January 15, 2005
TerraDaily
TISSAMAHARAMA, Sri Lanka (AFP) The animals are returning to tracts of Sri Lanka's premier wildlife park battered by last month's tsunamis, the tourists are also coming back -- only the butterflies are still missing.
"We're already up to around 100 visitors a day," said W. Weregama, warden at the Yala National Park in eastern Sri Lanka. "The tourists are returning."
Before the December 26 tsunamis, the park averaged about 150 visitors a day, half of them foreigners.
The giant waves did relatively little damage to the park itself thanks to sand dunes along the coast which served as natural bulwarks, while all the animals escaped due to their own built-in tsunami early warning systems, Weregama said.
But the human toll was disproportionate -- at least 42 people died in Yala, four of them park workers and the rest tourists, including 16 members of a Japanese group who were having tea when the waves came thundering through a lagoon.
Tourist bungalows at Patanagala beach in the park were pulverised but fortunately no one was in them at the time.
Weregama said Yala park was shut for just four days after the disaster. It has since been quickly recuperating.
In the affected areas, the soil is either still blotched with splashes of orange from the salt water or covered in sea sand.
Trees have been smashed about, large boulders lifted and deposited up to a kilometre (three-quarters of a mile) inland and mangroves and other vegetation uprooted, leaving bare or brown tracts of land.
But in the middle of the devastation, the acacia trees have begun sprouting bright green new leaves -- a delicacy for the park's 200-strong elephant population.
"The elephants have come back to these areas to munch on the new acacia leaves -- they love them," said safari guide Lionel Gunatilaka.
Other animals too were returning and a quick tour of affected areas revealed an assortment of water buffalo, deer, wild boar, crocodiles, monkeys and hosts of bird species.
"But one strange thing has happened," said Gunatilaka. "The butterflies have disappeared and have not returned. This place is normally swarming with butterflies."
He thought it due to the fact that the water on which the butterflies survive has become brackish and that they have moved elsewhere in the park.
British couple Nigel and Shirley Scott of Shepperton, England, refused to allow the tsunami to affect their long-dreamed plans of touring Yala park.
"We checked with all the travel agents and they said there was no reason not to go ahead," said Nigel Scott sitting in a jeep inside Yala on a weekend safari.
His wife added, "If anything, the safaris are more pleasant because there are fewer people in the park."
However, like all visitors to Sri Lanka, where nearly 31,000 people died in the tsunamis, they could not escape being touched by the events.
Their guide, Vicky Wickremaseka, was in the park on December 26 near the site where the Japanese were killed and his first return to the site this weekend had been as emotional for them as it had been for him, they said.
"The birds started flying and the elephants and other animals started running. We knew something was wrong and yelled for everyone around us to run," Wickremaseka told AFP, relating the events of that day.
"We started the jeep and had just changed to second gear when the waves came."
He heard the screams of the Japanese and saw them being swamped by the giant waves -- a horror he'll never forget.
"I radioed for help and we immediately began a rescue operation. We managed to save four of the group," he said.
Park warden Weregama said only about one percent of the sprawling sanctuary had been affected, due to the fact the sand dunes had not been removed, unlike in other parts of the island.
"Destroy the environment and it will destroy you," he said.
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