On the morning of the 16th I left Nagpur about 9 on a bus bound for the city of Seoni, to the north in Madhya Pradesh. The bus was slow and crowded, taking a long time just to get out of Nagpur and its suburbs and satellite towns. About 11:30 we reached the Maharashtra-Madhya Pradesh state border and passed the turn off for Pench National Park, just over the border. I had thought about going to Pench, but I had read it is difficult to find others to share jeeps there and I knew I had somebody at Kanha National Park with whom I could share a jeep.
The first part of the road in Madhya Pradesh was terrible, full of potholes as we went through hilly terrain through a teak forest full of almost leafless trees. The road eventually got better and we arrived in Seoni about 1:30. At 2 I left Seoni on an even more crowded bus heading northeast to the little junction town of Chiraidongri. People were packed into that bus. I was the third person on a seat made for two people and had standing passengers constantly leaning against me. Not a pleasant trip, and very slow, stopping, it seemed, every mile or so to pick up or drop off passengers. The terrain was fairly flat, with lots of cropland, at about 1500 feet elevation.
Arriving in Chiraidongri about 5:30, I almost immediately jumped on a bus for the final leg southeast to Khatiya on the edge of Kanha National Park. Fortunately, this bus wasn't crowded. We passed through hilly, forested terrain and reached Khatiya, at about 1500 feet elevation, about 6:30. It had taken me nine and a half hours to travel about 150 miles. I checked into a hotel right across from the bus stop and talked with a Yale Ph.D. student staying there while she spends a year doing field work for her thesis on tiger predation on livestock in the buffer zone surrounding the park. I then had dinner and tried, without success, to contact Nick, the guy I had planned to share jeeps with on safaris into the park. As it turned out, he had gone to bed early and didn't answer his phone. He is staying in the home of an English guy who spends six months of the year here, but who left in late March. I had been put in touch with him by a couple from Utah I met in Orchha in December, and he put me in touch with Nick.
I emailed Nick that night telling him where I was and the next morning shortly after 5, just after I had gotten up, he came by my room. I had hoped to go on a safari with him that morning, but since my name wasn't on the list I couldn't go. I did go to see the queue of jeeps (actually they are called "gypsies") waiting to enter the park. (The park entrance is less than a five minute walk from the hotel.) There must have been forty to fifty of them lined up.
After they all entered at 5:45 when the gate opened, I decided to take a walk, going along a dirt road that parallels the park border. I passed a few huts of the local tribal people and absent mindedly came across a bare assed old woman taking her morning dump just off the road. When I noticed her, I turned around and looked elsewhere. When I finally resumed walking, she was coming towards me and, I think, gave me a dirty look. Soon I turned off the road and followed trails into the sal forest, the tall, straight sal trees newly adorned with bright green leaves. I passed a few more huts and then went deeper into the forest. The sunlight began to filter through as the sun rose. I saw lots of langur monkeys, including a group of about fifty together. About thirty were sitting clustered on the ground and I think there must have been twenty or so in the trees above. I found the park's nature trail, followed that, and then headed back, stopping here and there to watch the langurs. It was getting hot in the sun after 8, but was pleasant under the trees. I didn't get back to the hotel until more than three hours after starting my walk.
I had breakfast, and then a second breakfast about 11 with Nick after he came out of the park. We decided to take an afternoon safari. You pay for these trips into the park by the jeepload and the charges are considerably higher if your jeep has foreigners in it. The charge is also higher if you go into the center of the reserve, where there are more tigers. The afternoon safaris are only two and a half hours compared to more than four hours, even five sometimes, for the morning ones, so we decided to go into the peripheral zone closest to the gate (the Kisli Zone) rather than the central Kanha Zone. It cost us about $76, split two ways. Kanha is said to be India's premier tiger reserve, with 40 to 70 tigers. April, May and June, when it is hot and dry before the monsoon and they need to be nearby the water holes, is the easiest time to see them. They claim this is the area Kipling was writing about in The Jungle Book, which is apparently based in part on a report in 1831 of a boy raised by wolves near Seoni. I had been humming "The Bear Necessities" on the buses from Nagpur the day before.
