Maduru Oya National Park

The endless valleys of Wuthering Heights came in to my mind, the minute I entered the park. There were green pastures filled with wild flowers as far as the eye can see with mountains in the background.

In this sleepy park where not a lot of visitor venture into, we saw about 200 spotted deer with one, out of this world deer who was insanely beautiful. Unfortunately I only had a pocket digital camera with me to take pictures at the time & couldn't get a good zoom in.

There were supposed to be about 600 - 700 wild elephants in the park & surprisingly we saw only one single elephant. This could be due to two reasons. A couple of days ago, there had been a small earthquake inside the park & the animals must have run away to the deeper parts of the jungle or the elephants could have migrated to the nearby Wasgamuwa National Park, in search of water during this dry season.

From inside the park, one could proceed to Dambana, the village of the forest dwellers of Sri Lanka - the Veddhas. However the bridge is said to be in a bad condition which needs to be crossed in order to reach Dambana.

"The Crossing" of Elephants is said to happen in the Maduru Oya water tank as well!! Another very good reason to visit Maduru Oya National Park once again to investigate on this.