November 21- 28, 2012: Bhubaneshwar - Konark - Puri

At 5 a.m on the morning of the 21st I took a taxi in the dark through the mostly deserted streets of Calcutta from my hotel to Howrah Railway Station.  I noticed my driver treated the traffic lights as no more than suggestive.  There was considerably more traffic on the approach to and on the massive Howrah Bridge over the Hooghly River.  It took only about 10 minutes to reach the station, a trip that cost me more than the fare for my almost eight hour upcoming train trip.  In the cavernous station, already crammed with people, many of them sleeping on the floor, at that early hour, I eventually found my train.  The crowded train left shortly after 6, with the sun rising shortly before 6.  The train headed southwest, paralleling the coast, through West Bengal and Odisha (renamed from Orissa in 2010) states to Bhubaneshwar, about 275 miles away.  We passed lots of rice fields, many green, many already brown, with some of the latter being harvested by men and women both, all under the typically hazy Indian sky.  I saw a line of men carrying big bundles of rice straw on their heads.  The air was cool in the morning and there were lots of trees along the way, and many ponds, one filled with scores of purple lotus flowers.  I also saw many birds, mostly egrets.  The terrain was flat until we passed some hills towards the end of the trip, and there were some huge steel mills off in the distance.  We crossed several rivers, including the very wide Mahanadi just before we reached the city of Cuttack.  I talked with a friendly man from Calcutta for a while and we arrived shortly before 2, about an hour late.  It took me about an hour to get a hotel and that was pretty much it for the day.  I went to bed about 8.

I was up early the next day and about 6:30 was at Lingaraj Mandir, Bhubaneshwar's tallest temple at about 180 feet.  Non-Hindus are not allowed inside this thousand year old stone temple, a policy dating from the Moslem depredations of the city's temples, but you can get a look over the walls of the compound from a viewing platform on the north side.  I enjoyed just walking around the area and seeing the pilgrims, the beggars, the cows, the commercial stands, and all the other temple area activity.  I went to several other temples in the area.  At one the priests were preparing food, with cut up vegetables placed in clay pots and ready for the smoky fires.  There was also a group of chanting, parading pilgrims in that temple.  Another temple, a small one dating from the 8th century, had a friendly priest who showed me how he washed and dressed the resident deity.  I passed by the local water tank, the Bindu Sagar, said to contain nectar, wine and water from holy rivers all over India (and from the look of it, many other less salubrious ingredients) and visited three other stone temples, two of them beautifully decorated with sculpture.  Odishan temples have a standard form, with a tall sanctuary tower called a deul and a lower entry hall called a jagamohana.  Sometime after noon I made a lunch stop and had an Odishan thali, which was very good, and then visited another two well decorated ancient temples after lunch before heading back to the hotel.

I was up early again the next morning and after breakfast at the train station took an autorickshaw to the Udaigiri and Kandagiri Caves about six miles away.  These man-made caves, carved out by Jains over 2000 years ago, are situated on two small hills separated by a road.  There must be about 30 caves in all, most fairly simple but some with interesting sculpture.  The low cells are sloped up from the openings, supposedly so the monks who slept in them had a sort of pillow at the far end.  In one cave there is a long inscription in Brahmi script, dating from the 2nd century B.C.  I spent about two and a half hours there and then took an autorickshaw to the Tribal Museum back in town.  Odisha's population of over 40 million people is almost one quarter tribal (62 different tribes), in the inland hills and jungles. This is a terrific museum, the best tribal museum I've been to by far, with clothing, ornaments, tools, weapons, musical instruments and much else on display.  I spent about four hours there.  There were some wonderful audio-visual displays.  For over an hour in the museum I was followed around by a guy until I realized he was the driver who had brought me and was hoping for an additional fare.  I finally told him to go.

I was up again before dawn the next morning and after breakfast took an autorickshaw out of town to Dhauli, with a long Ashoka inscription on a big rock.  This is near the battlefield where Ashoka defeated the Kalingas in 261 B.C., a bloodbath so terrible it is said to have caused Ashoka's conversion to Buddhism.  (His remorse apparently did not extend to restoring the Kalinga's independence from his empire.)  The rock with the inscription is now protected by an ugly building.  On the hill nearby is a gleaming white stupa built by the Japanese in the 1970's.  I went back to town, packed my bag and walked to the State Museum, which opened at 10.  It was fairly interesting. Oddly, it had a "Special Toilet for Foreigners," with a combination lock opened by a code given to me at the ticket window.

About 12:30 I caught a crowded bus to Konark, a small town on the coast about 40 miles away.  Arriving about two hours later, I got a hotel and then spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the enclosure of the 13th century Sun Temple.  There are great views of this giant temple as you walked around it.  It was once on the coast, but the coast has receded about two miles, and was visible out to sea, known to sailors as the Black Pagoda.  At some point it was sacked and then abandoned.  The deul, the main tower, thought to have been 200-230 feet high, collapsed and much of the rest was buried in sand.  The British began restoration soon after 1900.  It's no longer a working temple, but there were lots of visitors until it closed at 8 p.m.  It was lit up at night, an impressive sight.

I entered the Sun Temple compound soon after it opened at 6 the next morning and spent about four hours there.  There were already lots of people there and within half an hour on that Sunday morning they were pouring in by the hundreds, almost all Indian.  I think I saw about five other Westerners.  The surviving jagomohana, the entry hall in front of the wrecked deul, is itself 130 feet high and covered with sculpture.  The stone platform upon which the jagomohana and deul rest is maybe 400 or 500 feet long and maybe ten fight high and sculpted to resemble the chariot of Surya the Sun God, with twelve wheels (maybe seven feet in diameter) carved on each side.  There were seven horses in front.  Now only one remains.  The sculpture on the platform, jagamohana and deul is very interesting, much of it erotic, but also with musicians and gods and animals.  A procession of something like 1700 elephants decorates the lowest band of sculpture ringing the base of the platform.  The place was packed, but I enjoyed it.  I must have refused 20 or 30 photo requests, though I did agree to a few.

I had a late breakfast, checked out of my hotel, and then visited the museum (with some interesting photos of the temple at the time of restoration in the early 1900's) before catching a very crowded bus along the coast to Puri, 20 miles away.  I had to stand and couldn't stand up straight because of the low bus ceiling.  Needless to say, I was happy to reach Puri after an hour or so and get off that bus.  Puri is right on the beach, a wide beach with big waves, and I got a room in a somewhat run-down but still clean and comfortable hotel that once was the mansion of the Raja of Serampore, with windows facing the Bay of Bengal.  I had a great fish dinner with a British couple and slept well on a comfortable bed under a mosquito net to the sound of the waves.  With the ocean breezes, it is cool here at night, in the low 60's, I think.

