Yala National Park - the Nice Animals

As if I don't have a dozen things I'm working on now, but I'm going to start to make a concerted effort to get caught up on some of my foreign travel pictures and posts. One of the best days from last spring's student trip to India and Sri Lanka was the day we spent at the Yala National Park in southern Sri Lanka.  We drove around for hours in jeeps checking out the beasties, and it was pretty amazing.  I have to give props to my most excellent friend Cyndi for finding out about the and doing the research.  I normally get abuse for my seeming hesitancy to include "nature shit" on the trips, although in Zanzibar I'm the one who browbeats Steve into include swimming with dolphins.  On the Yala trip we saw seventeen elephants, some only a couple feet away, and that was extraordinary.  The park also has a big population of leopards, but, not surprisingly they're much harder to find. I think of all the animals we saw in Yala the ones I liked the best were the iguanas, who seemed clearly to be up to no good (or maybe I'm just thinking about old Jonny Quest episodes).  The next to last picture below was of an iguana climbing down out of a tree where it had gone in search of bird eggs.  One of the birds was dive bombing him on the head so he gave up and headed out.

Next time I'll post some pictures of the more troublesome animals - my students.