A Sticky Table and Stickier Luck: A Tale of Travel Risk in Yala National Park, Sri Lanka
- Rand Blimes
- May 5
- 4 min read
Tissamaharama—or Tissa, as everyone calls it—is a tiny town. A local’s town, not a tourist town, which is to say there weren’t many restaurants.
So we walked the main street, searching for dinner.
The prospects didn’t look good.
And then we saw it.
A little shop, with battered pots sitting on gas burners in the back, and a few small plastic tables up front.
We walked in and sat down.
I rested my hands on the table and immediately pulled them back up. Or rather, peeled them off. The entire surface was sticky.
Well—that doesn’t quite do it justice. How to explain?
The table wasn’t just sticky. It had achieved a level of adhesive commitment normally reserved for duct tape and tree sap. No matter how gently you set something down, it made a small, squelchy farewell when you tried to pick it up again.
Then, while I sat there trying not to touch anything, I noticed the walls. They had once been painted blue. Long ago, long ago. The blue still peeked through in places, but most of the surface was hidden beneath a thick layer of gray-brown grease.
Large, black drops of... something... inched down the walls at glacial speed, creating a random pattern of dark stripes that seemed to be on their own slow-motion migration from ceiling to floor.
The floor!
Nope. Don’t even look at the floor. Don’t wanna know.
This place redefined the word grimy.
But there weren’t many other options. So we ordered kottu. To play it safe, we asked for vegetarian.
The gas burners flared. The sizzle of roti and vegetables echoed off the grease-stained walls and adhesive tabletops.
Soon, a heaping plate of kottu landed in front of us.
We started tentatively.
And then—oh, glory—the first bite. It was the best kottu we’d eaten up to that point. And, in my opinion, it stayed the best kottu we ate during our whole stay in Sri Lanka.
Fantastic.
And that’s how travel works sometimes. You take a risk. Maybe the grimy hole-in-the-wall will give you hepatitis (don’t worry, we had our shots), or maybe it will give you the best meal of your life. Or, possibly, both.
Travel is risk.
As long as you’re smart about it (family motto: “Don’t do anything stupid”), the risks usually aren’t to life and limb.
But there are many kinds of lower-stake risks.
Yala National Park: A Different Kind of Gamble
In fact, our whole trip to Tissa was a kind of risk-taking exercise.
We had come to visit Yala National Park. And we came with a specific goal: see a leopard.
Or several leopards. We weren't picky.
Yala has one of the highest leopard densities in the world. But spotting one? Not guaranteed. It’s wildlife—not Disneyland.
Your odds may be better than almost anywhere else on earth, but most visitors leave leopard-less.
We went out of our way to reach Tissa. We spent three nights at the Yala Meedum Guest House (nice owners, pretty spare rooms—we also booked our safari through them).
We paid about $250 USD for a private full-day safari in Yala National Park, and another half-day safari in nearby Bundala National Park.
All to see a leopard.
Less than a 50% chance of success.
Sure, Yala has elephants, crocodiles, monkeys—all of which we’d already seen elsewhere. There were also sloth bears, but the odds of seeing them made leopard spotting look like a sure thing.
If we saw a leopard, it would be $250 and several days well spent.
If not... well... sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t.
The Bigger Game
This wasn’t the first time we’d gambled like this.
In Sri Lanka, we also took a boat out looking for blue whales (success!).
In Uganda, my wife and I paid a lot to see mountain gorillas (success!) and chimpanzees (also success!).
In South Africa, we shelled out to see great white sharks (huge success!).
But I’ve also been scuba diving looking for manta rays and come up empty.
I went to Kenya during the wildebeest migration, hoping to witness a mass river crossing. Nope.
And once, in a truly high-risk endeavor, I went to Mann’s Chinese Theater in LA hoping to spot George Clooney. That punk was nowhere to be seen.
That’s just how it goes.
If you want to see the world, you have to be ready for the possibility that sometimes the world doesn’t show up.
The Risk Makes the Reward
That risk—the not-knowing—is what makes wildlife encounters thrilling.
Seeing a leopard in a zoo isn’t the same as seeing one in Yala. It should be. But it feels different.
Because in a zoo, you know the animal will be there.
In Yala? You have no idea.
And the Verdict?
We didn’t see any leopards.
We saw elephants.
We saw mongooses (mongeese?).
We saw so many peacocks that they actually became mundane.
And we saw countless other birds—especially at Bundala, a birder’s paradise.
But no leopards.
Yes, we had great family time. But if that were the only goal, we could’ve just stayed home.
Still, because travel, I’ve come to understand that the anticipation of success is its own kind of fun.
Wondering whether we’d spot a leopard, straining our eyes, scanning every bush—that is almost as fun as actually seeing a leopard.
Just like wondering whether that amazing kottu from the sticky, greasy, gloriously grimy hole-in-the-wall would come back to haunt us later was its own kind of . . . let’s call it fun.
Right?
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