Elephants, elephants and more elephants!!!! Yea :-)

Elephants, lots and lots of them!!! Went to Pinnewala elephant orphanage yesterday and it was brilliant! There were over 40 elephants out stuffing their faces with palms and anything they could lay their trunks on!! The younger ones were being fed with huge bottles of milk (35 a day) which they downed in about 3 seconds!!! There were a few baby elephants too, one was only 1 1/2 months old and would have had the most hardened criminal saying awww, so cute!!!! :-) He was always hiding in under his mother and she was always flanked by at least 3 other grownup elephants so nothing was getting near that baby! Was interesting to watch cos they're all unrelated apart from the mother and baby but they were ultra protective of the baby. For obvious reasons we didn't try to pet that one. They're like giant warm leather bags with steel wool hair... COOL!!!! Was fab watching them splash around in the river and squirting water around, then throwing dust onto their backs to keep cool. There were two young males who kept headbutting each other for about 2 hours, v funny cos a smaller elephant kept trying to join in but they kicked him out, literally. And one of the worker elephants was submerged in the river and only breathing through the tip of his trunk :-) And to top it off saw a water monitor, a small lizard (they do get up to 1.5m long) green and yellow with a blue tongue, and a frog which narrowly escaped being squished by an elephant! Brilliant!!!!!!
Anyway met two new couples in the hotel, Aussie and N Irish and had dinner and drinks. Decided we'll keep going to Sigiria and Anuradhapura instead of chickening out to a beach. Derek has a stinking cold so I'll be climbing Sigiria myself, on with the suncream and walking shoes. Only 8 days till I get my birthday present to myself... ;-) Cya later.