What day is it?

13 December 2019… probably

Long flight days are always confusing. Taking off from London on a cold Thursday afternoon. Arrive in Doha and it’s dark and apparently midnight, and we take off at 2am. Bag of cheap crisps for £3 – they take airport snacks to a new level of rip off here! And then we land in Colombo in the sun and it’s 9:30am again. But back home it’s 4am which explains why we fall asleep on the drive north to Wilpattu, our first wildlife destination.

So waking up at the national park entrance is like starting a new day. Our guide Diluk thought it best to go straight from the airport onto a game drive, to make the most of the afternoon. So we wake up at 2pm (8:30am) and climb into a safari truck and bounce our way into the forest.

At 6:30pm (1pm?) we clean our teeth for the first time in something-de-something hours, at 7:30pm (2pm?) we have dinner back at our tented lodge, reviewing the wildlife we’ve seen – eight species of mammal already and lots of birds – and then we’re ready to go on a night drive in search of nocturnal species from which we get back at 12:30am (7pm?!) in order to grab 4 hours sleep before we’re up at 5:30am (midnight!) for our morning game drive!

On the morning game drive the promised leopards and sloth bears prove tricky and Diluk, who is very determined, turns it into an all-day game drive. We are about to get really quite grumpy about what seems like an interminable day of rattling our damp bones around an empty park (it rained torrentially for an hour at midday and it didn’t all stay out of the truck!) when a leopard appears – at 2pm (8:30am!). We see our sloth bear a couple of hours later, and so our epic twelve hour game drive is a triumph. Completely exhausting and butt-numbing triumph. Given we only stopped for a 20 minute breakfast and a 30 minute rain break, our driver’s stamina is the most amazing thing.

So it’s 6pm (12:30pm) again and time for dinner before another night drive. Like the game drive, this drags on without much luck but on this occasion we call it after 3+ hours. After all, Diluk himself is nodding off asleep at his spotlight. It’s past 1am (only 7:30pm!) by the time we crawl into bed, and next morning we are having a lie-in and no activities! Of the past 54 hours we have spent 14 of them in planes and airports and 19 of them in a safari truck. And not enough of them asleep.

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