Udawalawa National Park & Orphanage Visit from Hambantota Port

Fabulous tour. The elephant orphanage is wonderful. The park was amazing saw mums & babies bathing .Eagles crocodiles , monkeys great experience highly recommend

We had a tour to the Elephant transit point and a Safari. The tour operator did not answer any messages that we had previously sent The tour we booked was for four hours when we got ready to go onto the jeep we were told it was now 8 hours!! Now I can see you thinking what a bargain no it isn’t when you need to get back to the ship. Our tour should have been with a guide this is not true. We were dropped off at the elephant transit centre and told nothing of where we should go. We sat and sat and eventually the elephants were let in to be fed. We were told our tour would start at 8am. The elephant feeding didn’t start until 10.30 am. So 2.5 hours had already gone. All the tour operator wanted to do was to get money from us for the elephant transit centre and the Safari. He never asked us had we paid for the transit centre ourselves as there was a facility to do that. Do I believe the money he collected went to them? I doubt it. The Safari was good but the driver could not understand we were short of time. There were infact 21 of us in the bus that took us to the Safari. We couldn’t even cut the Safari short as we needed to wait for all their jeeps to return. Every time we went passed their jeeps they kept saying we are going to miss the ship. All the drivers of the jeeps just didn’t understand why we were all getting upset. Their English was extremely poor considering it’s supposed to be In English. After much shouting the drivers returned us to the bus. Our gps said we would arrive at the port shuttle buses at 4.05pm and the last shuttle was 4pm!! Luckily I had friends on the ship so I manage to contact them for them to inform the ship that we would be late. They said they would hold the buses until 4.30pm. If I hadn’t done this we would have missed the ship. The driver of the bus did drive fast to get us back. Others that were in a minivan said they struggled to keep up with us. They passed us as we had to stop at a bank for someone to use the cash machine which wasn’t actually there. We took enough water for a four hour tour not an 8 hour one, it was 30c!!! When we got to the port we literally ran from where we were dropped off to the shuttle bus getting on the bus at 3.59pm. If we hadn’t run or had limited mobility we would have missed the shuttle bus. This is totally unacceptable. We did not get the tour we paid for. Way too stressful to be enjoyed. Would i recommend definitely not

Driver/tour guide did not turn up today at the Port in Sri Lanka at the designated time. At least I have not been charged for it. Very disappointing- have never had a problem when booking tours with Viator before.