Our bird watching began today, so it was an early start, 6am pick-up.
The high priority this morning was Flamingos, a must have for Deb. With her good camera primed for the occasion we set out on a bird hunt, shooting only with a camera.
We left just before 6am, a very quiet car, I think everyone is still waking. A naturalist from our hotel joined us to share his local knowledge.
At 6:20 we were in the sanctuary, our naturalist and Hiru got out of our car and went to look for Flamingos. Sadly there weren’t any to be seen.
Sri Lanka has the largest flamingos, they come from India with a wing span of up to 1.9m
While we didn’t see any flamingos we did see a good variety of birds. We saw Painted Storks, Caspian Terns, Black Winged Stilts, Pelicans and others. Because there were no flamingos in the sanctuary, we moved on to causeway.
The flamingos usually feed in sanctuary primarily at night, and rest in the causeway area during the day. At this time of year there are 2000 to 3000 flamingos in this area. They gather in flocks of 300+. These numbers rise dramatically in March
It wasn’t long before we had flamingos, about 2km away from land along the causeway, there about 1000 in the group.
We drove on again and soon found another flock, maybe 1km from shore. There were 200 to 300 in this second group. We watched them for a while, also taking in a couple of local prawn fishermen going about there work.
We got back to our hotel at 8:15am and had breakfast. Our next outing is at 2:45pm, it gets extremely warm here in the middle of the day, so the plan was to do our exploring after the peak of the heat.
In the break we sorted out our Maldives inbound paperwork and Deb looked at restaurants for Malaysia, and sorted through here photos. It’s a bit sad we are starting to plan that far ahead already.
Our afternoon started with a visit to see the dwarf baobab tree, the largest of its kind in Sri Lanka, measuring 20.8m in circumference. It is one of many large baobab trees in the area. We got to hug the big one. It had a very gnarly trunk, so many nooks and crannies. For some reason there was a Catholic statue up against its trunk, we didn‘t ask why but it just looked out of place.
Next we went to the Thirukethiswaran kovil, an ancient Hindu temple. It is one of five ancient coastal kovils build along the coastal perimeter of Sri Lanka, together they are called the Pancha Ishwarams. They are all dedicated to the Hindu supreme being Ishawara, the supreme Hindu in the form of Lord Shiva. To enter the temple males are required to remove their shirts, a sign of respect. The same requirement wasn’t placed on females. We all had to wear a cloth to cover our legs (even if you were wearing long trousers), and bare feet were another requirement. There was a feisty older woman at the entrance ensuring everyone followed the rules, no one was getting past her doing the wrong thing! The temple is a typically colourful Hindu temple, taken to another level. Fresh vibrant colour was everywhere , the outside was particularly colourful, inside was a bare stone space with strategically place icons of the faith and the internal perimeter was a series of enclosed alters to various Hindu Gods, the doors on many were closed, only being open on specific days. It was a really interesting visit.
Driving back from the temple to the Dutch Fort we saw two large groups of flamingos a long way from shore, they look like floating white rafts from a distance. Once you know what they look like its very easy to spot them.
The Dutch Fort is almost 500 years old. Over the years it has been occupied by the Portuguese(built the fort in 1560), Dutch 1658 (they rebuilt the fort i. 1696) and British colonial forces in1795 after the Dutch surrendered. It has seen better days, but is currently undergoing major repairs and restoration. Unfortunately, the restorations are removing the old historic essence of the fort. The old untouched parts of the fort have so much character and historic presence to them.
We arrived at the Thalaimannar Pier ( aka the bridge to India) around 5pm. It was the location of a car ferry service between Sri Lanka and India. The service was stopped and the pier abandoned in 1984. It was also where the railway to India used to exist up until 1964 when it was destroyed by a cyclone. The railway line now terminates just before the water, but it doesn’t look like it gets much use these days. The pier is a rusting decayed relic of the past. It wont be long before the ocean claims it, it is already blocked off from public access. We were going to stay and watch sunset from the Pier but a large storm started rolling in from the ocean. We just made it back to the car before the rain hit.
We got back to our hotel a bit before 6pm, giving us a little time to freshen up before dinner.
#retiredlyf done our way.
Catch our photo blog here: https://www.facebook.com/Greganddebstravelblog?mibextid=ZbWKwL
Number of Views :80