Minneriya National Park

Every other wildlife park on this island is a place. Minneriya, for the few months that made its name, is closer to an event. The distinction is not a nicety, because it decides whether the afternoon you have booked is one of the great animal spectacles in Asia or a warm two hours looking at scrub and a few distant grey backs. What decides it is not the weather that day, not your driver, not your luck. It is the calendar, and underneath the calendar, the level of water in a reservoir.

That reservoir is the whole mechanism. As the dry season draws the tank down, it uncovers a wide floor of soft silt, and that floor grows a flush of short green grass at exactly the time of year when the surrounding forest has almost nothing left to offer. Elephants that spend the rest of the year scattered across a large area of dry country walk in from every direction to eat it. The result is a concentration of wild Asian elephants on open ground that has no equal anywhere in their range, and it exists because a lake is being emptied to water rice fields somewhere downstream.

The uncomfortable corollary is the reason this page is long. In the wrong months the mechanism is simply not running, the animals are dispersed or have moved to a neighbouring tank, and the ticket you bought buys you a drive. Visitors are rarely told this before they arrive, and the industry has a quiet habit of substituting one park for another without saying so. What follows is about the cycle, about how to check where the elephants actually are before you commit to a date, and about how to behave once you are out on the lake bed with forty other vehicles.

What Minneriya actually is

A national park in the North Central Province, in the flat dry country of the Cultural Triangle, wrapped around an ancient irrigation reservoir of the same name. It lies within easy reach of Habarana, Sigiriya and Polonnaruwa, which is why almost everyone who visits it is in the area for the ruins and the rock rather than for the wildlife. It is around 180 kilometres from Colombo, a little over four hours of driving, and it was given national park status in the 1990s after a long earlier life as a protected sanctuary.

The park is not large by the standards of the famous southern reserves, and it is easy to picture. There is the tank, with a long irregular shoreline. There is the belt of open ground the water uncovers as it falls, which is where everything happens. Beyond that is grassland, then thorn and scrub, then dry mixed evergreen forest closing in on all sides, with low rocky rises breaking the flat.

Nothing about that description sounds remarkable, and for much of the year it is not. Minneriya out of season is a pleasant, ordinary dry-zone park with a reservoir in it. Its entire reputation rests on what happens on that exposed margin for a stretch of the middle of the year.

The tank, and why a piece of engineering produced a wildlife spectacle

The Minneriya tank is not a lake. It is a reservoir, built by damming a seasonal watercourse across the plain, and it is very old. Sri Lankan tradition credits it to Mahasena, a king of the Anuradhapura period, and it belongs to the extraordinary system of tanks and channels that made dry-zone civilisation possible here. It has been storing the north-east monsoon and releasing it to paddy land for a very long time.

That is worth holding onto, because it reframes the thing you have come to see. The greatest gathering of wild elephants in Asia is not a relic of untouched wilderness. It is a by-product of an irrigation scheme that has been operating, in one form or another, since the early centuries of the common era. The animals found it and adapted to it. Nobody designed it for them.

The annual cycle in plain terms

The north-east monsoon and the inter-monsoonal rains fill the tank in the latter part of the year and into the early months of the next. Through the first half of the year the water is drawn off, partly by evaporation in serious heat and mostly by release into the channels that feed the fields below. The surface retreats, and behind it comes a widening apron of wet silt.

Grass takes that ground quickly. It is short, soft, freshly grown and rooted in mud that still holds moisture, and it is far better feeding than the dry, coarse, heavily browsed vegetation left in the forest at the end of a long dry spell. Drinking water is a few steps away. There is no cover for anything that might threaten a calf. From an elephant's point of view it is the best square kilometre of country for a considerable distance in any direction, and it appears at the worst time of the year. They come.

Why the timing moves, and why nobody can promise you a date

The usual shorthand puts the season roughly between July and October, with the middle of that window normally the strongest part. Treat it as a pattern rather than a timetable, because the underlying variable is not the month. It is how much water is in the tank and how fast it is going down.

