Guest guest Posted May 1, 2006 Report Share Posted May 1, 2006 ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Apr 30, 2006 7:00 AM WILDLIFE SAFARIS IN INDIA journalistandanimals *Safari in a weekend? Easy, tiger http://observer.guardian.co.uk/travel/story/0,,1764327,00.html *It's the ultimate short break: four days searching for tigers in India's beautiful Kanha National Park. That'll knock them dead at the watercooler on Monday morning, says Lynn Barber *Sunday April 30, 2006 The Observer <http://www.observer.co.uk/>* I suppose it makes for an unbeatable bit of one-upmanship - 'What did you do at the weekend?' 'Oh I flew to India to see a tiger in the wild.' Goodness knows what it does to your carbon footprint but it must certainly knock 'em dead at the watercooler. That seems the only possible explanation for Cox & Kings' 'Wildlife Weekend' which is designed to enable cash-rich, time-poor thrill-seekers to see a tiger in the shortest possible time. So this is what happens. You check in at Heathrow at 6.30pm on Friday for your 9.30pm flight to Mumbai. This is with a carrier called Jet Airways which is huge in India but new to Britain and utterly great - brilliant service, delicious food, comfortable seat. The flight is eight and a half hours so in theory you can get a full night's sleep but, of course, you don't. Because of the four-hour time difference, you stagger into the heat of Mumbai around mid-morning and spend an hour or so in a traffic jam travelling one kilometre to the beautiful Hotel Leela. At this point, you are meant to go for a tour of Mumbai but, if you are me, you head for the hotel swimming pool and refuse to budge. Next morning you are woken at 4.30 to drive to the airport to fly to Nagpur, where a battered minibus with minimal suspension collects you for the six-hour drive to Kanha. Nobody has warned you that it will be six hours, and that there is no provision for meals or loo stops. (In fairness, I should say this is unusual for Cox & Kings. I have travelled with them before and found them perfectly reliable on comfort. Not this time.) And so you lurch into the kaleidoscopic terror of Indian roads, with everyone on the bus remarking, 'It's amazing they never have any accidents' - and then falling silent at the sight of a dead body on the road, surrounded by stones, and slightly covered by leaves, with a lone policeman guarding him. Our driver says the man was there last night and seemed to be still alive but he couldn't be moved until five local bureaucrats had visited the scene and made their accident report. I shut my eyes for the rest of the journey. Eventually we arrive at Kanha Royal Tiger Resort about four in the afternoon and are told to hop into jeeps for our first game drive. 'Not without food!' I wail - we have only had one croissant since 4am. The manageress Margie Watts-Carter gives me the evil eye - clearly I am not a proper tiger devotee - but quickly summons up a delicious lunch before packing us into our jeeps. At 4.30, we set out into the game reserve and I finally see the point of this crazy expedition. Kanha National Park is simply gorgeous - cool woods of sal trees followed by rolling meadows grazed by flocks of deer, dotted with magnificent trees and shimmering lakes. At first sight it looks almost like English parkland designed by Capability Brown, and the effect is enhanced because it echoes constantly with the mournful wail of the peacock. But then you notice the strange shapes of termite mounds, and enormous bison (actually not bison - gaur) dotted around the meadows, and troops of langur monkeys chattering in the trees. Periodically the guide stops the jeep to point out fresh tiger pug marks (footprints), though we don't see them that first day. In the evening, after dinner, the hotel manager Adityaraj Dev gives us a lecture about tigers and how we must all lobby the government in order to save them. We also have to watch a slide show about tigers and a David Attenborough film about tigers. My mild interest in tigers sags under the weight of information overload, but clearly anyone who stays at Kanha is meant to emerge as a fully-fledged save-the-tiger crusader. There are about 120 tigers at Kanha and possibly 3,000 in the whole subcontinent, (though this figure is hotly disputed) and, of course, they are under threat from loss of habitat but even more from poachers catering to the ever-growing Chinese traditional medicine market, which uses tiger bones for rheumatism, eyeballs for epilepsy, whiskers for toothaches, and tiger penis soup as an aphrodisiac. Poachers are reckoned to kill one tiger in India per day. At Kanha they have to guard all the waterholes