Sri Lanka’s most remote and least-visited major national park – a vast, wild landscape in the east of the island centred around the massive Senanayake Samudra reservoir, known above all for its unique boat safaris that take visitors through open water channels to observe wild elephants swimming between islands in an experience unlike anything available elsewhere in the country. The park’s extraordinary wildness and very low visitor numbers give Gal Oya a quality of genuine wilderness encounter that the more accessible parks of the south cannot always provide.