• A heavy previous monsoon leaves the tank full, and it takes longer to draw down far enough to expose a useful width of grazing. The season starts late.
• A poor previous monsoon can produce the opposite, with the bed uncovered early and the animals arriving weeks ahead of the guidebook schedule.
• Unseasonal rain in the middle of it all ends the concentration almost immediately. Water lying in the forest and fresh growth coming up everywhere removes the reason to walk out onto an exposed plain, and the animals disperse within days. They will come back if it dries again, but not on your schedule.
• Irrigation decisions are made by people, for reasons that have nothing to do with tourism. How much is released, and when, depends on what is being planted downstream.
• The upstream system has changed. A large irrigation development completed in recent years has altered how water moves through the tanks of this basin, and there has been sustained discussion locally about what a more constantly topped-up reservoir would do to the drawdown grassland the whole phenomenon depends on. Nobody should tell you confidently how that settles.

The practical conclusion is uncomfortable but simple. Anyone who tells you in January what the elephants will be doing in August is guessing. What you can do is check close to the time, through a lodge in the Habarana area or an operator who is actually driving there daily, and ask a question about the last few days rather than about the season in general.

What the Gathering actually is

The word gathering is doing precise work and is usually read loosely. This is not one enormous herd. Elephants do not live in enormous herds. What assembles on the lake bed is a large number of separate family units, each a matriline that spends most of the year in its own patch of forest, arriving independently and feeding within sight of one another.

That is the part that interests biologists, and it is the part worth watching for once you understand it. Groups that have no ordinary reason to meet are suddenly in the same open space. They greet, they investigate each other, calves encounter animals they are not related to, and the loose associations that structure a wider population get renewed. Adult bulls, which are not attached to any family group, move through the aggregation assessing females, and the presence of so many potential mates in one place is a large part of why bulls turn up at all.

So what you are looking at is not a migration and not a single super-herd. It is a temporary society, assembled by hunger and dissolved every night. The units walk back into the trees after dark and go their separate ways, and they do it again the next afternoon.

You will find confident figures for how many animals attend. Be sceptical of all of them. Counting animals that arrive at different times, mix, split and leave in the dark, across a plain kilometres wide, is genuinely hard, and the number most often repeated has an unclear origin and gets rounder every time it is quoted. The honest description is the useful one: more elephants in one field of view than most people will ever see again.

What it looks like, as against what the photographs show

The famous images show a solid mass of animals filling the frame edge to edge. Those pictures are not faked, but they are made with a long lens, and a long lens flattens distance. Two family groups that appear to be touching in the photograph may be two hundred metres apart on the ground.

The reality is more diffuse and, for most people, more impressive rather than less. You are looking across an enormous flat pale plain, with the treeline a long way off on every side and the water behind it. Scattered across that space are dozens of separate clusters of elephants, some near enough to hear, some reduced to grey commas on the horizon, spread over a distance you cannot easily take in at once. The scale is horizontal. It does not compress into a phone screen and it never will.

The other thing photographs cannot carry is the arrival. Groups come out of the forest edge in single file, in the last hours of the afternoon, along established lines. Watching a family walk out of the trees a kilometre away and cross open ground towards the water is, for many visitors, the better half of the experience, and it is the half nobody photographs because it does not fill a frame.

Sound is the third omission. With engines off across an open plain you get rumbles below the range you would normally notice, trumpeting from somewhere out of sight, the crack of vegetation, and the noise of a lot of large animals drinking. It carries a very long way over water and flat ground.

Afternoon, not morning, and why that inverts the standard advice

Every piece of safari advice you have ever read says go at dawn. Cool air, active animals, good light, everything moving before the heat arrives. That advice is sound almost everywhere, and at Minneriya during the Gathering it is wrong.

The reason is behavioural and specific. The elephants spend the day in the forest, in shade, out of an exceptionally hot dry-zone sun. They come out onto the exposed lake bed in the second half of the afternoon and stay through the evening, which is precisely when there is no shade at all on the grazing but the heat has begun to go out of it. A morning drive in the middle of the season frequently means arriving at a nearly empty plain, with a handful of animals still out and the rest already back under cover.

So take the afternoon session. Book it as an afternoon deliberately, say so when you arrange the vehicle, and be suspicious of any itinerary that has you at the gate at first light in Gathering season, because it has been built by somebody applying the general rule without thinking about this particular park.

The catch at the end of the drive

National park gates close, and vehicles must be out by a fixed time. The awkward truth is that the concentration continues to build after the point at which you have to leave. The best twenty minutes of the day are often the last twenty you are allowed, with animals still walking in from the treeline as your driver turns for the exit. There is nothing to be done about it except to know it in advance, to enter as early in the afternoon session as the operator will run, and not to waste the final half hour driving somewhere else.

