The road out from Wild Coast Tented Lodge, a meandering dirt track through scrubland, is barely a road. There’s no fence between the lodge’s tents and the national park beyond, so the wild is immersive and immediate, even though this is the comfortable, two Michelin key, Relais & Chateau co-signed wilderness adventure.
“That’s five!” Thilak says, counting off the animals we’ve seen on the short dirt road out from the resort. There’s a maternal mugger crocodile under a large rock, a red mongoose sniffing the air, a troop of black-faced langurs picking berries and peering through the foliage, two spotted deer, and a jackal. He’d slowed right down at a flat outcrop where he often finds leopards. But not today.
Leopards Are The Prize And Wild Coast Tented Lodge Is The Place To See Them
Leopards are the prize. Yala offers the best odds of seeing them. The national park’s leopard density is among the highest anywhere in the world.
They like those flat, warm rocks. And they like the arms of the ironwood tree. They go up twenty feet and lie along a branch, in the shade and off the ground for the comfort of it, and the views, but not for safety, seeing as nothing much bothers them down on the ground either.
There are no tigers in Sri Lanka and no lions. That makes the leopard peerless. And they act like it. They’re out in daylight, unhurried, rarely bothering to check over their shoulders.
And the park exists like that, in a sort of peaceful coexistence.
In a watering hole, painted storks – a splash of pink paint across their folded wings – step eagerly through the shallows sweeping their bills through the water, a crocodile emerging eyes first from the water before submerging again, following the storks for fish they might flush out.
Two Michelin Keys And Relais & Châteaux Affiliation At Resplendent Ceylon’s Tented Lodge
At the entrance to Wild Coast Tented Lodge, hanging on the dry-stone wall, is a Relais & Châteaux plaque in brass – signifying their allegiance to the French membership association that takes independent family-owned hotels into its arms by invitation. Beside that is a red Michelin board with two keys on it. And between them a photograph of three men in aprons – Dilhan, Merrill and Malik.
Marrill founded Dilmah in 1988. He named Dilmah after his sons Dilhan and Malik who flank him in the picture. Wild Coast belongs to Resplendent Ceylon, the hotel arm his sons built, and it’s the last of three properties designed as a circuit – with tea bungalows in the highlands at Ceylon Tea Trails, a clifftop resort at Cape Weligama, then the jungle lodge here in Yala.
Like the leopards in the ironwood trees, nobody here is roughing it. Twenty-eight tents fan out from a single dirt path, looking like tethered zeppelins. Inside the faux-Victorian interiors are teak floors, tan leather and dark wood furniture, and a copper bathtub standing on feet.
The dreamy nostalgia is only broken when you open the chest beside the bed and find a coffee machine, and when you notice the air conditioner set into the ceiling above you.
Sixteen of the tents sit in clusters of four set around five watering holes, each with a deck. Eight are family tents with an adjoining Urchin, the kids’ tent. And four of the tents have private plunge pools. Some mornings a black-faced langur comes down to drink, and stays longer than necessary, admiring itself in the water’s reflection.
The path linking all the tents runs down the centre to The Den, the open-air pavilion built to echo the boulders on the beach. Inside is dining, a lounge and the Ten Tuskers Bar, all of it looking over the free-form pool.
Beyond are wild rocks.
Immersed In The Wild Nature Of Yala National Park
Nothing, from the entrance way to the sea front is sealed off. As there’s no fence around the resort, occasionally an elephant strays onto the grounds, and nobody is allowed to intervene. Staff spread word and everyone waits until it leaves of its own accord.
And, after dark someone comes to collect you from your tent and walks you back again, sweeping a torch across the path for anything else that might have wandered in.
Evening drinks are served there, from a bar they set up everyday as night falls in front of the rocks as waves crash against them.
Looking back at The Den, its timber slats lay unevenly across two connected domes that appear to be tethered to the ground like tents rather than built on it. Underneath, the colossal domes are woven bamboo, arched into vaulted ceilings over the pool that runs between the lounge and the bar.
In daylight the tiles are sun-bleached grey. But right now, at night the domes are black and the arches glow amber, lanterns lining the lawn between the pool and the guest rooms.
Like the peaceful coexistence in the park, the menus at the Den, for breakfast, lunch and dinner, are easy-going, single-sided things designed to unburden your day.
They’re full of desirable dishes, from the daily Sri Lankan experience: a rice-and-curry spread served in hammered copper karahi, a coconut sambol sharp with chili, coconut-sweet dal decorated with curry leaves served for any meal you desire, in the morning with a mound of string hoppers piled on banana leaf. For breakfast there’s curried pork belly too, with lemongrass hollandaise on an English muffin and a Sri Lankan omelette stuffed with banana peppers and green chilli.
For lunch, there’s black tiger prawn badduma – a sort of crispy stir fry – with tamarind broth. And slipper lobster has a habit of popping up again on the menu: chilled with white tomato essence and pickled melon at lunch, wok-fried with chilli, garlic and cashew for dinner. There’s smoked lamb that comes lacquered in Ceylon arrack-togarashi sauce, and the pittu session is coconut steamed cakes with a curry of your choosing.
The cocktails are full of local flavor too with arrack sours, a betel leaf negroni and an aromatic martini infused with toasted rice and mung bean.
Ten Tuskers Bar Pays Tribute To The Parks Pachyderms
Around you, in the dining room burnt-orange leather banquettes line the walls. Small cacti and potted plants separate the tables and over them, bronze dome lamps hang low on curved iron arms, one over almost every table, throwing warm pools of light onto the dark wood tabletops.
A bridge leads over to Ten Tuskers Bar where bamboo poles cascade from the roof, cut to uneven lengths. And all around, on the walls are framed photographs of the eponymous safari park’s tuskers, like Nalaka, shot on the Yala Plain in February 2002, and Kublai Khan, photographed at Gonagala – a rocky outcrop in the park – in February 1990, mid-spray at a waterhole. Both are labeled like museum pieces, location and date beneath each frame, a small act of record-keeping that turns the bar into something closer to an archive than a lounge.
There’s surprisingly few in the park in the days we head out – as part of the stay package at Wild Coast Tented Lodge, aside from the three daily meals and drinks there’s daily safaris with a guide who whisks you, knowledgeably, past the waiting queue of waiting vans at the park entrance, entry tickets already secured – and through Block 1. Yala is split into blocks, separately gated zones with their own permits. Block 1 is the original section and the one with the highest leopard density, so it’s also the busiest.
Days Like These
Both days there are leopards. They’re known by name – like Jessica, who sashays past the van, who was born near the park entrance and has few inhibitions when it comes to tourists crowding around for a sight – and Lucas, lazily heading to a watering hole’s edge. They tend to be more visible at this time of year, as water is scarce and they’ll come looking for it.
At Yala, unusually, male territories overlap. A male marks his ground and defends it elsewhere in the world, and a rival crossing the line risks a fight that can kill either cat. Here, researchers have found several resident males share a zone, marking the same trees, turning up within a day of one another, without fighting.
It’s like that at Yala and at Wild Coast Tented Lodge. Days drift by amicably, hoppers for breakfast and curry lunches, and usually a sighting or two of a leopard. Except this morning even though Tilak is still scanning the rocks for a sixth animal on the road out of the lodge.
