The engine stops. Your tracker raises one hand, and the jeep falls silent. For a long moment there is nothing: just the hum of insects, the smell of dust and sun-dried grass, and the feeling of your own heart beating faster. Then a langur monkey barks a warning from the trees. And another. Your tracker smiles without turning around. “She is close,” he whispers.
Yala National Park lies in Sri Lanka’s dry south-east corner, where scrub jungle meets lagoons and the Indian Ocean. Its first block has one of the highest densities of leopards anywhere on Earth. But a leopard is still a leopard. It sees you long before you see it, and it shows itself only when it chooses.
The art of waiting
This is the secret nobody tells you about safari: the waiting is the best part. While you wait, you notice everything. A crocodile sliding into the lagoon without a ripple. A family of wild boar trotting across the track. A peacock, absurdly beautiful, displaying for no one at all. Elephants wading through a waterhole, the smallest calf staying close to its mother’s legs.
We would rather you miss a sighting than see a leopard surrounded by thirty jeeps.
And then it happens. A flick of a tail on a rock. A shape in the branches that wasn’t there before. She steps out of the undergrowth, golden and unhurried, looks straight at you for one long second, and walks away into the trees as if you were never there. You will remember that look for the rest of your life.
Not every drive brings a leopard, and that is part of the magic. What every drive does bring is the feeling of being somewhere truly wild, and of being lucky enough, for a few hours, to be allowed inside it.
