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Pinnawala is located roughly halfway between Sri Lanka’s capital city, Colombo, and the tourist hub city of Kandy. I believe there are buses that go to Pinnawala, but the time it would take to get there is excessive. After visiting Kandy for five days, I hired a car to take me back to Colombo and requested the driver take a side trip to Pinnawala. He gladly agreed for a small additional fee. The side trip adds about 2-3 hours to your journey, but it is worth it.
takes in injured and stray elephants and provides them with care. Currently there are about 70 elephants at the orphanage. Visitors may enter the compound and feed the elephants and watch them rest in their residential enclosures. Once a day the elephants are herded several hundred meters through the town to bathe in the Oya River. For me, that’s the highlight of the visit. It really is a magnificent sight.
The town of Pinnawala is totally geared to elephant tourism. The main hotel faces the river and has three floors of balconies where guests have a bird’s eye view of the elephants bathing. Additionally, there are probably 15 souvenir shops and several small restaurants and snack bars.
Some have lodged complaints about how the elephants are treated. I didn’t see any elephants in chains or shackles, even when they were marched through the town. The elephants live in expansive outdoor enclosures and special houses, which appeared to be clean and well-maintained. Certainly, I did not observe anything nearly as bad as the private elephant businesses in Thailand which chain elephants and sell rides to tourist, which is an unacceptable practice.
There is a modest fee to enter the orphanage and you have to pay for each packet of food that you feed an elephant. You can also skip the orphanage altogether and get a table on the hotel balcony where you can watch the elephants bathe while you sip on a coffee. I don’t know if Pinnawala is an overnight destination or worth an excursion solely for visiting the elephants. But, adding it as a small side excursion during a required journey from Kandy to Colombo worked perfectly for me.