Minneriya National Park
The famous ‘Elephant Gathering’ in Minneriya National Park, where herds numbering in their hundreds congregate around one of the region’s last remaining dry season watering holes, is certainly a spectacular sight and naturally one of Sri Lanka’s most popular tourist destinations. There are few remaining places on the planet where you can get up close to what, at peak times of the year, may be herds of 200 to 300 of the endangered creatures, so of course, it’s high up on anyone’s Sri Lanka bucket list.
Peak season for Minneriya Lake (or Tank as these features are known colloquially*) is typically from May to September when herds from several adjacent national parks migrate into the area in search of water, although during most months of the year, large numbers can still be sighted.
At some 90 square kilometres, the National Park is, however, one of Sri Lanka’s smaller ones (compared to Wilpattu’s 1,300 for example OR 1,000 at Yala). Just a solitary entrance for foreign visitors features the ticket office, its corresponding queues and a car park full of safari jeeps awaiting customers. That’s the first issue and on a busy day, this inevitable choke-point can seem rather off-putting. On our most recent (daybreak) visit to the aforementioned Wilpattu National Park, we were second in a line of a grand total of three jeeps, at Minneriya, it could be at least a dozen or more.
Jeep queue at the Park entrance While, in an ideal world, turning up at Minneriya at 6.00 am would avoid that problem, experience has shown us that there is a limit to the number of pre-dawn starts we can schedule on any given 2-week tour. Our Island of Serendipity tour already feature pre-dawn starts for Horton Plains National Park and the ascent of World Heritage Sigiriya. (Indeed, the latter early start is on the day immediately preceding Minneriya.)
From the entrance and car park, it’s a short drive to Minneriya Tank, and conveniently for the jeep operators and most of the visitors, the elephants appear to favour the lakeside grasslands on the western side, closest to the park entrance. This prime photo spot forms the second choke point. You have the shallow, muddy lake waters, 100 to 200 metres of grassland (depending upon water levels) paralleled by the dirt track lined with safari jeeps, behind which is the forest. Frankly, in our experience, most of the grazing and bathing elephants – plus the playing babies – appear completely oblivious to all the vehicles and visitors. We suppose they just get used to it; however, it can’t be ideal and problems can occur.
The babies playing in Minneriya National Park have never known anything other than a row of jeeps Obviously, a mother who gets separated from her baby is cause for serious problems, while we’ve seen individuals become irate if their group is hindered by jeeps while crossing the track between forest and lake. There are reports of injuries to animals caused by vehicles as well as aggressive behaviour by elephants.
Lakeside jeep track at Minneriya As is often the case with wildlife spotting and national parks, it’s inevitably a matter of compromise. Crowds of birders surrounding a hornbill nest, boatloads of tourists heading straight into schools of dolphins or whales or would-be snorkellers trampling over coral are far from ideal either. However, if we want governments and local residents to create and respect national parks, as well as protect the parks’ flora and fauna, there has to be an incentive. Although there have been regrettable incidents, Sri Lanka’s parks do provide safe havens for thousands of elephants and parks such as Minneriya provide employment and income for hundreds of local families. As we said… it’s all about compromise.
Mothers and babies at Minneriya National Park We would also point out that the lake, or tank, is huge and indeed comprises a large chunk of the overall national park’s area and while the herds do congregate on the western side, they are of course free to roam anywhere. Predictably, the majority of visitors park-up on arrival, get their ellie photos and head back to the park gate while naturally most of the guides and drivers would prefer to spend as little time and petrol as necessary to comply with their job description, however, there are the remaining 80 or so square kilometres to explore and jeep tracks do run around the entire circumference of the lake.
The labyrinth of lakeside tracks makes it easy to escape the crowds – if you so wish A short drive off the main drag and you’ll find the vast majority of vehicles and visitors have suddenly disappeared. There’s still plenty of elephants about – perhaps the shier ones that prefer to avoid crowds – while there’s plenty of other wildlife about including leopards, langurs, jackals and sambur deer while the lake and adjacent mudflats are home to crocodiles as well as numerous bird species such as pelicans, storks and ibises.
Pelicans and cormorants are just a few of the bird species that frequent the lake On our small group Sri Lanka tours we’re lucky as obviously we have contact details for our regular driver/guides, but even so, just explain what you’d like to do and see and add a bit on to the bill or make it clear a decent tip will be forthcoming along with a good review for their FB page. (It does help them.)
*The huge lake actually began life as a man-made reservoir during the 3rd century CE reign of King Mahasen.
