Camp Leopard
Our Story

Growing up, my school holidays were spent in the wild. We would head deep into national parks and forest reserves in the south, camping for days at a time. I remember the sounds, the stillness, the way the light moved across the scrubland at dawn. While most kids were counting down to get back to the city, I was counting down to go back in. After high school, I left for Los Angeles to study aircraft maintenance engineering. To get through college, I found myself DJing in Hollywood under the name Marc living a life that couldn’t have been further from the jungle. Years later, when family needed me, I returned to Sri Lanka and gave Colombo a proper shot. But something didn’t sit right. I couldn’t quite explain it only that I felt disconnected from something I had once known so deeply. Over time, that feeling turned into burnout. I eventually found myself near Yala, working on something entirely different. That’s when I came across an abandoned guesthouse, sitting quietly on the edge of the wild. And in that moment, everything became clear. It wasn’t just a place it was a possibility. A way to return to the feeling I had grown up with. A way to live it. And more importantly, to share it. Camp Leopard began with that decision to step away from the expected, and move toward something more meaningful. What started as a personal journey slowly took shape into a space built with intention. Not just a place to stay, but a way of experiencing the wild one that is slower, more respectful, and more connected. From the beginning, the people around it mattered just as much as the place itself. Camp Leopard grew alongside the local community, working closely with families and safari guides, building a team that shares the same values respect for wildlife, ethical movement through the park, and a deeper understanding of the land. That same thinking extends into how the camp is run. Through the CampManager system, I created a way to manage operations with flexibility, allowing the camp to function seamlessly without losing its essence the freedom to move, to explore, and to remain connected to the experience itself. Guests who arrive are not treated as tourists, but welcomed as part of the Camp Leopard family. Even BooBoo, our resident German Shepherd, has become part of that experience greeting guests and calling Yala home in his own way. And somewhere within this journey, one encounter came to define it all. A leopard in Yala’s Block 5 later named The Prince of Veheragala whose presence, though brief, left a lasting imprint. That moment would go on to shape not just the identity of the camp, but its philosophy. Today, Camp Leopard stands as a reflection of that journey. Not built to sit in the wild but to belong to it.

We hire from the villages that border the park, and several of the team have been with us since the beginning. When things got hard, and in Sri Lanka's tourism industry over the last several years they really did, we held together the way a family does. The camp and the team came first. Everything else waited.

That decision shaped who we are. Camp Leopard has the culture it has because we never treated the people who built it as anything other than the most important part of it.

It's just how we operate because we live here and we care about what happens to this place.

We installed monkey bridges across the camp to maintain wildlife movement corridors without interruption. Elephants, leopards, and smaller species move through this landscape on routes that predate us by thousands of years. Our job is to stay out of the way of that.

Single-use plastics have no place here. We manage waste carefully, compost what we can, and treat water as the resource it is. Almost everything on your plate comes from local suppliers and the farming families in the villages around us. The artisans and makers in the surrounding communities are woven into the camp experience too, from what you find in the spaces to what you take home.

None of this is on a wall somewhere. It's just how we do things.