at night for fear of poison - poachers prefer poisoning tigers to shooting them because it doesn't damage the skins. A complication at Kanha is that there are many displaced people around the perimeter whose villages were 'relocated' à la Highland Clearances when Kanha was designated a national park. Many of them remain disaffected and are suspected of helping poachers. Given the vast scale of India's human problems, it seems surprising, though admirable, that it takes wild life conservation as seriously as it does. While I was there, a popular Bollywood film star called Salman Khan was sentenced to five years in prison for shooting the endangered chinkara, or Indian gazelle, and there was no suggestion in the newspapers that this was a heavy sentence. And whereas in, say, Kenya you sometimes feel that the game reserves exist solely for the benefit of tourists, Indians seem to treasure and enjoy their national parks - Kanha attracts plenty of local visitors. It was made a national park in 1953 and has had great success in saving the barasingha or swamp deer, whose numbers were down to 66 in 1970 and are now up to 350 and rising. But tigers are harder to save because each male needs 40 sq km of territory. Enough tiger talk - it is time to see one. We are woken at dawn next day in order to be at the park gate when it opens at 6am. The park is brilliantly managed: jeeps are the only vehicles allowed in and each has to carry an official guide who identifies all the animals and birds while also enforcing the park rules - no driving off-road, no getting out of the vehicle. All the guides are given different routes so you feel as if you have the park to yourself. That first hour of driving through the cool dawn with mists still rising over the waterholes is exquisitely beautiful - later, by 11, the temperature will be in the 40s. I learn to distinguish the four species of deer - spotted or chital, muntjac, sambar and barasingha - and to know that when you see a solitary langur high up in a tree by the road, it means he is the look-out and you will soon come across the whole troop, complete with babies, which means another photo stop. *We are pottering* around happily enough, me trying to look at birds, others taking photographs of monkeys, when a jeep comes hurtling down the road with the driver shouting: 'Tiger show! Tiger show!' So we turn and follow and come out on the central plain where already there is a great line-up of jeeps along the roadside. Everyone is standing up and staring through binoculars at a little wood about a quarter of a mile away, and after much instruction - 'See the dead tree, now go to the bush on the left and look at the big rock below. Just in front, you can see his ears' - I finally see a tiger, or think I do. But he is so brilliantly camouflaged I can't be certain until he obligingly sits up and forms a good clear silhouette. My first tiger! But this, the guide says later, was a tiger sighting, not a tiger show. Huh? I couldn't understand the difference till the next morning when we had a proper unforgettable tiger show. This is when the park mahouts on their elephants locate a tiger which is not on the prowl but resting, and amenable to visitors. You have to drive to one of the lodges to buy a voucher giving you a place in the queue and then you drive to wherever the mahouts have set up their tiger show and wait your turn on an elephant. (Incidentally, I always thought mahout was pronounced mahoot, but it is mahowt.) The great virtue of using elephants is that they can wade off-road into the dense undergrowth and - this is the bizarre thing - the tigers don't seem to mind. So you get out of your jeep and onto the platform on top of the elephant, the mahout kicks the elephant's ears, and you lurch off into the thick bamboo forest. It is a wonderfully comfortable ride - I wished we could have done all our Indian travelling by elephant - but you just seem to be crashing about rather aimlessly demolishing bamboo until suddenly you hear a deep snoring sound and find yourself literally face to face with a tiger. It is lying in a rock alcove, slightly uphill of the elephant so at your eye level, and it stares at you with an expression of benign contempt. The elephant lumbers in a circle so you can take photographs from every angle, and then crashes back down through the bamboos to the waiting jeep. It is such a strange experience - on the one hand, very artificial and touristy with a queue of other people waiting for their turn, but somehow perfectly natural once you are on the elephant - it feels as if you have become part of the jungle. Why doesn't the tiger resent the elephant? Why doesn't the