Kanha is mostly sal forest, with many meadows (I've been told "kanha" means "meadow") and lots of thin bamboo stands. We saw chital (spotted dear) and langurs and soon spotted several gaur by the side of the road. Gaur are Indian bison and the world's largest cattle, with the huge males weighing 2000 pounds. They are dark brown or black, with all four of their legs white on the lower half (so that they look like they are wearing white stockings), and the males are indeed huge. We also saw one albino calf. Like cows, they seem very placid. We saw a couple of small owlets in a hole in a tree, wild boar, sambar deer, barking deer (muntjacs) and lots of birds, including a jungle fowl, very much like a chicken but much more colorful.
We traversed a hilly, bamboo filled area into sal forest and eventually reached a little grassy meadow backed by the forest where we spotted two tigers in the bamboo. They were well camouflaged in the grass and about 150 feet away, but we could see them fairly well. We watched them for about half an hour as they walked through the high grass and into the bamboo. One headed towards us before turning around. The other was stalking some wild boar and using a clump of bamboo to hide himself or herself from them. The boar must have scampered off. The guide thought the two tigers were close to a year old, though they looked pretty big to me. They were fascinating to watch. I had great views with my binoculars and got a few okay photos with my new camera. Nick has a 500 mm telephoto lens that is about two feet long. He got some spectacular photos. Ours was the second jeep there. By the time the tigers disappeared and we left, there were maybe ten jeeps there. We drove back on a now cloudy late afternoon, passing more gaur and wild boar in a wide meadow. We got back to the gate at 6:30, when it closes. It gets dark about 7 and we had dinner in the open air hotel restaurant. It rained, quite a surprise, about 7:30 for ten minutes.
I was tired and overslept the next morning. Nick knocked on my door and woke me up at 5:25 and I hurriedly dressed and got to our jeep at the gate before we entered at 5:45. We headed towards the central Kanha Zone, which cost us about $94, split equally. A thin windbreaker was enough to keep me warm as we drove in the early morning. I took it off after a couple of hours when it warmed up. At the gate a sign indicated it was 24 degrees Celsius, or about 75 Fahrenheit. We saw a jackal, gaur, deer, wild boar and a jungle cat, the last the size of a very large domestic cat and colored brown. We drove along a dirt road through lovely sal forest and spotted mahouts on elephants to our left. There were three of them following a tiger and almost before we knew it a pregnant female crossed the road about 70 feet behind us. We got a great view, though a short one (Nick's camera indicated six seconds), before she disappeared into the forest cover on the other side of the road. The elephants and mahouts followed her. Soon she lay down somewhere beyond our vision. We waited for a while, but apparently she wasn't stirring. We had had quite a good view of her, though, and that was an exciting six seconds. She had turned her head to look at us as she crossed the road.
We drove on, spotting deer and lots of birds, many with wonderful calls. The guide, the driver and Nick were all very good at spotting them. We saw, among many others, hornbills, brilliant blue rollers and several peacocks displaying their fan tail of feathers. They circle slowly as they do so, trying to attract peahens. About 9 it was getting hot in the sun and we got back to the hotel for breakfast about 10:30. We sat around until about noon and then I spent most of the afternoon in my room, cooled fairly well by a cooler like the one I had in Nagpur. The electricity went out about 4 and I walked around a bit and read in the shade until dinner with Nick about 7.
The next morning I woke up soon after 4 (after going to bed before 10 the night before) and got up about 4:30. I had tea about 5 with Nick. He makes sure he arrives early with our jeep and driver so he can be the first in the queue at the gate. The sky was a little cloudy as we enterred at 5:45, heading for the Kanha Zone. We passed gaur, chital, wild boar, and a rare, large deer called barasingha. In a meadow we spotted two red-headed vultures on the ground, eating at the remains of a kill, though we couldn't see the kill in the high grass. Vultures are apparently being killed off by a medicine given to cattle that is fatal to vultures. We didn't see any tigers, but we did see an impressively large tiger scat, with remnants of the fur of one of his or her recent meals. On the way out we passed a big tree with a hole in a branch with a tiny owlet in it. Another owlet was on a nearby branch.