I was out on the beach the next morning just after six, in time to see the sun rise through the haze over the sea.  There is a fishing village just up the beach and fishing boats were leaving and returning.  It was interesting to see them navigating the big waves while launching or returning.  The beach was crowded with boats, boatmen and villagers, and of course with men and boys having their morning craps along the ocean.  You really had to be very careful where you stepped.  Pretty disgusting.  Nonetheless, I stayed and watched all the fisherman activity for an hour and a half.  Fish were off loaded onto the sand and then apparently sold and carted off by women in metal basins.  I saw several types of fish, including hammerhead sharks but only about three or four feet in length, and even crabs and lots of eels.  Primitive winches operated by eight to ten men hauled up the boats after they had ridden the waves onto the beach.  The village itself was filthy, with paper and plastic garbage everywhere.  The houses were both brick structures and grass huts.

I came back and had a big fruit salad and curd for breakfast and ended up spending most of the day in a little restaurant.  I met, among others, a 73 year old man there named Hamish Kane who was born in Calcutta (his father was in the colonial service and after independence with the British High Commission) and lived there until he was 16.  He comes back to India every year now, spending much time in Puri.  He had great stories of Calcutta, Darjeeling (where he went to school starting at age 11) and Puri in the '40's and early '50's.  He remembers the horrific Hindu-Moslem carnage of 1947, having seen people killed from the veranda of his home.  An interesting guy, he later became a disc jockey for radio stations in the U.K., eventually making it from pirate radio stations to the BBC.

In the late afternoon, I walked down the road to the restored, old railroad hotel, where Hamish remembers staying with his parents in the late '40's.  It has photos of Jackie Kennedy from her tour of India in 1962 and Leonid Brezhnev from his tour in 1961.  Neither visited Puri.  I walked to the "Bengali Beach," the nicer stretch of the wide beach fronted by many hotels, some quite big, catering to people from Calcutta.  There were some Bengalis in the surf, the women fully clothed.  I got back just after dark.

I slept in a bit later the next morning, had breakfast, and then took a cycle richshaw about 8:30 to the Jagannath Temple, one of the holiest sites in India.  In fact, Puri is one of the four holy abodes of India.  It is the easternmost, with the others being Badrinath in the north (which I visited in November 2010), Dwarka in the west (which I visited in February of 2012), and Rameshwaram in the south.

An incarnation of Vishnu, Jagannath means "Lord of the Universe," and abides in the temple with his brother Balabhandra and his sister Subandhra.  Non-Hindus are not allowed into the large temple compound, with the 215 foot high temple, dating from about 1200, in the center.  You can get a glimpse into the compound and a good view of the deul, jagamohana and other buildings from a roof top just east of the compound.  The deul was once whitewashed, but has now been restored to its natural stone color.  I walked around, observing all the temple activity.  The three temple deities are pictured everywhere and are quite distinctive looking, with short bodies, big round heads and big round white eyes.  In fact, they remind me of the South Park characters.  Cartman as a god.  Each June or July, the three deities are taken in huge wooden carts (Lord Jagannath's is the largest, 42 feet tall with sixteen wheels seven feet in diameter), on a procession about two miles in length, each cart pulled by about 4000 men.  The English word "juggernaut" comes from this procession, as devotees apparently used to throw themselves under the wheels, an auspicious death.  Some still do die, apparently, perhaps from accident.  Highly decorated elephants and the Raja of Puri also make up the procession, attended by maybe a half million people.

From the temple I walked through the narrow lanes to a water tank flanked by more temples, then walked back to the Jagannath Temple in part along the very wide street taken by the deities on their yearly progression.  I then walked to the cremation grounds near the sea.  There were only two burning piles of wood and a few smouldering remains of fires.  I didn't see any bodies.  I walked along the wide beach full of Bengalis for a while and then took a cycle rickshaw back to my hotel and had lunch before spending the rest of the afternoon in an internet cafe.

I spent a good part of the next day trying to decide on my route for the next part of my journey, as I am heading to the tribal areas of Odisha and Chhattisgarh and want to time my visits to see weekly markets.  I didn't do much else that day, though just before sunset I went down to the beach and watched the sun set over the sea down the coast.  Puri is on India's east coast, but because of the curve of the coast here, in the winter the sun both rises and sets over the ocean.  I've enjoyed Puri, with its sea breezes and congenial fellow travelers, quite a few who are spending a lot of time here. 

November 18 -20, 2012: Saipan to Bangkok to Calcutta

I'm off for up to another six months in India, this time in the south of the country.  I was supposed to leave Saipan on the 17th, but my scheduled early morning flight to Guam, the first leg of the trip, was cancelled because of mechanical difficulties and I couldn't arrive in time for my connecting flights with a later plane that day.  I also had to book another flight from Bangkok to Calcutta, because my already scheduled flight on the 18th was non-changeable within 48 hours of departure and non-refundable.  So that cost me an extra $210 or so.

I did finally fly from Saipan to Guam on the 18th, with a 4:30 a.m. departure.  Next was a flight to Narita in Japan only to find upon arrival that I was not booked on the 10:50 flight onward to Bangkok that United Airlines had told me I was booked on.  After about four hours and speaking to five or six different persons, I finally did get a boarding pass for a flight to Bangkok for 5:30 in the evening.  So I had a layover in Narita of about eight hours instead of one hour.  I slept off and on for maybe four of the seven hours on the flight and arrived in Bangkok just before 11 at night.  I got to my hotel a little before 1 a.m. and was happy to take a shower and go to bed.  I'm not sure I slept at all, but it was great to lie down after the cramped sleep on the plane.

I got up on the 19th about 6, had breakfast and took a taxi to Bangkok's old airport about 7.  It was a Monday morning and I was worried about the commute, but it took only an hour.  The news on the radio was mostly about President Obama's trip to Thailand.  The Air Asia flight to Calcutta was at 11, so I milled about the old, now mostly unused airport and noticed a group of people looking out a window onto the tarmac.  I walked over and saw Air Force One and an apparently identical Boeing 747 (the back up Air Force One, I guess), along with a smaller plane with "United States of America" on it.  A red carpet lined with an honor guard led to the stairs up to the entrance of Air Force One, with Thai officials, including a woman in a bright yellow dress, lined up just below the stairs.  Several Secret Service-looking guys surrounded the plane.  After maybe 20 minutes, a motorcade of about 40 vehicles approached, with a couple of Presidential-looking limousines, the first one flying Thai and U.S. flags, near the front.  I had my binoculars and saw President Obama get out, shake hands and bound up the stairs, with perhaps a couple of others, probably including Secretary of State Clinton.  He waved from the top of the stairs before entering the plane.  Everyone else was relegated to the stairs at the back of the plane.  Air Force One fairly quickly taxied to the runway and then took off, followed by the back up 747, on the way to Rangoon.  He had spent just a day in Bangkok, meeting the king and prime minister and visiting Wat Pho, with its giant reclining Buddha.

