread through the parakeet-green hills of Sri Lanka’s tea country in tight formation when our guide Rathnasingham stops in his tracks. In a beat, everyone’s heads tilt toward a rock face, fingers to lips, eyes saucer-wide. There, hanging, is a beehive the size of a small child, shimmering with hundreds of giant honey bees. Bigger, brawnier and far more volatile than anything you’ll find dawdling around a glass of lemonade. One twitch of threat, one blip in the queen’s mood, and the entire colony can erupt, rippling like a Mexican wave across the comb. If you don’t back off, they attack en masse. Get hit by enough of them and a tube of Savlon won’t touch the sides of your multiple organ failure.

Having travelled from one island nation to another, it becomes quickly apparent that Sri Lanka punches above its relatively small size when it comes to wildlife viewing. Travelling the length of the UK might yield a seal sighting in Norfolk, a deer crossing in Cumbria or a cocaine-eating pigeon in London, but by and large, it is an ecological slow burn. Yet, Sri Lanka somehow melds the natural wonders of India, Southeast Asia and Africa into one pocket-sized country. Step off the resort treadmill and you’ll find one of the world’s most biodiverse and spiritually complex islands.

However, remarkably, it’s possible to come here and miss all of it. My first few days on the island were spent at an all-inclusive hotel not far from Colombo watching a stream of sun-kissed (read: scorched) Brits at the dinner buffet breeze past clay pots of Sri Lankan curries, roti and sambol, loading plates high with pizza, chicken goujons and the regional speciality that is: a Greek salad. Having landed in paradise, many never step beyond the resort perimeter; their wildest encounter being a banana boat or an umbrella-topped cocktail.

Light floods through the main living room at Uga Halloowella

A women carries a sack of tea leaves walking along railway tracks captured on the Pekoe Trail

Christy Spring

Once liberated from the dystopian clutches of the all-inclusive, my week in Sri Lanka is spent travelling between sharply different landscapes with Uga, a Sri Lankan-owned hotel group. Firstly, to the highland tea estates of Hatton, then descending into the dun-coloured scrubland of Yala National Park, to see what wildlife waits beyond the poolside sunlounger.

Hatton

If you think parallel parking in London is a pearl-clutcher, try driving in Sri Lanka’s central highlands. To reach Hatton from Colombo, you climb thousands of feet through coiled, narrow roads that would make DVLA wet the bed: hairpins sharp enough to shave with and tuk-tuks passing each other with gaps as thin as a digestive biscuit. By the time you reach the town of Hatton itself, it’s not unusual to become reacquainted with your last meal, texturally.

The town of Hatton is a tangle of school children in starched white uniforms and technicolour tuk-tuks blasting bhangra (and sometimes an electronic rendition of Für Elise). Their dashboards are fringed in synthetic fur, saints, and sequins. One even has a bottle of arrack secured in a cupholder. You’d be forgiven for assuming driving these roads is easier with mild inebriation.

These are very different sights from those you'd catch on the country's well-trodden cultural triangle

We crawl higher into the clouds to Uga Halloowella. Once the bungalow of Major Elton Lane, a World War I fighter pilot for the British Royal Air Force, it is now a six-suite hotel designed by Channa Daswatte, the final protégé of Geoffrey Bawa, Sri Lanka’s most famous architect. Our welcome comes in the form of a pooja thali, a tray of oil lamps and tea leaf garlands and a blessing rooted in Hindu traditions. These hills, after all, are Tamil heartland – tea country carved out by British colonialists and tended since by generations of Tamil workers brought from South India.

You could spend your days at Uga Halloowella in a pleasant fug of hoppers and hot tea, but the real draw lies just beyond the gate – the Pekoe Trail. Sri Lanka’s first long-distance hiking route – 300 km stitching together a network of footpaths created when the British colonists established a tea-growing industry during the 19th century – was recently inducted into Time’s World’s Greatest Places list. It begins near Kandy, where James Taylor (not that one) planted the first tea seeds in the 1860s, and ends in the cool streets of Nuwara Eliya. Blessed with heroic stamina, you could attempt the whole thing, but most tackle it stage by stage – including us who lace up for stage seven.

