Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary – In search of wild elephants – By Zoe

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We arrived in Sultan Batheri after 4 hours on the bus driving through what we now know to be coffee plantations. An auto ride to our hotel and then dramas – Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary is closed – it closed the day before we arrived and our hotel forgot to let us know. It took us a little while to figure out why it was closed, but we finally found out that there is a lot of bamboo growing in Wayanad and every 30 – 40 years or so, the bamboo dries out and dies, this leaves a huge fire danger risk, so they decided to close the sanctuary for a month.…Brettie was a little cross and I was pretty disappointed. We had come here in the hope of seeing some wild elephants. We decided to leave Sultan Batheri a day earlier than we had planned, called our accommodation in Kannur and made sure that we could stay with them an extra night but nevertheless we decided to go on a few little trips to see the area. We had settled into our hotel, biscuits with vegemite on them for afternoon tea and cricket on the TV, then there was a knock on the door. Suneer (the manager) asked if we wanted to see some elephants, I said yes (thinking that he was going to tell us about some tour that we could go on) he said well come on then there are some on the side of the road. So off we went, cameras in hand and we saw about four elephants on the side of the road! Pretty cool! Suneer also showed us a big field of palm trees that the elephants had pushed over about a month ago. People dig trenches around the villages in order to stop the elephants getting into their crops and destroying the houses but this didn’t seem to have worked on this occasion, but I think in general it does. Excited about our elephant spotting, we were a lot happier about being in Wayanad. Dinner and then bed. (Interesting fact #1: if you see an elephant by itself or a herd of elephants with a baby, be careful they are much more likely to attack you).

The next day we had our breakfast and were all ready to go to the Edakal Caves and some waterfalls. After a discussion with Suneer we decided to go on the walking elephant finding tour that afternoon and go to the caves the next day. So with time to spare before our walking tour we caught the local bus into Sultan Batheri, wandered around there for a while, got some supplies, had a delicious pineapple juice and then headed back to the hotel. More cricket was watched before we headed out to find elephants! Suneer and another guy, Navee took us on our walking tour through another park close by to the hotel. We walked around for a little while, then we saw elephants really close by, kinda scared me a bit especially when Suneer told us that elephants ran faster up hill (and of course we were standing up hill from the herd of elephants). We saw about 5 elephants, I think that I could have walked right past them and not realised that they were there they were so well camouflaged. After chasing them around for a while, Navee and I got scared by a bush hen. At one point Brett and Suneer crept down for a closer look at the elephants. Navee and I enjoyed being alive so we waited for them a bit further back and then all of a sudden then elephants took off up the hill away from us (interesting fact #2: elephants run faster up hill than down hill, they are a bit too heavy to run as quickly down hill). Needless to say it took us about 10 minutes to walk up this hill that had taken the elephants 5 seconds to run up. Walked around for a bit longer, saw some strange animal which Navee said was a tree dog (looked more like a squirrel) and then we headed back to the hotel. Dinner, cricket and bed.

The next day we met two English girls Hannah and Jessica who were staying at the hotel and we all went to the Edakal Caves – all about keeping costs down! To get to the caves we took a jeep and then walked about 1km up to get to the caves, two of them, one on top of the other. They had carvings in the rock which were about 3000 years old. Pretty ancient. There were also really nice views of Wayanad. We then headed back to Sultan Batheri for lunch, then back to the hotel for a sleep and more cricket before we headed out for our night safari. We saw a hut that was built on top of a bunch of bamboo trees, people apparently stay up there day and night to keep an eye out for fires. Brett and Jessica climbed the dodgy looking bamboo ladder up to the hut to have a look. Hannah (who was more scared of heights than I was) and I decided to stay on the ground. We drove along the road for a while seeing a couple of elephants in the fading sunlight and feeling a little disappointed about the Night Safari. Once it was dark we weren’t really able to see anything because they only had the headlights of the car to spot elephants. We stopped at a police check point into Karnataka and got pretty confused because we thought the police wanted to see our passport when really what they wanted was a coin from our country. We decided to head back to the hotel. Then the driver spotted a herd of about 6-8 elephants, this time with a little baby in the midst! How he did this I have no idea, it was pretty dark. I was glad that we had gone on the Night Safari, so worth seeing a little baby elephant! Dinner, cricket (of course) and then bed.

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Photos

Our first group of wild elephants
These were on the side of the road!

Our second group of wild elephants
These we found on our walking tour

One of the many clumps of bamboo
These stopped us going into Wayanad

Brett climbing up the bamboo ladder
To the hut sitting on top of the bamboo trees....

Comments

[SaajKerala]

strange 'treedog'
The strange 'treedog' will probably be an 'Asian Palm Civet' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Palm_Civet).In Malayalam (language of Kerala) it is called 'Marapatti' which literally means 'Treedog'. :D Hope you enjoyed your trip to our beautiful Kerala.Have a nice journey!!!