I slept a bit on the flight to Calcutta.  We landed a little after noon, Indian time, with great views of the Sunderbans, the mangrove swamps of the Ganges Delta, before we landed.  I took a bus into town and checked into the hotel where I've stayed before.  I was a little surprised that the main clerk remembered me. The weather was relatively cool, in the 80's, and after resting in my room, I took a short walk and got a haircut before an early dinner.  I had planned to get a haircut in Bangkok, but arrived too late.  So I asked the guy at the hotel to recommend a place for me and he directed me to a somewhat upmarket place called Awesome that charged 150 rupees (less than $3) for a haircut, twice as much as I have paid anywhere else in India and three to five times the usual price.  The older man who seemed to be the proprietor of the place took over from the younger man who had started cutting my hair.  The younger man was relegated to standing by and brushing away loose hair with a little brush as the older man did the cutting.  The older man did allow the younger one to finish the haircut and he gave me quite a good head massage at the end.  First two person haircut I have had.  After dinner, I was tired and went to bed just after 7, sleeping well until about 3:30 the next morning.  I looked out my window and saw about five men sleeping on rope beds in the little alley below.

I got up around 4:30 and went out for a walk about 6, soon after dawn.  I walked for about three hours before breakfast and enjoyed all the sights in the early morning cool.  The streets were comparatively deserted, but there was still a lot to see.  A few rickshaws.  (Calcutta has the world's last man-pulled ones.)  A pot bellied street sweeper.  People asleep on the sidewalks, some next to their rickshaws.  People conducing their mornings ablutions at curbside.  A man delivering long sugar cane stalks, depositing them next to a lamppost  on a corner.  Several men on bicycles carting scores of chickens tied to their bikes.  A small parade with drums came along, centering on a transvestite dressed in a blue belly dancer outfit.  He was followed by maybe 50 people, men and women, and danced with both men and women as the parade proceeded.  Quite a few people stopped and watched in the predominately Moslem neighborhood.  He was quite the performer and seemed to revel in the attention.  I passed by him walking toward me on the sidewalk later in the day and he said something like, "You took my photograph!"

Eventually, following the parade, I reached the street side poultry market , with thousands of chickens in big wicker baskets.  Men were binding their legs and selling them, to be taken away in big clumps on bicycles for the most part.  One guy told me a chicken sold for 120 rupees (a little over $2) a kilo and that a chicken usually weighs a minimum of one kilo, 800 grams.  A little further on was a street side fish market.  Bengalis love fish.  It was quite interesting to see the expert way they eviscerated the larger fish before selling them.  There were several different kinds of fish, plus shrimp and crayfish, on sale.  People were friendly and I very much enjoyed it.  There is always so much to see on the streets of Calcutta, and often beneath once handsome and now derelict old colonial ear buildings.

After breakfast I booked a train ticket south for the next day and then spent the rest of the day doing errands and walking around the always interesting streets of this city..

My plan this year is to spend my time in the south of India, which I think will probably take the full six months allowed by my visa, and then go to Sri Lanka.  That's the plan, anyway.

May 10-15: Calcutta to Bangkok to Saipan

My train from Bolpur to Calcutta didn't leave until the afternoon of the 10th, so in the morning I took a cycle rickshaw to Shantiniketan.  I walked around the campus a bit, seeing several groups of yellow and white clad students attending classes under the trees.  I had read a newspaper the evening before reporting a special exhibition celebrating Tagore's 151st birthday, so I went to that when it opened at 10:30.  It wasn't much, but it did have some interesting photos and translations of a few of his poems.  It also had some of his paintings, which are quite interesting.  He started painting late in his life, in his 70's, I think.  After that, I walked around the campus a bit more, went to a bookstore, and took a cycle rickshaw back to the hotel about 11:30 in time for a last Bengali fish and rice lunch at the hotel.

My train left soon after 1 and was uncrowded.  It made good time through the flat Bengali countryside, with only two stops and covering the 90 miles to Calcutta in two and a half hours.  We passed lots of rice fields on the way, with a great many of them freshly harvested, and quite a few huts with the typical sloped Bengali grass roofs.  From the huge Howrah train station I walked across the road and caught a ferry across the wide Hooghly River, with views of the massive Howrah Bridge just upriver.  Reaching the east bank, I was right downtown.  I had planned to take a taxi once there, but they wouldn't use their meters or charge a reasonable rate, so I ended up walking to the hotel where I had stayed last November.  It took about 45 minutes, but I enjoyed walking past all the old colonial buildings and seeing all the street activity.  I relaxed and read a newspaper at the hotel before dinner.  It said Calcutta gets about six big rainstorms between early April and the middle of May, which is why West Bengal is so much greener and more humid now than points further west.  It took me a while to get to sleep that night as my room was hot.

The next morning my room still was hot, 88 degrees when I got up.  The day was a little cooler than previous days, though, with a high of only 95, but very high humidity.  After breakfast I walked around the city center, past many of the old colonial buildings as far north as the Writers' Building, former headquarters of the East India Company (the company's clerks were called writers) and now the seat of the West Bengal state government.  There is lots to be seen just walking along the crowded streets:  vendors selling just about anything, people cooking and selling food, barbers shaving customers.  I saw a guy on the street cleaning another guy's eye, scraping the white of the eye with a little metal utensil.

I stopped in at St. Andrew's Church, next to the Writers' Building,  and later at St. John's Church, the latter a few blocks away and completed in 1787.  Arriving at St. John's I was hot, sweaty, and thirsty and sat under ceiling fans in the vast nave drinking a liter of water I had just bought.  I checked out the plaques on the walls in both churches and the graveyard around St. John's before heading to a restaurant near my hotel for a late lunch. At St. John's there is a tombstone for a woman born in 1725, married first in 1738, remarried to a second husband who died of smallpox within a few days of the marriage, married a third time to a man with whom she had four children, and married a fourth time in 1774.  All this is on the tombstone, along with the names and marriages of the three of her children who survived until adulthood.  All her husbands held distinguished positions.  She died at 87 in 1812, the oldest British resident of Bengal, the tombstone said.  In the late afternoon I ventured out to a bookstore, but that was about it.

I left Calcutta, and India, the next day, the 178th of the 180 days allowed by my visa.  A big cricket match was to be played in Calcutta that afternoon, the Kolkata Knight Riders versus the Mumbai Indians, and the newspapers and television were full of news about it.  My flight left about 1 in the afternoon (on Air Asia and booked about ten days before for something less than $150) and arrived in Bangkok just before 5, local time.  I got to my hotel about 6:30.  It is as hot in Bangkok as it was in Calcutta, but after India Bangkok seems so clean and orderly and quiet.

I didn't do much the next day, another hot day, in the high 90's.  After breakfast I read the Bangkok English language newspapers, and spent most of the day reading and relaxing, with a few short walks.  I spent some time in the very nice Buddhist temple located between Khao San Road and my hotel.   Despite the heat, there are still a lot of tourists in Bangkok, though nowhere near as many as when I was last here in November.

