Up Close with Elephants and Tea Plants in Sri Lanka

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I’m in a souped-up safari SUV in a Sri Lankan national park, and a couple of car lengths away, a female elephant and her baby are pulling plants from the ground and eating them. I’m close enough to hear them chewing.

This was on my bucket list: seeing elephants in their natural habitat. But I had no idea how amazing it would be to sit quietly and watch them go about their day.

My trip, with the adventure travel company G Adventures, took me through central and southern Sri Lanka, a teardrop-shaped island situated off the tip of India.

Elephants at Udawalawe National Park

When we first arrived at Udawalawe National Park in southern Sri Lanka, our SUV drove around for a while before we saw any wildlife—first, colorful birds and a chameleon. After more driving along the dusty dirt roads, we stopped at a large clearing where several elephants were gathered in the distance. My tour group jumped out, excited to watch them.

The elephants were walking leisurely with each other, adults gently herding calves. It was interesting to watch them interact with each other, but they were pretty far away. I wasn’t sure if we’d get to see any more elephants.

But later, our driver saw the mother and calf in the brush, just off the road, and pulled over. We sat there and watched, close enough to see the elephants’ eyes looking at us.

Watching them eat was fascinating. They kicked the plants at their roots to loosen them, curled their trunks around to pull them out, and gently shook the dirt off before eating them. The mother elephant also tugged larger leaves off trees and folded them into her mouth.

The mother looked over at us occasionally, aware of the distance between us and her calf, who seemed to know to stick closer to her than to us. I could have stayed there watching those two elephants all day, but we eventually moved on through the park.

At the edge of a lake, we saw a wide expanse of wildlife: dozens of elephants, water buffalo, and spotted deer, plus some crocodiles, herons, and raptors. I had never seen anything like it.

Orphaned Elephants

The next day, we visited the nearby Elephant Transit Home, which takes care of orphaned elephants until they’re ready to be released into the wild. From a seating area for visitors, we watched their feeding time: They are let into the feeding enclosure a few at a time, and they come in running, some of them trumpeting. They’re fed milk through large tubes that look like beer bongs.

The orphans’ rehabilitation process usually takes a few years. We watched dozens of elephants being fed, including some tiny ones. I wondered why there were so many.

Our G Adventures guide, Prabash, explained that part of the reason is a conflict between people and elephants, due to the country’s dense population. In some areas, elephants are confined to national parks with electric fencing, but they sometimes get out and destroy farmers’ crops. This sometimes ends in people killing elephants or elephants killing people.

For tourists enamored with elephants, this may be hard to stomach, but our reality is not the same as the reality of an island nation with finite space for elephants and people.

The Elephant Transit Home’s work to prepare orphans to re-enter their natural habitat is admirable, and I’m glad I got to witness it.

Read More: Journey Through Tembe Elephant Park: A Community of Wildlife Conservation

Moving through Sri Lanka

Our trip started in the beach town of Negombo, on the west coast. There, I waded ankle-deep into the Indian Ocean for the first time, alongside a busload of kids playing at the water’s edge.

We ate our first Sri Lankan meal: “vegetable curry,” which included spicy eggplant and three other vegetarian dishes, all of them tasty and with their own flavor. Some of it was similar to Indian curry, but not the same.

After Negombo, we headed inland to the city of Kandy, where we visited the historic Buddhist Temple of the Tooth. Buddha statues, large and small, are plentiful around this mostly Buddhist country.

At an overlook in Kandy, we saw a huge Buddha statue high on a hill in the distance, and Prabash told us that if we went there, we could climb up the back of it—he told us where to find the staircase. We couldn’t say no to that, so we hired a tuk-tuk driver, who zoomed up the winding hill to the temple.

After visiting the temple area, we found the staircase out back, open to the public but not visible from the front. We climbed up, stopping to admire the view at each level. All the way at the top, we were level with the statue’s ear and had a unique view of the city.

My husband and I also wandered the dense city on our own, exploring the market. A merchant who had helped us hail our tuk-tuk earlier spotted us and showed us around the shops, telling us he was happy we wanted to visit the market, because not many tourists do. It’s usually the local people who go there to buy their produce and spices, he said.

Each time a merchant greeted us and asked where we were from, they seemed surprised that we were Americans, because they don’t get many American visitors. My husband and I were the only Americans in our group—the rest were from the U.K., Australia, and Canada.