The trail takes its name from the prized highland black tea picked mostly by women with superhuman posture, hauling sacks across hills striated with tea terraces. At weighing stations, their harvest is assessed by supervisors, nearly always men. But they’re not the only ones watching. In a shaded grove, Rathnasingham gestures to an offering beneath a tree: fruit laid before goddess Mariyamman, protector of the tea pickers. She’s one of three million deities in the Hindu pantheon and – importantly – a vegetarian. Elsewhere, Rathnasingham notes, gods with more carnivorous dietary requirements are plied with chicken.

You don’t have to squint hard to understand why this particular deity exists. The work is backbreaking. Pickers must gather around 13,000 leaves a day – about 20kg in total, for 600 rupees (or around £1.50). Fall on the steep terraces or wake up drained by leeches, and there’s no such thing as sick pay. It’s little surprise, Rathnasingham says, that in 15 years they expect machines to take over, as the younger generation bid adieu to Tetley in search of easier, better-paid work in cities.

Tea terraces walking along the Pekoe Trail

Christy Spring

We pull on plastic leech socks and carry on through taller vegetation, the trail slipping between iron-roofed villages and cricket games, past wild orchid-choked railways and porcupine quills. These are very different sights from those you’d catch on the country’s well-trodden cultural triangle – the trail shows you the country’s lesser-visited interior on a grassroots level, without a script or tour bus.

The sacred crest of Adam’s Peak punches the horizon, the curious depression at its verdant summit called Sri Pada just visible – rumoured to be the footprint of Buddha himself. Thunder belches somewhere behind the hills, quickening our pace, as three stray dogs lope past with the foolish expressions of animals unaware they’re the local leopards’ next petit déjeuner.

Inside a tea processing factory in Hatton

A women picks tea along the tea terraces in Hatton

Christy Spring

We don’t see any leopards on the trail – they’re solitary, nocturnal, and famously aloof. But that evening, back at Uga Halloowella, the resident naturalist Nissal calls us over. He flips open his laptop and begins playing black-and-white camera-trap footage. There’s a slinking mongoose, a barking deer, a pair of porcupines and a civet cat. Then the main event: two leopards – one male, one female – thick-pawed and heavy-coated, captured for the first time on separate clips just 250 metres from this bungalow. A very rare sighting in these highlands, Nissal tells us.

Yala

As mesmerising as the camera footage was, I’m hungry for a rare sighting not seen behind the LCD glare of a Toshiba. So, we head south to Yala National Park, home to the highest density of leopards per square kilometre on Earth. If there’s a location to spot big cats so prolific they’re practically tabbies, this is it. Getting there, though, is a different sort of safari.

The open-air bar at Uga Chena Huts sits in front of a starry sky at dusk in Yala National Park – its thatched roof inspired by the treetop huts used by local farmers in the region

While the hallmarks of most airports normally exist in the form of a £12 ham sandwich and a crossword magazine, there are none at this one. We descend past a vegetable patch heavy with gourds, clatter down a stone staircase, and find ourselves at a lake. Here, a man in a life jacket (air traffic control?) waves us toward a pontoon. The shape of a seaplane grows in the sky until it skims the water, sliding to our feet. This Cinnamon Air craft, with a luggage boot smaller than a Fiat 500’s glove box, is our Concorde substitute for the 30-minute hop to the southern wilds. If you think driving in Sri Lanka’s central highlands is a nerve-jangler, try taking a nine-seater seaplane.

The island's burgeoning ethical safaris are proving a lifeline for tourism and conservation alike

As the patchwork of tea terraces morphs into ochre scrubland, we touch down at the Weerawila airstrip, a stone’s throw from Uga Chena Huts and Area One of Yala National Park. Here, the boundary between hotel and habitat blurs, as a diverse clientele roam the grounds, including grey langur monkeys, green vine snakes and rock skink lizards. The cocoon-like huts, topped with rough, rattan roofs, provide the perfect back scratching posts, of which local elephants are known for ambling through the hotel’s grounds to get their hit of exfoliation.