The first of my flights home left the next morning about 11 from Bangkok.  I had booked the flights only a few days earlier, costing me only 15,000 reward miles and a little over $100. The very comfortable Thai Airlines flight to Osaka took about five and a half hours, arriving in Osaka about 6:30 Japan time.  On the way I had some great views of the Vietnamese coast just north of Danang, the southern tip of Taiwan and some of islands between Taiwan and Japan.  It was cloudy over southern Japan, so I saw little of it until just before we landed, when I got some good views of Kobe and Osaka and the mountains behind them before we landed.   My  next flight left Osaka about 9, arriving in Guam after about three hours, at 1 in the morning local time on May 15.  Because of mechanical problems, my flight from Guam to Saipan was delayed about an hour and a half, but we finally took off soon after 4 and arrived in Saipan about 5.  I got home just before 6, just after sunrise.

May 4-9, 2012: Bishnupur, Shantiniketan, Tarapith

It felt cool in Ranchi on the morning of the 4th when I walked over to the train station to buy my ticket to Bishnupur.  I had breakfast at the station and later read a newspaper in the lobby of a nearby hundred year old railroad hotel recently refurbished into a luxury hotel.  The temperature the day before in Ranchi, it reported, had been 97 degrees, a break from the 100 plus degrees weather I'd been having.  About 9:30 I left on the train to Bishnupur, about 150 miles to the east.  My ticket cost me all of 34 rupees, about 65 cents.  The train was all unreserved seating, but was uncrowded.  I sat in the last car and at times had it almost to myself.

The train made many stops as we passed through the scenic hilly and forested area of eastern Jharkhand (a state created only in 2000 out of the southern portion of Bihar), a sparsely populated area.  I enjoyed the trip.  We crossed into West Bengal and the terrain became flatter, but with big stone hills rising over the dry landscape.  A teacher boarded the train at the first stop in West Bengal.  He told me school runs from 6:30 to 11 in the morning in the summer and he was on his way home, in the city of Puruliya.  I talked with him for the hour and a half it took us to reach Puruliya.  He pointed out hills about twelve miles to the north and said there were wild elephants and Maoist Naxalite guerrillas there.  The land flattened as we headed east and became greener, though not as green as when I took a train west through West Bengal last November.  The rains start earlier in West Bengal than further west.  I spotted a few very green rice paddies and even the dry grass had a bit of green in it.  Further west, it had all been brown.  The train filled up a bit here and there, but was never overly crowded.  It clouded up and I saw lots of oil palms dotting the landscape.

We arrived in Bishnupur, at only 220 feet elevation, about 4, only ten minutes late, which is pretty good considering Bishnupur was the 32nd stop from Ranchi.  I took a cycle rickshaw to a hotel about two and a half miles from the station, and enjoyed the ride through the streets of that small city, with a population of around 60,000.  It is much more humid and green here.  I walked around a bit before dark and watched lots of cricket being played by boys in dusty fields.  It gets dark here about 6:30.  That evening there was quite a bit of thunder and lightning, but only a little rain.  I slept well under a fast moving ceiling fan.

The next morning after breakfast at the hotel I hired a cycle rickshaw to take me to the temples around the town.  These temples date from the Malla Dynasty of the 16th to 18th centuries.  My guidebooks don't explain who the Mallas were and how they managed to thrive at a time of Muslim dominance in Bengal.  The temples are made of either brick or laterite, the latter a rough, pockmarked red stone.  The brick temples are covered with terra cotta sculpture while the laterite ones are plastered, although much of the plaster has worn off.  They often have roofs modelled after the sloped straw roofs of Bengali style huts.  I enjoyed moving through Bishnupur's narrow lanes in a cycle rickshaw, with views of small town life everywhere:  men and women washing at water pumps or in small ponds, repair shops, food shops, school kids in uniform. People were very friendly.  There were quite a few hammer and sickle emblems painted on the sides of buildlings.  The Communist Party governed West Bengal from 1977 until just last year, when they were finally ousted in elections. 

Over the morning we must have stopped at between fifteen and twenty of these temples.  Some were covered with spectacular terra cotta tiles depicting scenes from daily life and from stories about Krishna and others.  I think all the temples are Vishnu temples.  Some of the brick temples had hundreds of panels and thousands of figures, and I very much enjoyed picking out all the details, often very fine, though it was hot standing in front of the temples in the midday sun.  At one temple my feet began to sting and I noticed that I had stepped among many very tiny, stinging ants.  We also passed the two remaining gates and the dry remnants of a moat from an old fort.  Flame trees, like those from Africa and Saipan (brought from Africa during the German era), grew around town.

After a lunch break from about 1 to 3, we headed to seven laterite temples just north of town and explored those until about 4:30.  The laterite temples are not as well decorated as the brick and terra cotta temples. The sculpture is carved into the rough laterite blocks and then plastered.  In the late afternoon I walked back to some of the finest temples and watched boys playing cricket in the nearby dusty open spaces.  The townspeople were friendly and curious.  It was sunny all day, with no clouds.  Hot and humid, but not unbearable, and really not bad at all in the shade.

The next morning I walked to the Shyamarai Temple, dating from 1643 and the finest of the lot, with hundreds of panels.  I watched a lizard crawl along the panels and just generally enjoyed the site in the morning sun.  It was hot in the sun, but pleasant in the shade.  In the sun I photographed a dung beetle rolling a ball of dung perhaps thrice his size and soon noticed I was dripping with sweat.  The morning's newspaper had said the high was only 93 the day before, but humidity about 85%.  

I had lunch at the hotel and caught a bus at 1 heading north, then west, then north again to Durgapur.  The bus was slow, with lots of stops, but passed through a scenic area of small villages and bounteous rice fields.  Some of the golden rice was being harvested.  The bus became much more crowded and the countryside much drier as we approached Durgapur, which we reached a little before 4.  I hopped on another bus, this one heading to Bolpur, which left at 4.  This was another small bus, which eventually got very crowded.  Fortunately, I had a window seat so no standees were leaning against me.  The aisles were packed, like the bus I took from Umaria to Tala.  I did have a mother and her screaming child seated next to me for a while.  The mother appeared to think that screaming back at the child might stop her. 

Durgapur seems to be a city of big factories and I remember seeing them before as I  passed through the city by train headed west last November.  Our bus headed east, then north, then east again to Bolpur, arriving at 6:30, at dark. The road was wet from rain in places and we passed through a forested area, in flat terrain, for a few miles, a surprise to me in densely populated Bengal.  Bolpur is only a little more than 50 miles from Bishnupur, but with the slow buses and indirect route, it took me five and a half hours to get there.  I took a cycle rickshaw to a hotel, with a few drops of rain and some impressive lightning on the way.  The hotel turned out to be a good one and I had a very good dinner at the hotel of Bengali style fish (a river fish; Bengalis are famous for their fish dishes), vegetables and rice.