We came out about 10:30 and had breakfast in the hotel's open air restaurant and then I spent most of the early afternoon in my room until we left for our afternoon safari at 4. It was cloudy as we headed into the Kisli Zone. We saw gaur, chital, sambar, wild boar and barasingha. We followed some tiger pugs in the dust of the road, probably from the morning, the guide said. About 6 we saw a tiger, maybe a couple of hundred feet from us, sitting lazily on a little ridge just above a small pond. Three other jeeps showed up as we watched him and he got up and disappeared into the high grass around the pond. He reappeared on the side of the pond closest to us and then disappeared again. We drove down the road a bit and he reappeared, walking straight towards us. He was an enormous tiger and I couldn't believe he was coming right towards us, less than a hundred feet away. We pulled forward, leaving a gap between our jeep and the next jeep and he sauntered onto the road between the two jeeps and disappeared into the forest on the other side. A very exciting sighting. The guide said he was a male about five or six years old. It was really something to see him coming right towards us. We sped off, as we had to be out by 6:30, and on the way out spotted a very large sloth bear behind some bamboo right next to the road. I wish we could have had some more time to watch the bear, but our guide insisted we proceed and we did get out of the park before 6:30.
The next morning we headed into the park at 5:45, into the Kisli Zone again. As usual, we saw gaur, barasingha, chital, wild boar and sambar. There are also lots of termite mounds, with many thin ridges somewhat like flying buttresses. I haven't seen termite mounds with those ridges elsewhere. We followed tiger tracks in the dust of the road and heard the warning calls of deer, signifying the presence of a predator. The tiger was in an area beyond the reach of roads, and elephants were sent in to search of him. We drove around some and then returned to this area and saw the elephants moving towards the road. Eventually, we could see through the brush that a big tiger was near the elephants and they were directing him towards the road. The elephants emerged onto the road a few hundred feet in front of us, and eventually one of the mahouts motioned us to come forward where we saw a big tiger, which turned out to be the same one we had seen the previous evening, lying placidly just along the side of the road. We got a great view of him as he rested for quite a while (maybe ten or fifteen minutes), until we were motioned to move on. I'd guess he was maybe 50 or 60 feet away. We drove around some more and saw sloth bear footprints, but no sloth bear. It gets warm after 9, and butterflies appear as the birds get quieter. We got back to the hotel for breakfast about 10:30.
For our afternoon safari, we wanted to go to Kisli again, but its quota was filled because of all the tiger sightings there, so we went to Kanha. We saw deer, wild boar, gaur and lots of birds and monkeys on the beautiful route we were on, but no tigers that afternoon. We did see three peacocks displaying their fan tails in a meadow, but nary a pea hen around.
The next morning we headed to the Mukki sector. As usual, we saw deer, wild boar and gaur, and we followed the pug marks of a female tiger and her four cubs. We heard alarm calls, but saw no tigers. They apparently had gone into the forest before we could reach them on the road. They like walking on the soft dust of the road, which makes it easier to track them. On our safaris we almost always came across long lines of tiger tracks. We had another beautiful drive and came upon quite a few, maybe twenty, gaur together. Two of the males fought, butting their wide horned heads together and raising quite a bit of dust. Later we came across two langur monkeys in the hollows of a dead tree eating the wood of the tree inside the hollow, or perhaps eating something on the wood. That was quite interesting. They kept darting us glances between nibbles to make sure we meant them no harm. Near the end of the morning we came upon two elephants and their mahouts, along with several jeeps. A tiger was in the bamboo along the road, but it apparently was resting or sleeping and didn't appear.