elephant fear the tiger? The Hindu explanation is that tigers and elephants are both gods and therefore treat each other with respect. The park guides say that tiger sightings or tiger shows are never guaranteed and you could stay a week at Kanha and not see a tiger, but I think you'd have to be pretty unlucky for that to happen. The trackers and mahouts seem to know where every individual tiger has been hunting, where it has killed, and where it will lie up during the day. I was disappointed, though, not to see any of the other big mammals that live at Kanha - leopards, sloth bears, wild dogs - but apparently they are mainly nocturnal and you only come across them by accident. My best accidental sightings were a mongoose and a monitor lizard - and of course endless birds but nobody except me was interested in them. I do love the rhythm of game-park life - getting up in the cold dawn, driving into the park as the sun rises, having breakfast (delicious scrambled eggs, samosas and fresh pineapple) on the bonnet of the jeep, driving round till the heat becomes unbearable, then back to the resort for lunch and a long siesta, before the evening game drive and dinner. The Royal Tiger Reserve is not grande luxe (the electricity is a bit flaky and there is no swimming pool), but it is perfectly comfortable and the food is excellent. And that strange elephant-back visit to the tiger was a truly unforgettable experience. *The 60-second guide to India's wildlife* *Snow leopard* The snow leopard is notoriously elusive but even if you only get to see its footprints, in the remote region of Ladakh you'll come across blue sheep, ibex, wild ass, marmots, Tibetan hare, wolf, wild dog, fox, golden eagle and bearded vultures. Explore Worldwide (0870 333 4001; www.explore.co.uk) offers a 15-night trek along the frozen Zanskar river, before exploring Leh. Departing January and February 2007 from Gatwick, the strenuous trek costs £1,669 including flights, transfers, accommodation in hotels, camps, village houses and a cave, most meals and a tour leader. *Birdlife* Keoladeo Ghana national park, better known as Bharatpur, in Rajasthan, is one of the world's most famous bird sanctuaries. A soggy green paradise, it is home to 400 species, including the magnificent but nearly extinct Siberian crane, plus scores of other migratory birds. UK summer months are not the best time to travel as there will only be local species. Also, in the off-peak season game viewing is by rickshaw, but in peak season it's by boat, which is much more comfortable. Bales Worldwide (0870 241 3208; www.balesworldwide.com) offers a seven-night trip, including four nights at the Bagh Bharatpur heritage hotel, sightseeing in Delhi, an excursion to the Taj Mahal and Agra, including flights and hotels, from £1,175 per person. *Rhino* The Indian one-horned rhinoceros once ranged across the north Indian plains in the wetlands of the rivers Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra, but today this prehistoric survivor is found only in pockets in the northeastern state of Assam and in Nepal. The Kaziranga national park is home to the largest rhino population in the Indian subcontinent. Wildlife Worldwide (0845 130 6982; www.wildlifeworldwide.com) offers a 13-day safari combined with a tiger safari at the Ranthambore national park from £2,395 per person including flights from London, full board (except for B & B in Delhi and Calcutta), plus air, train and road transport and guides. *Camels* People from rural India flock to Pushkar camel fair with their camels and cattle for livestock trading, racing, and religious festivities. This small town is taken over by musicians, acrobats, folk-dancers, traders and comedians. Devotees take dips in the holy Sarovar lake. Exodus (0870 240 5550; www.exodus.co.uk) offers a 16-day Rajasthan adventure holiday which includes the Pushkar camel festival, (2 November onwards). The price of £1,598 includes return flights from London, all accommodation on a B & B basis, some other meals, all transport and the services of a guide. *Beverley Fearis* *Essentials* Lynn Barber travelled with Cox & Kings (020 7873 5000; www.coxandkings.co.uk) on its four-night Wildlife Weekend which costs from £1,395pp, including two nights at the Leela Hotel in Mumbai and two nights at the Royal Tiger Reserve including full board and game drives, and direct flights with Jet Airways. Jet Airways ( www.jetairways.com; 0800 026 5626) is launching a second daily flight from London Heathrow to Mumbai in July. A five-night itinerary is available from £1495pp. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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