Are we still having fun?

17 December 2019

Phew! The guided wildlife watching part of our trip is done with! We put in a six hour night drive last night after arriving in Sigiriya, and tonight we put in a seven hour drive (curtailed when the heavens opened at 3:30am and we had to hurridly cover the jeep and chug back to our hotel through the downpour). No small cats. That’s after more than 24 hours total night spotlighting over 5 nights.

Lest that sound too downbeat, we did actually see 15 different mammals across our night drives, including a totally unexpected sighting of an otter fishing in a big reservoir at 2am. But… well… it’s probably hard to understand why we’d do this. It’s pretty hard to explain, too. It amounts to hours of staring into the dark countryside with a torch from the back of a bouncy jeep, punctuated by the occasional sighting. I mean, occasional like 2 or 3 in an hour. You could have a lovely meal and watch a great film in the same time.

I think it can only be explained by calling on the word “hobby”. It falls into the same category of question as: “why would you spend hours sitting on a river bank holding a rod with a fly on the end, when maybe nothing bites at all?” or “why would you spend hours standing on a railway bridge to enumerate the various trains passing by?” Maybe there’s even something slightly meditative about it. When you are night spotlighting, you think of nothing else, just the semi-hypnotic passage of the torch’s beam across the landscape in search of shining eyes.

Hmm. Still, I did say “phew!” at the top of this post. And it really does feel sometimes like we’re tetering on the brink of ditching this hobby – most often after a really disappointing and uncomfortable drive like this. Some folks are clearly absolutely passionate mammal-watchers and will do and endure almost anything for a “lifer” (a sighting of a mammal you’ve never seen before). A week in primitive camping conditions near-freezing in the Hindu Kush to spend day after day hoping for a glimpse of a snow leopard is the kind of stuff I mean. We’ll never do that. I honestly can’t say how long we’ll even do these kind of trips. 24 hours and 5 nights of spotlighting for probably 5 genuinely cool glimpses of mammals? The otter, the slender loris, the first palm civet, the proper view of a ring-tail civet, the unexpected bicolour spiny mouse, that’s probably just about it for real “oh cool” moments. Aren’t there more interesting and pleasant things we could do with our precious days and nights of exotic travel?

The tone of this post might be a bit influenced by how tired and damp I feel. Nevertheless, I will refer back to this text next time we plan a mammal watching holiday!

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