Minneriya, Kaudulla and Hurulu: one elephant population, three gates

This is the single most useful thing on this page, and it is barely mentioned in the promotional material.

Minneriya does not have its own private elephants. It sits inside a much larger landscape of forest, tanks and corridors, and the same animals move around that landscape according to where the feeding is. Kaudulla National Park, a short distance north, is built around another ancient reservoir on the same principle and produces its own drawdown grassland on its own schedule. Hurulu Eco Park, part of a forest reserve nearer Habarana, is the third venue and is regularly used when the two tanks are not delivering. There is more protected country beyond these again, running south towards Wasgamuwa.

The elephants treat all of it as one home range and shift between the parts along corridors of remaining forest. When Minneriya's bed is at its best, they concentrate at Minneriya. When Minneriya fills, or its grazing is exhausted, or Kaudulla's bed comes good, the concentration moves. Local drivers know within a day where the animals are, because they were there yesterday.

None of that is a problem in itself. Following the animals is exactly the right thing to do, and a driver who takes you to Kaudulla because that is where the elephants are is serving you well. The problem is entirely about disclosure.

The substitution, and how to ask about it before you book

What happens in practice is that a great many safaris are sold as Minneriya regardless of which gate the vehicle actually enters, because Minneriya is the name people have heard and the name that sells. Visitors are driven to Kaudulla or Hurulu, given an excellent afternoon, and either told at the gate or not told at all. Plenty come home believing they have been to Minneriya.

Often this is harmless and occasionally it is not, because the substitution runs in both directions. The bad version is being taken into Minneriya, by name, because that is what you asked for and what is printed on the voucher, on an afternoon when everybody in the trade knows the animals are at the other tank. You get the park you paid for and not the thing you came to see. The other bad version is a substitution made for the operator's convenience rather than the elephants', towards whichever gate is nearer, cheaper or quicker to clear.

The questions that sort it out

• "Which park will we actually enter?" Not which safari, which park. Ask it when you book and again the day before, because the honest answer can change between the two.
• "Where were the elephants yesterday and the day before?" This is the question that separates people who are driving there daily from people relaying a brochure. A specific answer about recent days is worth more than any seasonal assurance.
• "If the herd is at Kaudulla or Hurulu on the day, will you take us there instead?" You want the answer to be yes. Establishing in advance that you would rather follow the animals than the name removes any incentive to quietly do one while claiming the other.
• "Whose ticket is it?" Entry is charged park by park and at a different rate for foreign visitors, and the paperwork is normally handled by the operator rather than by you at a window. Confirm that the ticket matches the park you are entering.
• "Is the tank low enough yet?" A driver who talks about the water level rather than the month is telling you they understand the mechanism.

Ask all of that pleasantly. It is not an accusation and most operators answer straightforwardly, particularly once they realise you know the three parks are alternatives. The visitors who get substituted without knowing are almost always the ones who never raised the subject.

The bund, the lake bed, and the vehicles on it

Crowding at Minneriya works differently from crowding at the leopard parks, and the difference is structural rather than informational. Nowhere else does anyone need a radio call to find the animals. Everybody already knows where they will be, because they will be on the grass at the edge of the water, which is the one place they can be. Every vehicle in the park is therefore heading for the same strip of ground, at the same hour, for the same reason.

What that produces is a line of jeeps along the drivable margin of the tank, sometimes several deep, engines running, guests standing on seats. At the height of the season the row of vehicles is a landscape feature in its own right, and it will be in your photographs unless you think about where you are looking. This is not a secret and it is not an outrage. It is the direct consequence of a predictable spectacle in a fixed location with a fixed viewing period.

Two behaviours in that line are genuinely damaging rather than merely annoying. The first is driving out onto the soft exposed bed itself, beyond the established tracks, to gain an angle. It cuts up ground that is feeding the animals and it is exactly the sort of thing that gets access restricted for everybody. The second is worse and more common. Because the family groups come out of the forest along consistent lines, it is easy to park a vehicle across the route a group is walking. An arriving family with calves in it, confronted by a row of jeeps between the trees and the water, will stop, mill, turn back, or be funnelled somewhere it did not intend to go. Being the reason a group turns around is a poor way to spend an afternoon.