Ceylon Tea

In the 1960s, when Sri Lanka was called Ceylon, it was the top tea exporter in the world. On the drive to the highlands of Ella, we passed several tea plantations and stopped at one.

Prabash told us this would be an immersive experience where he’d put us to work, but we didn’t know what that meant.

When we hopped out of the van, we were each handed a basket the size of a small hamper, with straps on it. We were to strap the baskets to our backs and pick tea leaves, competing to see who could pick the most. We learned how to do it: to pick only the soft, light-green leaves at the tips of the thigh-high plants. Those are the youngest leaves, and the thicker, darker green ones don’t make good tea.

Workers crisscrossed the plantation with full baskets and bushels. Picking the tea leaves turned out to be much harder than it looked. Finding the right leaves was a challenge, and bending over to check the plants was hard work.

When our time was up, we compared baskets, and the apparent winner was disqualified for picking too many darker leaves. The next-biggest bunch won the challenge, and we learned how difficult it is to pick any significant amount of the right leaves.

We also toured the factory, following the tea leaves through each stage of the production process.

An Organic Tea Estate

Our next destination was an organic tea farm with guest houses called Amba Estate. When we arrived, it was a tropical paradise. Lush plants and trees lined the drive and surrounded the buildings.

Amba Estate is a working farm with a mission to increase economic opportunities for the local people. It shares 10% of its profits with its staff.

The staff cooked us some of the best food I’ve ever eaten, all of it either from the farm or locally sourced. Some of the dairy products that we ate came from Amba’s cows, all of them rescued.

Amba plants thousands of trees every year. A partnership between G Adventures and Planeterra has planted 18,000 trees at Amba, some that produce food and others that are indigenous varieties.

One staff member led us on an 11-mile hike through the jungle between one town and another, flitting up and down the rocky hills with far more ease than our group. We covered a lot of beautiful ground on that hike, stopping at overlooks to trace the path we’d walked.

When we got back to Amba, we showered and showed up at the kitchen for a cooking demonstration. The chef waiting for us was also our guide on the hike. Prabash explained that he’s a skilled guide but also an excellent chef.

He showed us how to make two of the dishes we had eaten throughout our trip: coconut sambol (like a shaved coconut salad that’s often spicy), and dhal curry (lentils), a demonstration that included how to crack a coconut, use the coconut milk, and scrape out the insides. It was delicious. We also had a tea tasting and learned about different varieties.

The estate seemed to be everyone’s favorite spot on the trip. Some of our other accommodations were also beautiful, but this place, where the staff are clearly dedicated and appreciated, was special.

Learning about a Different Culture

Like any developing country, Sri Lanka is not without its problems. A long civil war ended in 2009, and more recently, the country endured terrorism that ended in 2019, all of which caused economic hardship. But the country has been rebuilding and is generally considered safe to travel to now.

As an American woman, I noticed a gender divide in the people we encountered: Most of the people who engaged with us were men, with women staying mostly quiet and in the background. Notable exceptions were the woman who led our tour at the large tea plantation and the women we met at Sthree Craft Shop and Café, a women-led social enterprise in Kandy.

Our up-close view of the tea industry was eye-opening, and the difference between the large tea factory and the organic farm was stark.

Prabash explained social and cultural practices that were unfamiliar to our group. I noticed that he and others we met often did a fluid, sideways wag of their head, neither a “yes” nod nor a back-and-forth “no.” I asked him what it meant, and he said it could mean a few things—yes, maybe, OK, or something else.

Along with the highlights above, we also visited a gorgeous botanic garden and a gem museum, where we learned how the country’s mining industry protects workers by keeping operations small scale. We visited an old Dutch fort at Galle, which is a UNESCO heritage site, and watched traditional fishing practices on the beach at Unawatuna.

Sri Lanka contains a wealth of natural beauty and fascinating culture.

If You Go

The only way to get to Sri Lanka is by air—there’s no boat option. Sri Lanka’s main airport is Bandaranaike International Airport (CMB), which is about 30 km from Colombo, the largest city in the country.

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Author Bio: Allison Torres Burtka is a freelance writer and editor based in Michigan. Her writing has been published in National Geographic, Outside, Lonely Planet’s Epic Runs of North America, Sierra, National Wildlife Magazine, Audubon Magazine, Parents, Well+Good, EatingWell, and other publications.