4 Reasons Why You NEED To Go With A Tracker In Yala National Park
Yala is a small town on the southern coast of Sri Lanka and it’s best known for being home to the world-famous Yala National Park. The park is certainly the country’s most popular national park and it’s easy to see why; elephants, sloth bears, leopards and an innumerable amount of birds dwell within this shrub-jungle. The wide variety of exotic wildlife ensures that you’ll have a great game drive, but to take it to the next level you should go with a tracker or naturalist, who can explain the ins and outs of the jungle. Hotels like Wild Coast Tented Lodge send one of their resident naturalists on game drives with their guests, taking the safari from great to phenomenal. Here are 4 reasons why you should not pass on going with an experienced tracker when exploring Yala.
1. Safety
Safety is of the utmost importance when you’re visiting Yala or any other national park in general. Unlike safari parks in Africa which are largely made up of grassland, Yala mainly consists of dry shrub jungle and dusty trails. Most of the trails are lined with foliage with a few gaps of wide-open spaces and watering holes. When entering the wild there are things that can go wrong, and naturalists know exactly what to do IF there’s an emergency and that in itself is a comfort. One great tip that only trackers know is that if an elephant charges towards you or takes a threatening stance, while most tend to just rev their jeeps to scare off the elephants, you can actually make a sound to ward them off.
2. Routes Off The Beaten Path
As previously mentioned, Yala is Sri Lanka’s most popular national park out of its other 21! Most visitors to the island flock to this park, as do most locals. While this enthusiasm in wildlife is a great thing to have, it also, unfortunately, means that the park gets a lot of safari jeeps on a daily basis and in fact, there are sometimes traffic jams! Trackers know all the routes away from the crowds, allowing you to get a more intimate experience of this bustling park.
3. The Jungle Doesn’t Get Lost On You
For a regular person, after we’ve seen a few deer, some elephants, monkeys, crocodiles and (hopefully) a leopard, we’d think we had had a good safari. However, there’s so much that we wouldn’t know about the jungle, which would be lost on us if we didn’t have a tracker. For instance, the season to spot sloth bears is from May to June which coincides with the palu trees (Manilkara hexandra), a plant which produces a sweet fruit. What’s actually interesting about this fruit is that once the bears eat it, the palu fruit ferments in their stomachs, resulting in a few sloth bears wandering drunkenly around the park!
4. Tracking
Finally, trackers are the best at… tracking! The untrained eye can miss out on many things, but this talented group of men and women have a deep appreciation for nature and they can spot even the smallest thing. While you might be keeping your eyes peeled to spot an elephant, at the same time a naturalist would have spotted a Sri Lankan grey hornbill, or something similar. These naturalists not only know the park like the back of their hand, but they are also very familiar with its inhabitants and have built a relationship of sorts with the animals. Due to this, the trackers are (almost) able to predict where an animal is going to be at a certain point during the day and get you there.
Ultimately, trackers know Yala from the inside out and they truly love the park and its animals. When you go on a game drive with them, you can see their passion for wildlife and this deep appreciation will make you more experience of the park even better.