The next morning I walked up the road about a mile north to Shantiniketan, the location of a university founded by Rabindranath Tagore, India's Nobel Prize winning (in 1913) poet.  His father, Debendranath Tagore, considered a great maharishi of a 19th century reformist Hindu sect, bought a farmhouse here in the 1860's, soon after Rabindranath (his fourteenth child) was born in 1861.  Rabindranath spent a lot of time here and moved here from Calcutta in 1901 to start a school, with five pupils taught under the trees.  It became a university in 1921.  Indira Gandhi (then Indira Nehru), among other notables, attended.  I visited several buildings, including the farmhouse expanded into a two story mansion and some other interesting smaller houses where Tagore lived off and on until his death at 80 in 1941.  The houses have some of the original furnishings and lots of photos.  Gandhi visited several times, as early as 1915 and as late as 1940.  There are photos of him and Tagore:  Tagore tall, dressed in a long white robe, with a flowing long white beard and hair and Gandhi, small, his head shaved, wearing only a white dhoti not falling below his knees.  There is also a museum, but I was told it is closed for renovation.

I walked through the campus, mercifully under shady trees, including some huge banyan trees, and saw some of the students walking around and attending classes under the trees.  Under one tree surrounded by students seated on the ground stood a blackboard permanently fixed onto the ground.  The students wear very stylish yellow and white uniforms:  the boys in white trousers with almost knee-length yellow shirts; the girls in white trousers and yellow blouses with white scarfs or else yellow saris with white top garments.  There were quite a few tourists and I met an architect from Bangladesh and walked around with him for a while.  The sky clouded up around 2 and that made it seem cooler.  I got back to the hotel about 3:30 and spent most of the rest of the afternoon there.

The next morning I took a cycle rickshaw to Santiniketan about 7:30, reaching the small glass-walled temple near the mansion just after a prayer service commemorating Tagore's 151st birthday had ended.  He was born on May 7, 1861, but this year his birthday under the Bengali calendar falls on May 8.  I walked to the Uttarayan complex, with all the small houses where he lived, and sat under an awning in front of one of the houses to await a birthday ceremony.  It was hot, though ocassionally a very welcome cool breeze blew. 

The program started at 8:30, with songs by choirs and individuals, interspersed with readings from Tagore's poetry.  It was all very nice.  Of course, I didn't understand the Bengali poetry, but it sounded lovely when read by the various readers.  One of the poems recited was in English and quite beautiful.  I think the songs also were Tagore poems set to music.  There was quite a crowd for the ceremony, with many men in traditional Indian dress and many women in beautiful saris.  I seemed to be the only westerner.  The ceremony ended after an hour and I hung around watching the colorful crowd disperse and talking to the Bangladeshi architect and others.  I walked back through campus, bought a ticket from the small Shantiniketan train ticket office for Calcutta in two days' time, and in the hot sun took a cycle rickshaw back to my hotel about 11.

I spent the afternoon trying to avoid the heat at an internet cafe and in the air conditioned lobby of my hotel.  Hilary Clinton had visited Calcutta the previous day and I found a Bengali newspaper with seven or eight photos of her, mostly with West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.  It didn't seem to cool down much after dark.  Sunset is just after 6 and it gets dark about 6:30.  Sunrise is very early, about 5.  India is one big time zone, despite the country covering almost 28 degrees of longitude from west to east.  Time zones ordinarily cover about 15 degrees of longitude.

It was hot and very humid when I woke up the next morning.  My thermometer registered 88 degrees in my room.  The morning newspaper said it had reached between 98 and 99 degrees the day before in Calcutta, with a low between 81 and 82.  A little before 10 I boarded a crowded train heading north to Rampurhat, about 35 miles away.  I had to stand in the crowded aisle, but the train was an express, making only two stops and reaching Rampurhat in about an hour.  I stood near the open door and enjoyed watching the scenery go by.  Rice was growing in places and being reaped by sickle here and there.  Other rice paddies were still fallow, to be planted in the coming monsoon, I guess.  A Baul singer, one of Bengal's traditional wandering minstrels, came through the car singing and beating his small drum.

Alighting at the station in Rampurhat, I hopped on a shared, large-size autorickshaw that took me about five miles south to Tarapith, a small town with a tantric Hindu temple honoring Tara, one of the many avatars of Shiva's consort Parvati/Uma/Durga/Kali.  A guy from Calcutta named Rahul had been on the train and autorickshaw and he showed me around.  It was hot and humid as we walked to the temple through a pedestrian lane full of shops catering to pilgrims.  There were some spectacularly beautiful garlands on sale.  The red hibiscus ones, he told me, were Tara's favorite, but there were also ones of yellow flowers, blue flowers, small white flowers, and giant lavender lotuses.  The temple wasn't much, but the pilgrims were interesting.  It was relatively uncrowded.  Rahul, who told me he comes here every three months or so, said it is packed on weekends.  I didn't join the line to enter the temple, but I could pick out the central idol from the outside.  I looked around while Rahul was praying and with him after he finished.  Small stones are tied with red and yellow string to a fence near the main temple.  Rahul told me you leave one when you have a prayer for Tara to grant, and if she does you come back and remove one of the hanging stones.  There were also many bells, of different sizes, hanging near the stones, donated by persons whose prayers had been granted.  Rahul showed me the spot where goats are sacrificed to Tara.  He told me a small goat costs about $100.

We next walked to the cremation area along the river near the temple.  A body on a pyre was burning, with men beating it with bamboo poles.  Rahul told me that is done to break the legs, so the body doesn't sit up while burning.  Another group had just brought the body of an old woman, with long gray hair, to the area.  Unlike at Varanasi, where the bodies are covered in cloth, this dead woman was clad only in a piece of cloth reaching from her waist to her knees.  She was rather unceremoniously lifted off the stretcher and dropped face down onto a small pile of wood, which was quickly set on fire without any of the ceremony seen at Varanasi.  Rahul told me these were poor people who couldn't afford the quantity of wood necessary for a full cremation.  He said they would be only partially burned, with the remnants buried nearby.  He pointed to the many dirt mounds nearby.  I asked if the body remnants might be washed away when the rains come, but he said they are buried six feet and more down.

While we were there, an uncovered body of a man was brought on a stretcher to be cremated, again on a small pile of wood.  Unlike at Varanasi, you are allowed to take photos and I saw some Indians taking photos with their cell phones.  People at the temple and cremation ground were quite friendly, even the sadhus.  Nobody seemed to mind having his or her photo taken, and some requested it.  I don't think they get many westerners at this place.

We found a small, hot restaurant and had a small lunch before I took an autorickshaw back to Rampurhat and caught a train back to Bolpur about 2.  I easily found a seat for the hour trip back on another express.  It was overcast and humid and I spent the rest of the afternoon at the hotel.