In the afternoon we entered the Kisli Zone again, where we had had the most luck. Two other Europeans who had arrived the day before joined us on a cloudy afternoon so the safari cost each of us only about $19. Again, we saw lots of deer, gaur and monkeys, along with some wild boar and a jackal. Three birds tried to drive the jackal away by diving towards it. Nick thought they had eggs nearby in a nest on the ground. We drove around looking for tigers and late in the afternoon saw another jeep whose guide motioned us forward. Along the road a big tiger was sitting in a little pool of water. The pool was lined with concrete and wasn't much larger than the length of the tiger, so it looked more like something in a zoo. Still, it was another great close up view of a tiger in the wild and it was fun to watch him drink, yawn and rest his head in the water. Afterwards, the four of us had dinner at the hotel restaurant.
The next morning I left on my last safari at Kanha. Nick and I were joined by an Indian couple and we ventured into the Sarhi Zone. We saw a couple of jackals early on, along with deer and lots of birds. The area was beautiful, very hilly with views down into the valleys between the hills as we traversed dirt roads on steep hillsides. Most of the trees along the way were nearly leafless. At one point we came across a commotion of birds, which I didn't fully appreciate until the more observant Nick explained to me what had happened. A shikra was chasing a small red headed woodpecker, caught him and took him to the ground. Immediately, a dozen or more babblers attacked the shikra on the ground (this part I saw), freeing the woodpecker and driving the shikra off. The apparently somewhat stunned little woodpecker then flew off. Nick said he'd never seen birds defend a bird of a different species.
We circled through the Sarhi Zone and came back to the green sal forest nearer the park center and found a big herd of barasingha in a meadow. We also spotted two vultures in barren tree. They flew off and we noticed about five or six of them circling in the sky, so there must have been a fresh kill nearby. We didn't see any tigers, though. It was hot in the late morning and we got back to the hotel for breakfast about 10:30.
All together, I went on nine safaris at a total cost of about $340 for the entrance fees, jeeps and tips, and saw tigers on five of them, six tigers in total, a much better rate of success than I had expected.
That afternoon Nick had hired a car to take him to Jabalpur (he had a flight to Delhi the next morning) and graciously invited me to go along with him. We left about 2:30 on the hundred mile trip northeast, passing small towns and villages and the large town on Mandla on the holy Narmada River. We came through some wooded hills south of Jabalpur, rising to over 2000 feet in elevation and passing maybe fifty carts pulled by oxen and full of colorful tribal people and their possessions. I wonder where they were going. It was quite a sight to see all those heavily laden carts strung out along the paved two lane highway. We arrived in Jabalpur, at about 1500 feet elevation, about 6, checked into a hotel and went to dinner. I was very tired and went to bed about 9:30.
I slept well, all the way until 6 (after so many mornings getting up before 5), and saw Nick off at 7 when he took a taxi to the airport. Extremely knowledgeable about wildlife, and much else, he was a great traveling companion. He's headed back to London, where he teaches at a university. Tired, I spent most of the morning in the hotel, with breakfast in my room, before venturing out to an internet cafe about 11.
About 3 I took a tempo (a large shared autorickshaw) about 12 miles west to Bhedaghat on the Narmada River. Arriving about 4, I boarded one of the tourist boats that take you up the river through the Marble Rocks, mostly white, rocky cliffs that line the river below a waterfall. About twenty of us were on a boat rowed up the river into the narrow gorge between the rocks and back, a trip of about 30 to 40 minutes. It was fairly scenic, with rocky white pinnacles rising about 100 feet above the water. The two guys rowing had to strain in the narrowest part of the river where the current was strong.
Afterward I walked to a nearby 10th century Durga temple on a hilltop reached by 108 stairs with statues of the Chausath (64) Yogini in an arcade circling the temple. They were quite interesting, though almost all had been damaged by Muslims. Heads, breasts, arms and legs were often missing, but the parts that survived were very well done. Two or three of them were almost complete. From the hilltop temple there was a good view of the gorge of the Marble Rocks below. From there I walked about a mile upstream to the Dhaundhar Falls, a mini-Niagara perhaps 40 or 50 feet high. A lot of water was crashing over the very scenic falls, which I thought more impressive than the Marble Rocks. The narrow chasm of the gorge starts just below the falls. Lots of Indian tourists were there for the sunset. I got there after six and stayed there until almost dark, with sunset about 6:30, before taking a tempo back to Jabalpur about 7.
