More Elephants :-)

  Pinnawala, Sri Lanka Friday, July 25, 2014

We woke up and went for breakfast this morning and already waiting for us in the water were half a dozen elephants - wonderful. We watched them enjoying themselves as we ate our breakfast from just 50 yards away, then we dashed back up to our room to grab our cameras.And not a moment too soon as a large number of ellies made their way down to the water from the orphanage while we watched. The manutes were vastly outnumbered by the ellies as they all made a scrabble for the water. We could see that although many did not need any kind of restraints, some did have chains on their feet and some had been rubbing so they had big sores. It is easy to sit and judge them from the banks of the river, so we did try to find out why some were chained and others not. And it wasn't that the big elephants all had chains either, it was more of the little ones so we wondered if they were just too boisterous for the number of tourists. As we had had such a magnificent show all morning, we decided not to go into the orphanage itself. There seems to be very mixed reviews about it so instead decided to keep the nice memories we already had Off to catch a bus back to Colombo now - deep joy! (WARNING - if you do not like elephants we advise you not to scroll down any further!) [gallery columns="4" ids="7021,7025,7028,7030,7034,7035,7036,7040,7043,7047,7049,7050,7053,7054,7058,7061,7063,7066,7069,7074,7076,7078,7081,7082,7084,7087,7088,7092,7095,7098,7102,7104,7106,7108,7109,7111,7114,7116,7118,7119,7121,7124,7126,7127,7128,7130,7131,7132,7133,7134,7135,7137,7138,7139,7141,7142,7145,7147"]