Nigel and Paula with Tharanga-a Walk With Jith tour 2017
8 day endemic bird tour
Tour Leader: Tharanga Herath
We have enjoyed a wonderful eight days successfully seeing all the endemic bird species. Tharanga worked tirelessly to find all the endemics and to ensure we had a brilliant trip. His knowledge, passion and good nature ensured that we had a fabulous time and learnt a huge amount about the wildlife and culture of Sri Lanka. As we are photographers this meant not only did Tharanga have to facilitate us seeing the birds but where humanly possible photographing them as well!
Carol Hopkins Graeme Munro-tour-Walk-With-Jith-2017
It ws a fantastic tour, Jith. Absolutely Love all the birds & animals we observed. Comments by email when we return to Australia in 1 weeks’ time. Thank you for the gift.
Carol Hopkins
6. FEB 2017
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Hi Jith
As promised, here is my review of our 11-Day birding and wildlife tour, completed on 6 Feb 2017.
Overall Summary
This was a well organised tour, tailor-made to our requests, which provided a fabulous opportunity to see a huge variety of birds and animals with the help of a very knowledgeable and efficient guide and staying in comfortable accommodation with good service and meals.
Excellent tour with Good Guide (Saman) and all endemics seen.
A few things that could be improved:
Kandy – Could be left out of the itinerary. No special birds there.
Yala – Total Kaos! Too many jeeps in the park. This should be registered by park authorities. Not good, stressful, for the wildlife.
Mirissa – The wetland, Kirala Kele (?), should be included in itinerary not as option for 50 USD.
Time for transports: Where stated 5 hours in itinerary, was 3 hours. Could have spent more time in Mirissa instead of at the airport. ….. Itinerary should be adjusted so mornings are spent birdwatching as much as possible, not for transport. I think we spent too much time in transport also on mornings.
We had a great time on our tour with Walk With Jith. Our guide, Hettie, was so funny and easy going. His English was excellent. He always made sure we were comfortable. Hettie really knows the birds and their calls. He made sure we saw them. We would recommend Walk With Jith to any birdwatchers anywhere.
We had two guides (in addition to Jith) during our tour, both of whom were excellent. Tilly guided us at Talangama & Kitulgala. At Kitulgala we stayed at a place that Tilly had not been to before, where he was very good, not only at finding the birds but “reading” the habitat to identify the possibilities. He worked really hard to find the birds, always making sure we could see them properly. He was great company.
We wanted to experience what Sri Lanka has to offer over a relatively short period. This tour came right at the end of 6 weeks’ traveling, and we didn’t want to spend a long time trying to find accommodation and where to go. This tour delivered just what we wanted: some wild-life, some culture, some history. Whilst we usually don’t like doing “touristy things”, we felt we needed to get a “flavor” of Sri Lanka in only 6 days, and this tour hit the spot!
Jith gave in an excellent service, tailormade for our requirements. I can strongly recommend Walk With Jith!!
The birding trip itself was very well organized and managed by our bird guide – Athula.
Athula was an expert on the birds in all the locations and National Parks - The Parks are so big that you need to know the best places, to go to avoid the crowds.
Athula also took in to some other great places in the hill to find the endemics. We had a good haul of photos to take home.
Of course, it’s not all about birding for a perfect trip. The guide needs to be patient with guests and Athula was always helpful and attentive.
Ies Goedbloed and Johanna Heikoop at Kitulgala bird watching
We had a fantastic time with Athula. He is a very nice guy and did everything for us both for birding and having a smooth trip. “If we had asked him to change the weather he certainly would have tried it.”
Our main goal was to see all endemic birds and we only missed Legge’s Hawk Eagle. A fantastic result especially because we had only 8 days.
Advise for future “short endemic trips” à Skip Kandy and Udawatta Kelle and spend more time in Kitulgala or Sinharaja.
Other advise: a telescope for serious birding trips.
Hi Jith, Firstly let me say what an excellent enjoyable holiday we had in Sri Lanka. The whole trip was brilliant and I will be recommending my friends to go there and to use your services!
The Guide: Mr. Upali was an excellent guide and companion on our trip. He was very well informed about the birds, locations and local knowledge. He was also very knowledgeable when it came to the cultural sites and their history together with some very insightful information about Sri Lankan Buddhism. He was reliable, punctual and a safe driver. Please pass on our thanks to him for all his help.