The first part of the road in Madhya Pradesh was terrible, full of potholes as we went through hilly terrain through a teak forest full of almost leafless trees. The road eventually got better and we arrived in Seoni about 1:30. At 2 I left Seoni on an even more crowded bus heading northeast to the little junction town of Chiraidongri. People were packed into that bus. I was the third person on a seat made for two people and had standing passengers constantly leaning against me. Not a pleasant trip, and very slow, stopping, it seemed, every mile or so to pick up or drop off passengers. The terrain was fairly flat, with lots of cropland, at about 1500 feet elevation.
Arriving in Chiraidongri about 5:30, I almost immediately jumped on a bus for the final leg southeast to Khatiya on the edge of Kanha National Park. Fortunately, this bus wasn't crowded. We passed through hilly, forested terrain and reached Khatiya, at about 1500 feet elevation, about 6:30. It had taken me nine and a half hours to travel about 150 miles. I checked into a hotel right across from the bus stop and talked with a Yale Ph.D. student staying there while she spends a year doing field work for her thesis on tiger predation on livestock in the buffer zone surrounding the park. I then had dinner and tried, without success, to contact Nick, the guy I had planned to share jeeps with on safaris into the park. As it turned out, he had gone to bed early and didn't answer his phone. He is staying in the home of an English guy who spends six months of the year here, but who left in late March. I had been put in touch with him by a couple from Utah I met in Orchha in December, and he put me in touch with Nick.
I emailed Nick that night telling him where I was and the next morning shortly after 5, just after I had gotten up, he came by my room. I had hoped to go on a safari with him that morning, but since my name wasn't on the list I couldn't go. I did go to see the queue of jeeps (actually they are called "gypsies") waiting to enter the park. (The park entrance is less than a five minute walk from the hotel.) There must have been forty to fifty of them lined up.
After they all entered at 5:45 when the gate opened, I decided to take a walk, going along a dirt road that parallels the park border. I passed a few huts of the local tribal people and absent mindedly came across a bare assed old woman taking her morning dump just off the road. When I noticed her, I turned around and looked elsewhere. When I finally resumed walking, she was coming towards me and, I think, gave me a dirty look. Soon I turned off the road and followed trails into the sal forest, the tall, straight sal trees newly adorned with bright green leaves. I passed a few more huts and then went deeper into the forest. The sunlight began to filter through as the sun rose. I saw lots of langur monkeys, including a group of about fifty together. About thirty were sitting clustered on the ground and I think there must have been twenty or so in the trees above. I found the park's nature trail, followed that, and then headed back, stopping here and there to watch the langurs. It was getting hot in the sun after 8, but was pleasant under the trees. I didn't get back to the hotel until more than three hours after starting my walk.
I had breakfast, and then a second breakfast about 11 with Nick after he came out of the park. We decided to take an afternoon safari. You pay for these trips into the park by the jeepload and the charges are considerably higher if your jeep has foreigners in it. The charge is also higher if you go into the center of the reserve, where there are more tigers. The afternoon safaris are only two and a half hours compared to more than four hours, even five sometimes, for the morning ones, so we decided to go into the peripheral zone closest to the gate (the Kisli Zone) rather than the central Kanha Zone. It cost us about $76, split two ways. Kanha is said to be India's premier tiger reserve, with 40 to 70 tigers. April, May and June, when it is hot and dry before the monsoon and they need to be nearby the water holes, is the easiest time to see them. They claim this is the area Kipling was writing about in The Jungle Book, which is apparently based in part on a report in 1831 of a boy raised by wolves near Seoni. I had been humming "The Bear Necessities" on the buses from Nagpur the day before.