The remedy is unglamorous. Ask to be parked to one side of the arrival lines rather than in front of them, accept a slightly worse angle, switch the engine off, and stay put. A stationary vehicle at a sensible distance stops being an object of interest to elephants within a few minutes, which is the entire trick.

What a good driver does here specifically

Operators around Habarana vary more than the vehicles do, and the things that mark out a good one at Minneriya are not quite the same as the things that mark out a good one elsewhere.

• They talk about the water. Someone who volunteers how far the tank has dropped, and how that compares with a fortnight ago, is watching the thing that matters.
• They will drive to another park. Willingness to go to Kaudulla or Hurulu on the day, and to say so plainly, is the clearest signal of good faith available.
• They arrive early in the session and stay put. The temptation is to tour the park and end up at the tank. The better afternoon is usually the opposite: get to the grazing, choose a position, and let the animals come to you for two hours.
• They read the arrival lines. Positioning that anticipates where a group will emerge, without blocking it, is a skill and is visible when somebody has it.
• They cut the engine without being asked, and do not restart it every few minutes to shuffle for a better view.
• They do not join the deepest part of the line. Fifty metres further along the margin, away from the cluster, is very often a better view of the same plain.
• They avoid guarantees. Anybody promising a spectacle on a particular date months ahead is selling a season they cannot see.

A departmental tracker normally joins the vehicle at the entrance under park regulations, and standards vary from excellent to indifferent. They are nonetheless the person with authority over conduct inside the boundary, and worth appealing to if the driving becomes uncomfortable.

If your dates fall in the wrong months

Say plainly what an out-of-season visit is. The tank is high, the drawdown grassland is under water or has not appeared, the surrounding forest is green and carrying feed, and the elephants have no reason to congregate. You will probably still see elephants, in ordinary numbers and in ordinary family groups, along with everything else the park holds. What you will not see is the thing the park is famous for, and no amount of driving around will produce it.

There is nothing wrong with that afternoon. It is a perfectly good dry-zone safari in attractive country close to the Cultural Triangle sites, and it is considerably quieter, which is not a small consideration. The failure mode is entirely one of expectation: people who booked the photographs and got a park.

If your dates are wrong and the Gathering is what you actually want, the honest options are to move the dates, to accept an ordinary safari and enjoy it as one, or to build the wildlife part of the trip around a park whose animals do not go anywhere. What does not work is booking Minneriya out of season in the hope of being lucky, because luck is not the operating variable here.

Minneriya against Udawalawe, in Minneriya's terms

These two parks are usually compared as if they were competing for the same visitor. They are really offering opposite bargains, and the comparison only makes sense from the calendar end.

Minneriya has the higher ceiling and no floor to speak of. In the right weeks, with the tank drawn down and the reports good, it produces something Udawalawe does not attempt and could not stage. In the wrong weeks it produces an average afternoon. The variance is enormous and it is decided months before you arrive by rainfall and irrigation schedules.

Udawalawe is the inverse: a lower ceiling and a floor you can stand on in any month, because its elephants live there and do not leave. There is no season to research and no substitution question to ask.

The practical rule follows from that. If you can check conditions close to the date, if your dates fall inside the window, and if you are already in the Cultural Triangle for the ruins, take Minneriya, because the upside is unavailable elsewhere. If you are booking blind, travelling in the wrong half of the year, or routing along the south coast and up into the hills, take the park that cannot disappoint you. Geography settles most of these cases before preference does.

The rest of the park, and the birds on the tank

Attention here is so completely fixed on one species that the rest of Minneriya is treated as scenery, which is a waste of a good landscape.

The tank itself is the best of it. Shallow margins, dead standing timber where the water once rose over trees, and a wide shoreline attract large water birds in numbers: painted storks and openbills, pelicans, cormorants drying their wings on snags, egrets and herons working the shallows, and a shifting population of ducks and waders that changes completely with the water level. A falling tank is far better birding than a full one, for the same reason it is better elephant watching. Fish eagles and kites hunt over the water, and there are eagles perched along the forest edge for anyone with binoculars.

On the land side, spotted deer are common on the grassland, sambar keep to heavier cover, wild boar cross open ground in a hurry, and buffalo wallow in the shallow margins. Toque macaques and grey langurs work the woodland edges. Mugger crocodiles live in the tank, which is the practical reason nobody should be wandering about near the water. Land monitors and water monitors are seen constantly and are usually the largest reptile most visitors have encountered. The forest around holds much more than you will see from a vehicle in three hours.

