Yala Block 1 offers the highest recorded density of wild leopards per square kilometre of any national park on earth – and with a private jeep, a pre-dawn entry and a dedicated wildlife naturalist who knows the park’s individual leopard territories personally, a sighting is a genuine statistical likelihood rather than a hope. The supporting cast is extraordinary in its own right: wild elephants moving freely through the dry-zone scrub, sloth bears in the late afternoon, mugger crocodiles at the water’s edge and the coastal lagoon birdlife of the park’s southern boundary. This is wild. Nothing is guaranteed. That is what makes it worth getting up before dawn for.