Kanha is mostly sal forest, with many meadows (I've been told "kanha" means "meadow") and lots of thin bamboo stands. We saw chital (spotted dear) and langurs and soon spotted several gaur by the side of the road. Gaur are Indian bison and the world's largest cattle, with the huge males weighing 2000 pounds. They are dark brown or black, with all four of their legs white on the lower half (so that they look like they are wearing white stockings), and the males are indeed huge. We also saw one albino calf. Like cows, they seem very placid. We saw a couple of small owlets in a hole in a tree, wild boar, sambar deer, barking deer (muntjacs) and lots of birds, including a jungle fowl, very much like a chicken but much more colorful.
We traversed a hilly, bamboo filled area into sal forest and eventually reached a little grassy meadow backed by the forest where we spotted two tigers in the bamboo. They were well camouflaged in the grass and about 150 feet away, but we could see them fairly well. We watched them for about half an hour as they walked through the high grass and into the bamboo. One headed towards us before turning around. The other was stalking some wild boar and using a clump of bamboo to hide himself or herself from them. The boar must have scampered off. The guide thought the two tigers were close to a year old, though they looked pretty big to me. They were fascinating to watch. I had great views with my binoculars and got a few okay photos with my new camera. Nick has a 500 mm telephoto lens that is about two feet long. He got some spectacular photos. Ours was the second jeep there. By the time the tigers disappeared and we left, there were maybe ten jeeps there. We drove back on a now cloudy late afternoon, passing more gaur and wild boar in a wide meadow. We got back to the gate at 6:30, when it closes. It gets dark about 7 and we had dinner in the open air hotel restaurant. It rained, quite a surprise, about 7:30 for ten minutes.
I was tired and overslept the next morning. Nick knocked on my door and woke me up at 5:25 and I hurriedly dressed and got to our jeep at the gate before we entered at 5:45. We headed towards the central Kanha Zone, which cost us about $94, split equally. A thin windbreaker was enough to keep me warm as we drove in the early morning. I took it off after a couple of hours when it warmed up. At the gate a sign indicated it was 24 degrees Celsius, or about 75 Fahrenheit. We saw a jackal, gaur, deer, wild boar and a jungle cat, the last the size of a very large domestic cat and colored brown. We drove along a dirt road through lovely sal forest and spotted mahouts on elephants to our left. There were three of them following a tiger and almost before we knew it a pregnant female crossed the road about 70 feet behind us. We got a great view, though a short one (Nick's camera indicated six seconds), before she disappeared into the forest cover on the other side of the road. The elephants and mahouts followed her. Soon she lay down somewhere beyond our vision. We waited for a while, but apparently she wasn't stirring. We had had quite a good view of her, though, and that was an exciting six seconds. She had turned her head to look at us as she crossed the road.
We drove on, spotting deer and lots of birds, many with wonderful calls. The guide, the driver and Nick were all very good at spotting them. We saw, among many others, hornbills, brilliant blue rollers and several peacocks displaying their fan tail of feathers. They circle slowly as they do so, trying to attract peahens. About 9 it was getting hot in the sun and we got back to the hotel for breakfast about 10:30. We sat around until about noon and then I spent most of the afternoon in my room, cooled fairly well by a cooler like the one I had in Nagpur. The electricity went out about 4 and I walked around a bit and read in the shade until dinner with Nick about 7.
The next morning I woke up soon after 4 (after going to bed before 10 the night before) and got up about 4:30. I had tea about 5 with Nick. He makes sure he arrives early with our jeep and driver so he can be the first in the queue at the gate. The sky was a little cloudy as we enterred at 5:45, heading for the Kanha Zone. We passed gaur, chital, wild boar, and a rare, large deer called barasingha. In a meadow we spotted two red-headed vultures on the ground, eating at the remains of a kill, though we couldn't see the kill in the high grass. Vultures are apparently being killed off by a medicine given to cattle that is fatal to vultures. We didn't see any tigers, but we did see an impressively large tiger scat, with remnants of the fur of one of his or her recent meals. On the way out we passed a big tree with a hole in a branch with a tiny owlet in it. Another owlet was on a nearby branch.