Corridors, farmland, and why the whole thing is fragile

The Gathering is often described as if it were a permanent feature of the island. It is better understood as a thing that still works, for now, because enough of the connections between these forest blocks remain open.

The animals that assemble at Minneriya spend most of the year spread across a much wider area, and they reach the tank by walking through country that also contains villages, paddy, roads and reservoirs used by people. Where those corridors narrow or close, the movement that produces the concentration becomes harder. The surrounding districts carry a serious burden of human-elephant conflict, with crop damage, night watches and deaths on both sides, and the management measures that follow, principally electric fencing, work by deciding where elephants are permitted to be. Where the fence goes is therefore not a technical detail. It shapes whether a family group two districts away can still reach this lake bed in August.

None of that is a reason to stay away. Tourism is one of the arguments that keeps the corridors on the agenda at all, and money arriving in Habarana for elephants is a large part of why the elephants are worth something to the people living alongside them. It is a reason to treat the spectacle as contingent rather than guaranteed, to take the local rules about distance and off-track driving seriously, and to be sceptical of anybody describing it as timeless.

Heat, dust and the practical shape of an afternoon

An afternoon drive in the dry zone starts in the worst heat of the day and improves. The first stretch is genuinely punishing, on open ground with a canopy that shades you from directly overhead and nothing else, and this is the part that surprises visitors who have been told the afternoon is the cooler option. It is not. It simply ends cool.

• Water, more than seems necessary, and sunscreen applied before boarding rather than in a moving vehicle.
• A hat that will not leave your head on a track at speed, or none.
• Something over your face for the dust. Dry tank margins produce a fine pale dust that hangs in still air, and in a line of vehicles you are breathing everyone else's.
• Binoculars. More valuable here than in almost any other Sri Lankan park, because the whole subject is spread across a plain at distance.
• A layer for the end. Once the sun is down, an open vehicle moving on the road back is cooler than anyone expects.
• Insect repellent for the last hour, which is when the mosquitoes near the water find you.

The tank bed is not uniformly dry, either. Parts of it stay soft, vehicles do get stuck, and the tracks that were fine last week may not be this week. That is one more reason to accept a driver who declines to go somewhere.

Photographing it, realistically

Most people arrive wanting the compressed telephoto image and go home with something else, so it is worth deciding in advance what you are actually trying to record.

A long lens will let you isolate one group and produce the picture everybody recognises, and it needs to be a genuinely long one, because the animals are further away than they appear. What a phone will do, quite well, is the opposite and arguably better photograph: the wide one, showing the scale of the plain, the treeline, the sky over it and elephants scattered across the whole frame. That is what the place actually looks like, and almost nobody takes it because everyone is trying for the other shot with the wrong equipment.

The best light arrives in the last part of the session, low and warm across pale ground, at exactly the point when the gate closing is approaching. Position matters more than gear: with the sun behind you, the animals are lit and the plain is legible; into the sun you get silhouettes on a shining lake bed, which can be much better and requires you to have thought about it beforehand. Keep the line of jeeps out of the frame by shooting along the shore rather than across it. And lower the camera for the arrivals, which are worth watching rather than capturing.

Access, and who this park is easier for

A safari here demands nothing of you physically once you are aboard, and the barrier is the vehicle, as it is at every park on the island. Getting into a high open jeep with a long step and no door is the obstacle, and it needs either reasonable mobility or firm assistance.

Where Minneriya is genuinely kinder than the alternatives is in the shape of the drive. The distance from the gate to the viewing ground is short, so there is much less time spent being shaken along rough track before anything happens. The best of the afternoon is spent stationary at the edge of the grazing rather than covering ground, which is far easier on backs, hips and anyone prone to motion sickness. And because the session is an afternoon one, there is no start before dawn and no cold hour in an open vehicle in the dark.

Set against that: there is no shade at the viewing ground, no way to shorten the drive once it has begun, no facilities beyond the entrance area, and the heat in the first hour is real. Vehicles differ, and some operators have a front passenger seat that is smoother and far easier to board. Ask for it when arranging the vehicle, describing what is actually needed, rather than discovering the problem at the step.