April 29 - May 3, 2012: Bilaspur, Raipur, Sambalpur, Rourkela, Ranchi

I was up at 5 on the morning of the 29th as we were hoping to make another safari into the Tala Zone of Bandhavgarh National Park.  We were told that we would know by 5:30, but not until 6:30 were we finally informed that we couldn't get entry.  We had breakfast at the hotel and a little before 9 the five of us, rather than chance the crowded buses, hired a jeep to take us to Umaria.  It took us a little less than an hour to get there, a much more pleasant trip than my arrival on the bus from Umaria to Tala.  When we arrived, a train for Katni was at the station about to depart and Zafer and Karen (headed for Nepal) and the two Danish women (headed for Khajuraho) jumped on it.  I was headed in the opposite direction, with a train scheduled to pass through at 10:45.  I sat and waited, talking to some of the friendly people curious about me, including a guy who bought me tea.  I expected the train to be late.  It had left Indore the previous evening at 5 or so and Umaria was its 45th scheduled stop.  The train arrived just before noon and was packed.  I jumped on and had to stand for the first half hour, until our second stop, where I got a portion of a crowded seat.  Still, when very crowded, the relatively spacious trains are much better than the cramped buses.

My seat mates were friendly and I fielded the usual questions and one unusual one, whether I liked boxing.  The young woman who asked me that had earlier asked me what my job was, and later said, "Well, you must like boxing with words," which I thought was pretty clever.  It was hot, but not unbearably so, as we headed southeast through the mostly flat, though sometimes rolling, dry countryside.  There were lots of trees.  I had thought of getting off at a station called Pendra Road and taking a bus about 25 miles up into the hills to Amarkantak, a temple city at the source of the holy Narmada River.  But I had been told that April and May are months when Indians do a lot of travel, as the schools are out.  I didn't want to face another crowded bus and in fact a lot of people got off the train at Pendra Road.  Rather than go to the relatively cool hills and the source of the holy Narmada, I decided to remain on the train to its destination, Bilaspur, a city one of my guide books says is noted for its cement factories.

Amarkantak is in the hills, which we could see from the train, that separate Madhya Pradesh from the newly formed state of Chhattisgarh, part of Madhya Pradesh until 2000.  Chhattisgarh (which means "36 Forts") is 40% forested.  About 30 % of its people are tribal, mostly in the far north and south.  We had risen to over 2000 feet elevation around Pendra Road (the hills along the border rise to over 3500 feet) and soon after descended through hills covered with beautiful forest, including sal trees.  We passed through one long tunnel but mostly had some great views of the forest out the windows.  The number of passengers on the train had thinned out and I enjoyed the scenery.  The landscape became flatter and the elevation lower further south.  The sun set into the haze above the horizon about 6:20 and maybe twenty minutes later, just as it got dark, we arrived in Bilaspur, a city of 300,000 at about 1000 feet elevation.  I took an autorickshaw to what turned out to be a very nice hotel and got a room with a cooler for 500 rupees, about $10.  I was very hungry and had a very good dinner (chicken tandoori, nan and two lassis) at the hotel's restaurant and then washed my incredibly dusty and dirty clothes and day pack before going to bed soon after 10.

I got up the next morning soon after 6 and relaxed most of the morning, with a good breakfast at the hotel and a trip to an internet cafe to check train schedules.  I decided to forego inquiring about opportunities to visit Bilaspur's cement factories and about noon caught a train south to Raipur, Chhattigarh's capital.  The train was relatively uncrowded and I got a seat.  The train made no stops as it sped south through the flat, dry countryside.  A lot of cropland was in view, all fallow in this the hot season.  It did look very hot outside.  It took only a little more than an hour and a half to get to Raipur, a city of over 700,000 people, where I checked into an okay hotel and had a late lunch before checking bus schedules and spending most of the rest of the afternoon at an internet cafe.  Not much of touristic interest in Raipur, noted for the huge steel mill built by the Soviets in Bhilai, east of Raipur.

I was up early the next morning and bought my bus ticket for Sambalpur, to the east.  I had wanted to leave on a morning bus, but almost all the buses left at night and the earliest bus I could find left at 1 in the afternoon.  (I could have taken a direct overnight train to Calcutta from Raipur, or from Bilaspur or Umaria for that matter, but I wanted to travel in the day time and see the scenery on the way.)  I spent most of the morning in my hotel room (the morning newspaper reported that the high the day before was 105 and it was already hot in the morning), except for breakfast, and at 1 left on a big pink bus for Sambalpur.  It was a fairly comfortable, though well-worn, bus, with reclining seats and plenty of leg room.  However, it was not air conditioned and very hot.  I had a window seat with a window that wouldn't open fully, but I noticed almost every window was closed to prevent the blasts of hot air from coming in.  Mine was stuck partially open and I could feel the very hot air rushing in from outside on the back of my neck.

The bus initially made good time through the mostly flat, dry countryside, though there were, to my surprise, a few green rice paddies.  We did go through a hilly, rocky, forested area.  About 4:30 we reached the small  town of Sarai Pali, more than half way to Sambalpur.  We made a half hour stop there and thereafter made much slower time.  The bus had filled up with lots of people in the aisles and began to make lots of stops for people to get on and off.  We crossed the Chhattisgarh-Odisha (formerly Orissa, until just last year) state line, with lots of trucks lined up waiting to cross, and reached the city of Bargarh just before 7 as it was getting dark.  After another half hour stop there, we drove in the dark to Sambalpur, arriving after 9.  I found a hotel and a Chinese restaurant run by an actual ethnic Chinese guy and got to bed after 11.  It was warm in Sambalpur, at about 500 feet elevation, but I had a room with a cooler.

I had thought I might do some sightseeing around Sambalpur, but the sites, mostly temples, didn't seem that worthwhile and getting to them entailed a bus trip in the heat.  I spent most of the morning in the lobby of a nicer hotel than mine, and a little after 1 left on an uncrowded train heading to Rourkela to the northeast.  One of my guidebooks had said that the route from Sambalpur to Rourkela was particularly scenic, but it must have been talking about some route other than the one I took.  The train route passed through mostly dry, flat countryside, with some rice paddies.  We passed a huge factory near the city of Jharsuguda.  The factory had four of those huge cement cooling towers that you see at nuclear plants, plus two even taller smokestacks and a big squarish building.  As we passed, I noticed almost naked men fishing with nets in a dirty little pond in the foreground of the factory.  We passed through a somewhat more scenic hilly area just before arriving at Rourkela a little before 4.  I saw a few oil palms, maybe the first I've seen in India, as we neared the city.  I got a hotel and took a short walk before sunset.  Rourkela is a steel and mining city, at about 700 feet elevation.  Just north of the train station is a long brown hill with a temple about two thirds of the way up.  I asked the hotel manager if there was anything of touristic interest in town and he said no.

I again spent most of the next morning in my hotel room and after 11 left on another uncrowded train heading north to Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand state.  I was hoping this would be a scenic route as Jharkhand is quite a hilly state, and the scenery was fairly nice in places, especially just after we entered Jharkhand, with forested hills and one rocky river bed.  However, most of the terrain was dry, fallow farmland, with some hills here and there.  It seemed a very sparsely populated area.  The train was actually heading all the way to Jammu and a guy I was sitting near was going to Delhi.  He said the train would fill up in Ranchi and it did.  It arrived in Ranchi about 3:30 and I got off and got a hotel.  Ranchi is at about 2100 feet elevation and was noticeably cooler, especially at night, than the places I'd stayed in the previous days.  Not much of touristic interest in Ranchi, though.  