We came out about 10:30 and had breakfast in the hotel's open air restaurant and then I spent most of the early afternoon in my room until we left for our afternoon safari at 4. It was cloudy as we headed into the Kisli Zone. We saw gaur, chital, sambar, wild boar and barasingha. We followed some tiger pugs in the dust of the road, probably from the morning, the guide said. About 6 we saw a tiger, maybe a couple of hundred feet from us, sitting lazily on a little ridge just above a small pond. Three other jeeps showed up as we watched him and he got up and disappeared into the high grass around the pond. He reappeared on the side of the pond closest to us and then disappeared again. We drove down the road a bit and he reappeared, walking straight towards us. He was an enormous tiger and I couldn't believe he was coming right towards us, less than a hundred feet away. We pulled forward, leaving a gap between our jeep and the next jeep and he sauntered onto the road between the two jeeps and disappeared into the forest on the other side. A very exciting sighting. The guide said he was a male about five or six years old. It was really something to see him coming right towards us. We sped off, as we had to be out by 6:30, and on the way out spotted a very large sloth bear behind some bamboo right next to the road. I wish we could have had some more time to watch the bear, but our guide insisted we proceed and we did get out of the park before 6:30.
The next morning we headed into the park at 5:45, into the Kisli Zone again. As usual, we saw gaur, barasingha, chital, wild boar and sambar. There are also lots of termite mounds, with many thin ridges somewhat like flying buttresses. I haven't seen termite mounds with those ridges elsewhere. We followed tiger tracks in the dust of the road and heard the warning calls of deer, signifying the presence of a predator. The tiger was in an area beyond the reach of roads, and elephants were sent in to search of him. We drove around some and then returned to this area and saw the elephants moving towards the road. Eventually, we could see through the brush that a big tiger was near the elephants and they were directing him towards the road. The elephants emerged onto the road a few hundred feet in front of us, and eventually one of the mahouts motioned us to come forward where we saw a big tiger, which turned out to be the same one we had seen the previous evening, lying placidly just along the side of the road. We got a great view of him as he rested for quite a while (maybe ten or fifteen minutes), until we were motioned to move on. I'd guess he was maybe 50 or 60 feet away. We drove around some more and saw sloth bear footprints, but no sloth bear. It gets warm after 9, and butterflies appear as the birds get quieter. We got back to the hotel for breakfast about 10:30.
For our afternoon safari, we wanted to go to Kisli again, but its quota was filled because of all the tiger sightings there, so we went to Kanha. We saw deer, wild boar, gaur and lots of birds and monkeys on the beautiful route we were on, but no tigers that afternoon. We did see three peacocks displaying their fan tails in a meadow, but nary a pea hen around.
The next morning we headed to the Mukki sector. As usual, we saw deer, wild boar and gaur, and we followed the pug marks of a female tiger and her four cubs. We heard alarm calls, but saw no tigers. They apparently had gone into the forest before we could reach them on the road. They like walking on the soft dust of the road, which makes it easier to track them. On our safaris we almost always came across long lines of tiger tracks. We had another beautiful drive and came upon quite a few, maybe twenty, gaur together. Two of the males fought, butting their wide horned heads together and raising quite a bit of dust. Later we came across two langur monkeys in the hollows of a dead tree eating the wood of the tree inside the hollow, or perhaps eating something on the wood. That was quite interesting. They kept darting us glances between nibbles to make sure we meant them no harm. Near the end of the morning we came upon two elephants and their mahouts, along with several jeeps. A tiger was in the bamboo along the road, but it apparently was resting or sleeping and didn't appear.
In the afternoon we entered the Kisli Zone again, where we had had the most luck. Two other Europeans who had arrived the day before joined us on a cloudy afternoon so the safari cost each of us only about $19. Again, we saw lots of deer, gaur and monkeys, along with some wild boar and a jackal. Three birds tried to drive the jackal away by diving towards it. Nick thought they had eggs nearby in a nest on the ground. We drove around looking for tigers and late in the afternoon saw another jeep whose guide motioned us forward. Along the road a big tiger was sitting in a little pool of water. The pool was lined with concrete and wasn't much larger than the length of the tiger, so it looked more like something in a zoo. Still, it was another great close up view of a tiger in the wild and it was fun to watch him drink, yawn and rest his head in the water. Afterwards, the four of us had dinner at the hotel restaurant.
