Colombo, Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka Day 2 Today we spent a lot of hours on the bus. We probably passed some beautiful scenery, but I am not sure because I slept most of the 5 and a half hour trip. That’s what I do best in buses (and don’t worry, I think my sister slept 6 or 7 hours of the 5 and a half hour trip). What was our goal? The holy grail for thetwinsontour! Elephants! Sri Lankan Elephants! We got to go on an afternoon game drive. Of course we loved it! Everyone knows that thetwinsontour love safari game drives. The park just has elephants and birds, but we did also see a large heard of buffalo that we thought were elephants when we first glimpsed them on the horizon. We also saw an eagle and a peacock, but enough about that. Let’s get to the amazing elephants! They were just standing around in this big field waiting to get their pictures taken. Lots of them. Our guide said that there were about 180 of them. I’ll have to take his word for it. I was too busy taking millions of pictures from every angle to stop and count the elephants. It was the most amazing thing ever, and our first safari experience outside of Africa. There are about 500 elephants in the park, so we didn’t get to see all of them which is disappointing. There are several parks here in the area, and the elephants move around following the water. They are in this park very early due to a light monsoon season. Sri Lankan Elephants only like clean water (Can you blame them?) and do not appreciate when the buffalo stomp through the smaller pools of water and get it all muddy. So when the water gets muddy in the other parks they come to this adjacent park because it has a giant reservoir of clean water. Do not worry! There is no poaching in Sri Lanka. In Sri Lanka, only the male elephants have tusks. And only 7% of the male elephants have tusks. Now I am going to do some crazy math calculations here, just for the fun of it. Assuming equal birth and death rates of male and female elephants, that means 50% or 250 elephants in the park are male. Now if I break out my calculator, that means 17.5 elephants in this particular park have tusks. I have no idea how long it takes to grow a decent set of tusks, but for the sake of argument, I am going to say 20 years. We did see a young adolescent in the group with tusks, but they were very short and only visible when he raised his trunk to eat. So they do take a while to grow. There were a lot of young elephants, so it is safe to say that 30-40% of those tuskers are still growing the tusks out. So 10-12 are still growing their tusks. Which means that of the 500 elephants in the park, 5-7 of them have tusks. So poaching for ivory to sell to the Chinese is just not feasible. Hence, the Sri Lankan Elephants are safe from the evil poachers that are wreaking havoc on the African elephant populations. Thetwinsontour hate poachers! Anyways, as can be expected, we took a lot of pictures. I took 750, and I do not know how many my sister took, but it’s safe to assume that it is a lot. And guess what! We get to go on Safari again in just a few days! Get ready for more elephant pictures! Love, Thetwinsontour