Come World Environment Day...
 

BY ADITHA Dissanayake

OFF to Wilpattu to camp at Kudrimalai, to have an inkling of life in the stone ages, building bonfires, sleeping out of doors, using the jungle as a bathroom.

It takes four hours on a Saturday morning from Colombo to reach the turning point to the Wilpattu National park at the 28th Mile post at Thimbiriwewa, in a much battered, old, but immensely reliable Isuzu trooper.

There are eight of us, including the tracker, Ajith, who joins us at the park office at Hunuwilagama. All of us, carrying a backpack each with our mobile phones voluntarily switched off are old enough to have a credit card in our wallets, but young enough to be impulsive and plunge into the unknown regardless of the consequences.

Thus the choice of Kudrimalai the furthest point from the park office, as our campsite sans grumbling adults, sans water, sans any kind of camping paraphernalia and disconcertingly sans bathrooms.

Everyone who enters Wilpattu has one intention in mind to catch a glimpse of a leopard. But according to Ajith, this is wrong. "You must never enter the jungle with the sole aim of seeing leopards", cautions Ajith.

"If you do you will never see one. I was with a group last week who wanted to see only leopards and after four days of searching went back without seeing a single one". Upon this advice we convince ourselves that the last thing we want to see is a leopard.

Who wants to see panthera pardus fusca, anyway, when we get to see enough of his kinsmen,(the pussycats) back at home? But lo and behold, the moment we do so, hardly before we had spent an hour inside the park, a leopard runs across the road, yards away from the jeep.

And, as if to make-up for those who had missed him the first time he appears again ten minutes later and walks back and forth in front of us as if to say "take a good look" before disappearing into the thick undergrowth. The grin on Ajith's face is worth a photograph. His theory had worked. Convince yourself you don't want to see leopards and you see plenty.

After this flash of luck, everything else, though interesting, turns out less exciting. Ajith shows us the main topographical feature in the park the "villus" which look like lakes but are in reality basin like depressions on the surface of the earth, filled with rain-water.

Traveling from one villu to another, through the thick jungle made up of trees identified by Ajith as satin, ebony, weera and palu, with its lush green undergrowth, it is hard not to imagine we are in the Sherwood forest and that Robin and his Merry Men might jump on us at any moment.

"Is this a virgin forest?"

"Virgin what?'

"Virgin forest?"

"How would I know?"

"Shhhh. If you want to observe wildlife keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut"

Dead silence. Only the sound of the jeep is heard, for three seconds. Then, "Look.

Look. There is a yellow bird on that tree, on that branch right in front of you"

"A black headed oriole"

"Only a black headed oriole? I see them everyday from my window back at home"

"Shhh when you are in the jungle keep your eyes and ears open..."

"AND YOUR MOUTHS SHUT" comes the sound of seven voices in unison .

There are copper red sand dunes close to Kudrimalai and plenty of dry wood to light a bonfire. According to Ajith, Kudriamalai was once a port where horses were imported from Arab and where Queen Alirani, who is said to have hated men and had women warriors had built her palace.

We light our hurricane lamp, hang it on a branch so that it will guide us back to the camping site and go for a dip in the sea in the moonlight. On the beach we come across the grave of a Muslim saint.

Dinner by the crackling campfire is bread, a boiled egg each and seenisambol.

"This is how our ancestors would have eaten in the stone ages"

"Bread?"

"No. But eggs surely..."

"Boiled?" "I don't know. But I hope so"

It isn't easy to go to sleep under the brilliant stars on mats laid out on uneven ground. An invasion of ants, leaves falling from the trees above, twigs breaking, something shuffling in the bushes, a bear? A cobra?

"Do you know World Environment Day is round the corner?" Asks someone from the dark.

"Good. For once, we are in the right place at the right time"

Finally when sheer fatigue overtakes us, our minds become oblivious to our surroundings and we find ourselves ensconced in the land of dreams... we fall asleep in much the same way our ancestors would have done, at the beginning of civilization, perhaps dreaming the same dreams.