The next morning I left on my last safari at Kanha. Nick and I were joined by an Indian couple and we ventured into the Sarhi Zone. We saw a couple of jackals early on, along with deer and lots of birds. The area was beautiful, very hilly with views down into the valleys between the hills as we traversed dirt roads on steep hillsides. Most of the trees along the way were nearly leafless. At one point we came across a commotion of birds, which I didn't fully appreciate until the more observant Nick explained to me what had happened. A shikra was chasing a small red headed woodpecker, caught him and took him to the ground. Immediately, a dozen or more babblers attacked the shikra on the ground (this part I saw), freeing the woodpecker and driving the shikra off. The apparently somewhat stunned little woodpecker then flew off. Nick said he'd never seen birds defend a bird of a different species.
We circled through the Sarhi Zone and came back to the green sal forest nearer the park center and found a big herd of barasingha in a meadow. We also spotted two vultures in barren tree. They flew off and we noticed about five or six of them circling in the sky, so there must have been a fresh kill nearby. We didn't see any tigers, though. It was hot in the late morning and we got back to the hotel for breakfast about 10:30.
All together, I went on nine safaris at a total cost of about $340 for the entrance fees, jeeps and tips, and saw tigers on five of them, six tigers in total, a much better rate of success than I had expected.
That afternoon Nick had hired a car to take him to Jabalpur (he had a flight to Delhi the next morning) and graciously invited me to go along with him. We left about 2:30 on the hundred mile trip northeast, passing small towns and villages and the large town on Mandla on the holy Narmada River. We came through some wooded hills south of Jabalpur, rising to over 2000 feet in elevation and passing maybe fifty carts pulled by oxen and full of colorful tribal people and their possessions. I wonder where they were going. It was quite a sight to see all those heavily laden carts strung out along the paved two lane highway. We arrived in Jabalpur, at about 1500 feet elevation, about 6, checked into a hotel and went to dinner. I was very tired and went to bed about 9:30.
I slept well, all the way until 6 (after so many mornings getting up before 5), and saw Nick off at 7 when he took a taxi to the airport. Extremely knowledgeable about wildlife, and much else, he was a great traveling companion. He's headed back to London, where he teaches at a university. Tired, I spent most of the morning in the hotel, with breakfast in my room, before venturing out to an internet cafe about 11.
About 3 I took a tempo (a large shared autorickshaw) about 12 miles west to Bhedaghat on the Narmada River. Arriving about 4, I boarded one of the tourist boats that take you up the river through the Marble Rocks, mostly white, rocky cliffs that line the river below a waterfall. About twenty of us were on a boat rowed up the river into the narrow gorge between the rocks and back, a trip of about 30 to 40 minutes. It was fairly scenic, with rocky white pinnacles rising about 100 feet above the water. The two guys rowing had to strain in the narrowest part of the river where the current was strong.
Afterward I walked to a nearby 10th century Durga temple on a hilltop reached by 108 stairs with statues of the Chausath (64) Yogini in an arcade circling the temple. They were quite interesting, though almost all had been damaged by Muslims. Heads, breasts, arms and legs were often missing, but the parts that survived were very well done. Two or three of them were almost complete. From the hilltop temple there was a good view of the gorge of the Marble Rocks below. From there I walked about a mile upstream to the Dhaundhar Falls, a mini-Niagara perhaps 40 or 50 feet high. A lot of water was crashing over the very scenic falls, which I thought more impressive than the Marble Rocks. The narrow chasm of the gorge starts just below the falls. Lots of Indian tourists were there for the sunset. I got there after six and stayed there until almost dark, with sunset about 6:30, before taking a tempo back to Jabalpur about 7.
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