Yala, Sri Lanka

In Sri Lanka’s deep south, the rustic farming villages round Tissamaharama are divided from the teeming animal and bird life of Yala, Sri Lanka’s oldest and second-largest natural reserve, by a belt of semi-protected jungle running down to the sea. For centuries, people here have farmed small clearings in the jungle called chena, sleeping beside their crops in modest huts to protect them from hungry elephants.