ON THE morning of December 26, 2004, Wicky Wickremasekera was in a Land Rover a few metres inland from a lodge on the edge of the ocean when he saw the tsunami coming.

That fateful morning still etches his nightmares.

Seeing the massive swell rolling in at a frightening speed, he told the driver to step on the gas and drive inland. Behind them as they fled, the 40-foot high wall of water thundered ashore, obliterating the Yala Game Safari Lodge, killing staff and dozens of tourists, among them a group of Japanese enjoying a picnic breakfast on the picturesque shore.

Wicky is the top naturalist for Jetwing Eco Holidays, a travel operator run by Sri Lankan naturalist, conservationist and author Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne. Jetwing owned the hotel that was destroyed, just outside Ruhuna Yala National Park in south eastern Sri Lanka.  

Wicky took me to the site earlier this month. We walked around the shells of the ruined buildings, with the rubble of the disaster still crunching under our shoes. In a bizarre facsimile of some Kipling tale, long-tailed grey langur monkeys wandered about the ruins, some sitting on top of solitary walls looking out to the unbroken ocean.  

Wicky amid the ruins: sombre reminder
-- PHOTOS: NIRMAL GHOSH

"I remember the mud. Awful black mud," Wicky muttered as we stood in silence.

Yala, a picturesque six-hour drive from Colombo, recovered, only to be beset by a different kind of tragedy when clashes took place between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) coming out of their strongholds to the north to attack army camps set up in northern Yala.

That sparked travel advisories from some countries including the UK, warning tourists to avoid Yala.

But just last month, the British government lifted its advisory. And with the end of the bloody, 30-year civil war that has torn the country apart, tourists are now returning in greater numbers than before, many of them locals earlier nervous of visiting.

Not all of Yala is open to tourists, and the Sri Lankan army still maintains camps inside the park. But the blocks that are open are astonishingly rich in biodiversity.

Yala is an extraordinary wilderness. Tigers never reached Sri Lanka; the island separated from the mainland before the big cat that came south out of central Asia could colonise it. But the leopard did, and the beautiful, enigmatic cat is Sri Lanka’s top predator. Yala possibly has the highest density of leopards in the world.

One of Yala's famed rocky outcrops

Red earth merges into white sand near the ocean, huge rock outcrops and escarpments rear up out of the thorny bush; large low-lying bowls become lakes and wetlands in the north east monsoon season and dry out to sun-baked mud flats in the summer. As you drive around the bush, the distant thud and roar of the Indian Ocean’s 6-feet tall breakers is a constant refrain.

Grey headed fishing eagle: watchful eye

Wild buffalo in a shrinking waterhole - focus of life in summer

Peacocks, monkeys, spotted deer and wild boar wander the wilderness. We sat for hours one evening watching a shrunken waterhole.  Crocodiles lined its banks, wild buffalo sat impassively in its waters, a grey headed fishing eagle coursed over it in wide sweeps spooking many of the birds. Spot bellied pelicans floated in the water and painted storks perched on the trees. Ibis and stilts stalked the shallows. A ruddy mongoose and a gaudy Ceylon jungle fowl visited to drink, and in the gathering dusk a family of elephants ambled out of the woods.

Male elephant: astonishingly unafraid

The elephants of Yala are surprisingly unafraid of people in vehicles – unlike in other parts of Sri Lanka where they can be extremely aggressive. Perhaps the Yala population does not have an inherited memory of conflict with people. One elephant walked right past our Land Rover within touching distance on the dirt track while we sat still as statues in it, the engine off. At night a male elephant regularly visited a small fresh water pond at the Yala Village resort where we stayed, to drink while tourists ate their dinner in the restaurant just above it.  

The leopard, Sri Lanka's top predator: this is one of three seen in two days

And then, of course, there are the leopards. Here, it is evident that Sri Lanka’s wildlife tourism suffers from the same mad rush of jeeps when a leopard is spotted, as afflicts some Indian national parks when a tiger is seen. But if you – as the leopards have learned to - can ignore congregating Land Rovers with their roaring diesels, and the loud conversations of drivers and trackers and tourists, it is an extraordinary experience to see the big, elusive cat, sometimes draped languidly over a rock, sometimes pacing the dirt tracks, sometimes warily lapping water from the ponds that give the forest life in summer.

The leopard rush

The Indian Ocean - mesmerising landscape

And then there is the incomparable setting. Yala's wilderness is a welcome relief from the brutality of the human conflict that has ravaged Sri Lanka. On our last morning, mesmerised, I took over a hundred pictures of the ocean as it crashed endlessly upon the shore. When I returned to Bangkok a day later I could still hear the sound of the waves in my head.