Aerial shot of Yala National Park

While many flock to Tanzania’s Serengeti or Kenya’s Maasai Mara to tick off the big five, Sri Lanka’s safari credentials have long flown under the radar. Yet this island boasts 26 national parks – Yala being the first, covering 1.5% of the country’s entire landmass. Two thousand years ago, a Buddhist community settled here, carving watering holes, clearing forest for grazing, and building temples, leaving behind a landscape tailor-made for buffalo, sambar deer, and inevitably, their predators.

Had tourists not been kept away by two bruising decades – a civil war between the mainly Buddhist Sinhalese and the largely Hindu Tamil minority that ended in 2009, the 2004 tsunami, the 2019 Easter bombings, the 2022 economic crisis, and, of course, the pandemic – Sri Lanka’s safari scene would surely have had its moment in the sun. Now, with visitor numbers on the rise, the island’s burgeoning ethical safaris are proving a lifeline for tourism and conservation alike.

“Never bathe in the same spot twice,” our safari guide Niwan advises as we ease through Yala’s popular Area One in a safari jeep and pause by a watering hole. Just beneath the surface lurks a mud-caked mugger croc. “They study their prey for weeks before they strike.” These jurassic-looking things are about as hardy as it gets,  surviving two catastrophic events on this earth, outliving the dinosaurs, with an ability to slow down their hearts to a few beats per minute. They’re a common sighting on safaris, of which Yala National Park (rather alarmingly) houses the largest congregations of crocodiles in Sri Lanka. “Crocodiles can survive on one meal a year,” Niwan adds with a raffish smile.

Meanwhile, the elephants are on no such ration. They graze through around 25 meals a day. Consuming around 150kg of plants, about twice the weight of an average human. Sri Lanka’s Asian elephants – the world’s densest population – have historically been woven into the island’s art, architecture and spiritual life. Yet for all their cultural status, the tensions between people and pachyderms remain fraught. Despite the government’s best efforts to keep them contained in national parks, elephants roam far beyond the boundaries, often clashing with farmers, known to gorge on entire fields of rice like locusts. Firecrackers are commonly used to scare them off, explains Niwan, but the mouth injuries sustained often kill the elephants.

A solitary elephant cools down in a watering hole at Yala National Park

Christy Spring

Over two drives in Area One, I spot six elephants – two males trundling by the roadside, one bathing in a watering hole and a mother with two calves delicately twining their trunks around twigs. I also see more elephant dung than actual elephants – planet-sized pats that Niwan explains rangers analyse for stress levels. Apparently, elephants are as susceptible to depression and anxiety as any London commuter, and the park loses a fair few every year to these psychological issues.

If the mark of a good safari is a leopard sighting, don’t hold your breath; all I managed was a pawprint. However, the real magic of Yala lies in the supporting cast. There’s a knee-weakening selection of birds for avian enthusiasts from featherlight green bee-eaters and blue kingfishers to brahminy kites, hoopoes and the technicolour national bird of Sri Lanka – the jungle fowl. Even a good fifteen minutes spent at a watering hole watching the buffalo wallow in the shallows rivals the thrill of any banana boat excursion.

Leopard at Yala National Park

Back at Uga Chena Huts, Niwan coaxes us out of bed for a pre-dawn beach walk. Here, among the dark sand and quartz, he points out more remarkable instances of animals’ superhuman adaptations. We pause by the hatched remains of turtle shells, where newborns braved the sand to find the sea, guided back to this very beach each year by a built-in GPS system in their brains that relies on Earth’s magnetic field. The moment of wonder is tempered by a sighting of scattered wild boar bones, which Niwan says love to snack on baby turtles, as well as their own young. Mother of the year? Perhaps not.

Nature has a funny way of holding up a mirror, and as we plod through the sand, I can’t help but think back to the hive I stumbled upon on my first day – in many ways an apt reflection of Sri Lanka’s landscape and political past. Like the community of bees, this island and its people have spent decades navigating one threat after another: civil war, tsunami, bombings, economic crisis and pandemic. As the island rebuilds and reunites, and tourism reawakens, it feels as though the wildlife that has endured throughout the turmoil may be one of its greatest lifelines.