Fitting it into a Cultural Triangle day

Minneriya's afternoon habit turns out to be extremely convenient, because everything else worth doing in this part of the island is a morning proposition.

• Sigiriya Rock Fortress takes three to four hours and should be begun before eight o'clock, because the western face bakes from late morning onwards and the stairways clog with traffic going up and coming down at the same time. Finish, rest through the middle of the day, and go to the park in the afternoon. This is the standard shape of a Cultural Triangle day for good reason.
• Pidurangala Rock, the outcrop facing Sigiriya, is a two to three hour scramble climbed at sunrise for the view back at the fortress. Doing Pidurangala at dawn, Sigiriya afterwards and the park in the afternoon is a long day and a very full one.
• Polonnaruwa Ancient City also runs three to four hours and is best done on a bicycle hired at the gate, since the ruins are set at distances that punish walking without ever being far enough apart to justify a car. It sits on the far side of the park from Sigiriya, so a Polonnaruwa morning and a Minneriya afternoon fit together neatly on the way back.

What does not work is stacking two demanding things either side of the safari and expecting to enjoy the second. The middle of the day here is very hot, the climb and the ruins are both taken in full sun, and people who go straight from a rock staircase into an open jeep frequently spend the best hour of the afternoon asleep in the back of it.

Getting there, and the drive home in the dark

The roads are covered properly on the route pages, and there is little difficulty in them. This is flat dry-zone country with fast straight roads, and the stretch between Dambulla, Sigiriya and Polonnaruwa is among the most comfortable driving anywhere on the island. Sigiriya is the natural base and the hub these journeys are measured to:

• Bandaranaike International Airport to Sigiriya — 152 km, about 215 minutes.
• Colombo to Sigiriya — 175 km, about 240 minutes.
• Kandy to Sigiriya — 90 km, about 135 minutes.
• Dambulla to Sigiriya — 17 km, about 30 minutes.

Two things about arriving change the visit rather than the journey. The lodges here are strewn through a great deal of scrub instead of clustering in one town, and a fair number sit at the end of long unsealed side tracks. Give the exact name of the property when you arrange a car, because in this district a vague destination genuinely does lose an hour. Safaris also run in the park's own dedicated jeeps, so the car you arrive in plays no part in the drive itself. Arrange the transfer in and the transfer out as two separate journeys rather than leaving a driver idle at the gate.

The point that matters most is the return. An afternoon safari ends at dusk, and elephants cross the roads around these reservoirs at exactly that hour. It is a genuine hazard rather than a charming detail, and it is the reason not to plan a long onward leg for the same evening or to hurry a driver on that stretch. Get back to where you are sleeping, and travel on the next morning. If the arrangements are already clear, book a car directly. Everywhere else on the island has its own page among the destination guides.

A plan that survives a bad year

1. Decide the dates around the water, not the month. The July-to-October pattern is a guide. Ask locally, close to the time, how far the tank has drawn down.
2. Sleep in the Habarana or Sigiriya area, which puts you close enough to all three parks that the choice can be made on the day.
3. Ask the three questions before you book: which park you will actually enter, where the animals were in the last few days, and whether the operator will follow them to Kaudulla or Hurulu if that is where they are.
4. Book the afternoon, deliberately, and enter as early in the session as the operator will run.
5. Do the ruins or the rock in the morning and rest through the middle of the day. Arriving tired at the gate wastes the part you came for.
6. Get to the grazing and stay, rather than touring the park and arriving late. Position beside the arrival lines, never across them.
7. Engine off, and wait. The concentration builds through the session, so the afternoon improves right up to the moment you have to leave.
8. Take the wide photograph as well as the long one, and spend the last twenty minutes watching rather than shooting.
9. If the season is against you, enjoy an ordinary dry-zone park on its own terms, or put the wildlife day somewhere with resident animals instead. Do not book the Gathering and hope.
10. Do not plan a long drive after the safari. Dusk on these roads belongs to the elephants.

Minneriya is the one park in Sri Lanka where the research matters more than the morning. Turn up on a good afternoon in a good year and you will stand on the bed of an ancient reservoir watching wild elephants arrive out of the forest from every direction at once, which is not a thing that happens anywhere else. Turn up in the wrong month, or at the wrong tank, and you will have had a pleasant drive and missed it entirely by a matter of weeks. The difference is almost entirely decided before you leave home, by asking two or three specific questions of somebody who was out there yesterday.