Elephants

Before leaving the Heritance Kandelama, we took a ride on their elephant. It was an amazing experience standing next to the elephant and looking him in the eye, a very smart animal indeed.
Riding the elephant was not quite as nice as hoped, as we felt a bit sorry for the poor chap - he is well looked after, and gets lovely long 3 hour lunch swims in the tank, but he does live at the hotel all by himself, so probably gets a bit lonely :o(

 Elephant's head as seen from above.

 Good bye dear friend!

Next it was off to the Pinnewala elephant orphanage. As mentioned in the previous post, due to the extremely slow tuk-tuk taking 6 hours to get there, we missed the bath time in the river, and got there just before closing time, so had a brief look around.

 As we had not had time to check in anywhere, we had our backpacks with us. I had put my backpack down to take some photos of these guys, when this cheeky chap grabbed the strap of my backpack and started pulling it into the enclosure.
This followed a very tough tug of war, and I could hear the stitching in my bag starting to rip. Despite being a very young elephant, he was darn strong and eventually lost interest, and decided to let me have my back back - I would have been pretty sad if it had been trampled and eaten by the elephants, but Boet and I had a great laugh over that!
Sadly, Boet was not able to get a photo in time of the wresting!

 Awwww cute!!!!