Pinnawala

A town in central Sri Lanka, about an hour and a half from Kandy by car, which exists for visitors almost entirely because of its elephant orphanage. The shops opposite the entrance are there for the same reason, and Harry says so.

The elephant orphanage

Chosen on a hotel’s recommendation, specifically because they were told the animals are treated well.

• 3,000 rupees a ticket — about $15.
• Bananas to feed them cost around 1,000 rupees for a couple.
• The herd is bathed in the river until about four, then walks back to the compound through the town, past the shops — which is the best thing in the visit and costs nothing to watch. Harry arrives thinking four is the start and finds it is the end.
• There is almost no guidance on site: no instructions on where to go or how close you may get to the animals.
• Most of the visitors are Sri Lankan, not foreign tourists.
• The signage describes the elephants as semi-wild, weighing up to 4.5 tons, and says the chains they wear are a safety measure.
• They eat whole branches, wood included, in a feeding pen; there are babies in a separate area about five minutes’ walk on.
• A display of the traditional handling tools is part of the visit.

What Harry actually concludes

Not much, and deliberately. He says on camera that welfare is genuinely hard to verify and often covered up, that he chose this place on a recommendation precisely for that reason, and that the chains worried him because there were none at the place he visited in Thailand. He takes the safety explanation at face value on the grounds that he has no evidence against it, judges that the animals look well fed and cared for, and finishes with the obvious caveat: ideally they would be wild.

See check animal welfare before booking, which this visit complicates rather than confirms.

Nearby

A café directly opposite the entrance: three fresh pineapple juices and a water for 1,150 rupees, about $6, pressed from fruit grown on the island, plus seven rabbits.

Harry’s tips

• Get the bathing times right. Four o’clock is when it ends, not when it starts, and the river is the part worth seeing.
• Watch the walk back through town, which happens in the open and costs nothing.
• Expect to work it out yourself. Nobody tells you where to stand.

The explanation travels with him

The sanctuary’s account of the chains — a safety precaution against aggression rather than a sign of mistreatment — is the one Harry repeats a fortnight later in Colombo, on seeing a chained working elephant being washed at a temple. He does not test it there either. Worth knowing that the claim in the bundle traces back to a single sign at a single site.

Source

• We met Elephants in Sri Lanka 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9fzTuhp2DY
• First Impressions COLOMBO, SRI LANKA 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY3bjlPSOic — where the explanation is repeated.