Greetings!
The morning sun looks like a sunset around here, primarily because India's air quality is so poor. But it rained yesterday, and it's much cleaner than usual. We started early on our way to Rathambore National Park. We'll spend two nights there in a twenty-year old hotel designed to look like something out of the English colonial times.
Along the way, some of our travelers decided to do some wheat gathering in solidarity with a group of women scythe-cutting on the other side of a fenceline. Soon, we gathered a crowd, and it turned into a photoshoot, with everyone having a lot of fun taking pictures of each other. A few minutes later, we admired local wheat truckers' packing acumen, as we came across a roadside scale, and saw the enormous sacks of wheat being delivered from the area.
Several hours later, we arrived at
Nahargarth Rathambore, an ivory royal palace which serves as the guest entry point for safaris into the nearby vast national forest. When asked at the beginning of this tour what travelers wanted most out of the experience, almost all nominated "seeing a tiger". The anticipation is great today, as we dig out our binoculars, sun tan, mosquito repellent, and prepare our buns for a rugged ride over dusty forest hills in search of one of the 85 tigers claiming these 515 square miles in the
Rathambore National Forest.
Climbing aboard local 12-passenger open-air safari vehicles, we traversed the designated zone (A), and came up short for about two hours. Plenty of deer and peacocks, but little else. Our guide provided all the history and background information on everything we did see, and our driver did a magnificent job of barely missing trees, fording ponds, and making it up and down muddy roads.
Finally, we spotted and followed (it was hard to tell who was following whom) a well-known female tiger as she slowly walked (very regally) through the territory. Eleven safari groups jockeyed around each other vying for the best views, as hundreds of cameras captured thousands of photos. Over the space of about thirty minutes, we were treated to a very special site. One all of us will remember the rest of our lives.
No comments:
Post a Comment