April 24-28, 2012: More Tigers! Bandhavgarh National Park

On the 24th I traveled from Jabalpur to the little village of Tala on the edge of Bandhavgarh National Park, a hellish journey of less than 120 miles that took me more than ten hours.  I left Jabalpur before 9 on a bus with no one standing in the aisles other than the conductor.  But while still in the city and probably not five minutes from the bus station, it stopped and filled up with what seemed like dozens of additional passengers.  The three hour bus ride northeast to Katni was not a pleasant one, with standees pressed close against me in my aisle seat on a hot morning.

In Katni I drank a liter of water and got a window seat on a bus I was told was going to Umaria, to the southeast.  After an hour wait, it left about 1 and as I bought my ticket from the conductor soon after we started off, he told me that the bus was going only as far as Chandia Road, on the way to Umaria.  It took us about an hour and a half to head down the road 25 or so miles to Chandia Road through dry, flat country.  At Chandia Road the bus emptied and I was told to catch the train to Umaria, which is about 12 miles away.  I arrived at the station just as the train was pulling away.  The next train was scheduled to arrive at 3:30, in less than an hour, but was several hours late.  An Indian couple was also heading to Umaria and had also just missed the train.  I followed them as they tried to get trucks to give us a lift.  While waiting, I drank another liter of water.  Finally, we got a lift (for 20 rupees each) in an fairly nice automobile for the last 12 miles, which delivered us right to the Umaria bus station.

In Umaria we had a wait of about an hour before a bus arrived for Tala (where I was headed) and Manpur, beyond Tala (where they were headed).  There was a terrific scrum as people fought their way onto the bus while others tried to get off.  The guy I was with must have fought his way on early as he got two seats near the front.  His wife was too slight to lift up their heavy bag, so I lifted it up to the window and he tucked it under his seat.  The bus conductor had me put my bag in the back of the bus.  I was one of the last to squeeze onto the little bus.  The couple from Manpur slid over and gave me a very small portion (he was quite a large man) of their seat.  We started off, a packed bus, and made several stops picking up even more passengers.  My seat was very uncomfortable and I was happy to give it up to a woman carrying a baby when she boarded.  Then, packed to the gills or rafters or whatever is the appropriate term for buses, we stopped at a gas station for several minutes to fill up.

Wedged in with all the other standees, I could barely move.  And the trip was excruciatingly slow.  It is only 20 miles from Umaria to Tala, but it took about two hours and twenty minutes.  Probably the second most uncomfortable bus journey I've ever been on.  (The first was in 1979 through Baluchistan in Pakistan from the Iranian border to Quetta, about 26 hours in another jam packed bus, but I did have half a seat in that one.)  The bus seemed to proceed at about five miles per hour at times, if that, on a poor road through the hills with many long stops while departing passengers got their things off the roof.  Everybody seemed to be in about as good a humor as they could be, though.  The last few miles were through the national park on a particularly bad road.  One guy in a seat informed me that he was seeing deer and peacocks.  A little after 7 we arrived in Tala just as it was getting dark.  I got off and wanted to kiss the ground like the Pope.  I bought a liter of water, drank it, walked in the dark about five minutes to a hotel and thankfully checked in, exhausted but relieved to be there.  Three other westerners were at the hotel and I had dinner with them.  After dinner I took a very welcome bucket bath and went to bed about 11.  I was later told that the reason the buses were so packed is that there are fewer of them running now than is normal.  It is wedding season in this area and wedding parties rent out the buses, leaving fewer on their normal routes.  I am very much missing the old, rickety, but relatively spacious and regular state buses of Maharashtra and Gujarat.  In Madhya Pradesh the buses are all private.

The other three had booked a safari the next morning, which I couldn't join, and so I slept in until 8.  After getting up, I relaxed on the veranda of my room.  It was already quite hot.  They returned from their safari about 9 or 9:30, having seen a tiger, and went off to a special breakfast they had booked the night before.  I had my own breakfast, relaxed and went to an internet cafe (quite a surprise in this little village and in fact there appear to be three of them).  There were no afternoon safaris that day (none on Wednesday afternoons, for unknown reasons), so about 4 Neel, one of the westerners (from Britain and with parents who emigrated from Gujarat 40 years ago), and I took a walk through the dry countryside just outside of Tala.  We saw quite a few blue Indian rollers, a beautiful bird, and came upon a brick works in the open countryside.  In one area men were arranging firewood in a circle.  Nearby, we could see firewood similarly arranged under a new made kiln consisting of new made bricks stacked together and then plastered over with mud.  One man was plastering with mud the last bit of the stack of bricks.  A woman was digging up dirt and carrying it in a basket on her head to a guy on top of the kiln, who used the dirt to cover the top of the kiln.  We came back into the village about six and sat on the lawn of one of the nicer hotels and drank lime soda as in the dusk before the four of us (Neel, two Swedes and me) had dinner.  I got to bed about 10.   It is quite pleasant at night, with the sounds of the forest outside.  The elevation is about 1500 feet, though the hills in the park rise to well over 2500 feet.  There is a very old fort on one of them, though you have to pay the normal safari fees (even higher than those at Kanha) to visit it.

I was up the next morning at 4:45 and our jeep arrived about 5:30.  The central Tala Zone of the park was completely booked, so we headed into the Magdhi Zone over the terrible road I had come on two days before.  We entered the zone and drove on dirt roads through mostly flat terrain, with lots of trees, including sal.  It was very dusty, as we were often right behind other jeeps.  We saw sambar, chital, langurs, a jackal, peacocks and lots of other birds, including Indian rollers, of which there seem to be many in this area.  Early on we followed the pug marks of a very large male tiger, by far the largest pug marks I have seen.  We saw a large deposit of tiger scat and heard a chital warning cry, but saw no tiger.

We drove around some more, getting dustier and dustier and soon after 8 came across about eight jeeps parked alongside the road near a water hole.  We drove up and a big tiger was standing on a bank above the water hole, about 300 or 400 feet from us.  He lay down and roared several times, very impressive roars.  The guide said he was calling to his females and that he was the tiger whose tracks we had seen, a male about five years old.  He is the dominant tiger in the area, having killed the previous dominant male, who just happened to be his father, less than a year ago.  He lay there about ten minutes, as a few other jeeps arrived.  Then he got up and walked down the sandy incline to the water hole, full of reddish water colored by algae, where he crouched and drank for what must have been two minutes.  He then began walking past the water hole through the grass towards us.  We could see him clearly all the way.  We were perfectly positioned as he crossed the road right between us and another jeep, turning to growl once at us just before he crossed the road and disappeared into the forest.  What a great sighting!  We made our dusty way back, seeing deer and a wild boar on the way, and arrived at the hotel about 9:30, where we had breakfast.

The two Swedes left that afternoon and about 3:30 Neel and I set off on an afternoon safari (expensive with only two of us, with each of us paying about $40) into the Magdhi Zone again.  We followed a different route than in the morning, a very pretty route through rocky, hilly terrain, with higher hills than in the distance.  It was much less dusty than in the morning as fewer jeeps went this route.  We could see the hill upon which rests the fort, though we couldn't make out the fort itself.  Bandhavgarh (which means "Brother's Fort") has a long history and is supposed to have been given by Rama to his brother Lakshman.  An ancestor of the current Maharaja of Rewa (the city of Rewa is to the north) abandoned it in the early 17th century when he moved his capital to Rewa.  Bandhavgarh became his hunting preserve.

About 5 we came to a water hole with about ten jeeps waiting.  A tiger had been spotted here in the morning.  We waited a while, but no tiger showed up.  We drove around some more and saw deer and peacocks and langur monkeys.  About 6 we heard the warning cry of a chital, but couldn't remain long as we had to leave the zone by 6:30.  I got to bed about 9:30 that night, tired after the early mornings.

The next morning Neel and I set off into Magdhi Zone again, though our jeep driver was 40 minutes late and we didn't go through the gate until almost 6:30.  We had a beautiful drive, seeing deer and langurs and peacocks and even a long snake (a black cobra, the guide thought) slithering around a termite mound.  About 7:30 we arrived at a very small pond with ten or fifteen jeeps parked nearby.  A tiger and her cub had been spotted nearby earlier in the morning and all were hoping they would approach the water hole.  We waited an hour or so without success, with only a few birds to watch.  We drove back, very hot in the sun.  We spotted a red-headed king vulture in a tree and stopped right beside an unusually unconcerned chital buck right by the side of the road.  Usually, they flee or at least move off a little at the approach of a jeep.  We got back about 10 and had a very good breakfast prepared by an Indian woman living near the park whom Neel has befriended over his seven trips to the park.

Neel left that afternoon to catch a train to Bombay, but two other tourists, Zafer and Karen (he was from Turkey and she from India, a Goanese raised in Bombay), had arrived.  The three of us headed into Magdhi Zone about 3:30.  The afternoon was hot and sunny with no clouds, much hotter than the previous cloudy afternoon.  Near a large water hole fairly close to the entrance gate a huge herd of chital and sambar had gathered to drink.  I would guess there were about 200 of them.  Usually, you see them in groups of 20 at most, usually less.  We headed back to the water hole where I had spent an hour in the morning, passing a few deer, langurs and peacocks on the way.  After another unsuccessful wait, along with about 15 other jeeps, for 40 minutes or so, we drove back slowly towards the exit.  Near the exit we heard chital warning calls, but saw no tiger.  Just past the exit, on the main road back to Tala village, several jeeps were parked in hopes of seeing a tiger.  Chital warning cries had been heard, but again we saw no tiger.  We drove back to the village and spotted three jackals running alongside the road.  First time I 've seen three together.  About a mile from the village (the village is maybe four or five miles from Magdhi Gate, a fifteen minute drive by jeep on a terrible road) a tiger had just crossed the main road.  We had just missed him and spotted only his tracks in the soft sand along the road.  We got back to Tala about 7, just at dark, and had dinner before I went to bed about 9:30.  There is a fairly good restaurant in the village and the nights are very pleasant, though it was hotter that night than the night before.

Two Danes had arrived the next morning about 2 and at 5:30 the five of us crammed into a jeep for another trip to Magdi.  With five of us and a cheaper jeep than I had with Neel, it worked out to only about $14 each.  Again we saw deer and langurs and peacocks.  We also saw a large group of wild boar, maybe ten or so together.  We startled them and they bolted across the road behind us and into the underbrush.  We spent a long time looking for a tiger in the forest near the water hole where we had spent so much time during the previous two safaris  We heard him growl several times, and our guide and Zafer briefly spotted him as he moved through the grass, but that was it.  On the drive back we spotted a mongoose, the first one I've seen, scampering along the forest ground.  As we left the exit gate we saw several jeeps parked along the main road.  We hurriedly joined them, but had just missed, by about a minute, a tiger crossing the road.  We had to content ourselves with seeing his tracks before getting back to the hotel about 10.

That afternoon we finally got the coveted entry into the central Tala Zone.  It cost us about $110, thankfully divided by five for each of us.  The entrance is less than a mile from our hotel.  Entering about 4, we were all impressed by how beautiful the area was, with lots of greenery, hills and a little stream along the road.  About five or ten minutes after entry we saw jeeps parked along the road and heard a sambar's repeated loud warning calls.  We stopped and soon a tiger cub was spotted.  There was a sort of jeep scrum as they all (maybe ten or fifteen of them) tried to get into the best position, with one scraping another.  Eventually, we could see him, only nine months old but still looking large, standing in the green grass near the stream.  He is one of three cubs, but the mother and the other two cubs were not to be seen.  He soon lay down in the ferns right next to the stream along the road, perhaps fifty or sixty feet from us.  He looked very relaxed, but he wasn't drinking, I suspect because of all the jeeps.   We had a great view of him for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes as he lay in the ferns next to the stream, a beautiful spot.  He moved his head back and forth, but that was about that.  Our guide said there is a ten minute rule for viewing tigers, so we moved on, though others didn't.  The tiger got up and stood in the grass.  We could still see him standing there as we pulled away.

We drove through beautiful hilly, wooded scenery and saw sambar and chital in the forest and in the meadows.  At a water hole, two peacocks were displaying, shaking their beautiful tails and their brown rumps.  Two peahens appeared and walked up to the winner.  We came in view of the fort atop a flat topped hill, with a temple on top and gates on the approach to the top.  Pilgrims by the thousands come to the temple once or twice a year, which must be disturbing for the tigers.  Near the fort we drove through rocky terrain and then into more forest.  We passed a parrot nest in the hollow of a tree and could see the parrot feeding her chick, with the chick just barely visible poking out from the hollow.  We hoped to see another tiger and her cubs in this area, but had no such luck.

We drove back through the dusk as the sun set and reached our hotel about 6:30.  I walked over to the nearby interpretation center, which had pretty good exhibits, and spent an hour there before dinner with Karen and Zafer.  I got to bed after 10, later than I wanted, but happy to have made it into the Tala Zone.  In all I took six safaris (seeing a tiger on two of them) at Bandhavgarh, five in Magdhi and one in Tala, for a total cost of about $160 in entrance fees and jeep rentals.  At Kanha and Bandhavgarh together, I went on fifteen safaris, seeing tigers on seven of them (eight tigers altogether), for a total cost of about $500.  I guess that works out to a little over $60 a tiger!

April 16-23, 2012: Tigers! Kanha National Park and Jabalpur

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.