A friend of mine in the program here is a girl named Jennie who just happens to be a PhD student at the Yale School of Forestry and her main area of research just happens to be tigers. As soon as I learned this about her I made clear that she must alert me if ever she was going to seek out some tigers this summer. I was not the only one of the students here to come up with that idea, so it wasn't long before Jessica, Stephanie, Heeryoon, Devin, and I all found ourselves tagging along with Jennie on an Indian Jungle safari in Ranthambhore National Park, just a few hours south of Jaipur.We left Jaipur on Friday evening and arrived late that night to the "Hotel Tiger Safari Resort." The HTSR was a nice place with a lot of character; it featured tacky paintings of tigers on every available surface which could only be outdone in loudness by the tiger-print curtains. After a night of tiger-striped dreams and sleeplessness due to pre-tiger excitement, we woke up at 5am for our 6am safari.
The six of us loaded into a jeep-like vehicle accompanied by a driver and a guide. As soon as we approached the park entrance I immediately had the opportunity to embarrass my travel companions as our car was swarmed by souvenir sellers--my friends shooed them away as I beckoned them closer to buy an army-green Ranthambhore baseball cap which I insisted on wearing in public for the remainder of our trip to everyone's dismay.
We began down the bumpy, dirt road at speeds reckless enough to make me legitimately concerned about being ejected from the vehicle (no roof, no seat-belts, nothing to hold onto). It was much like the Indiana Jones Ride at Disneyland, except real and totally unsafe. Our first hour or so in the park was somewhat uneventful other than the moment when I felt an itch only to realize a gecko was crawling up my leg and began wildly screaming. We saw any number of beautiful birds, some deer, and some nice scenery, but our chances of actually seeing a tiger seemed to be narrowing as it got later and the sun got hotter. And then, tiger tracks in the mud, birds making distress calls, and another half-hour of nothing. And then, TIGER!!!Our vehicle, and about five others, suddenly clustered on the road and just 100 feet up the hill a female tiger (possibly pregnant) lazily paced around in the trees. We were able to follow her along the road for a good half hour or so. Though we could see her very clearly, it turns out it is very difficult to photograph a tiger. That whole natural camouflage thing really works to my camera's disadvantage, and for some reason they didn't want us to get out of the car to walk closer.
Eventually we had disturbed the tigress long enough that she decided to leave for more remote areas of the forest and we decided to leave for Ranthambhore Fort, a thousand year-old structure in the center of the park. Like most historic buildings in India, 
the fort was crawling with monkeys. The fort was beautiful, but by 9am after a long morning of safariing and fort climbing in the oppressive heat, we were more than ready to return to the hotel for food and napping.In the afternoon, Jennie, Jessica and I wandered into the village around our hotel. Here, Jennie put aside her fashion sense and purchased the same hat I had bought that morning. She got her hat for less than half the price I paid for mine from a Hindi-speaking shopkeeper who asked why none of us
(over-the-hill in our early/mid 20's) were married yet and told us that he was married at age 10. Shortly thereafter, the three of us created some kind of riot attempting to get our park passes for our evening safari, but all was resolved in the end. (Jennie and I are pictured in our matching hats in front of the tiger curtains in the hotel making our best Tiger Safari faces)Our evening safari seemed almost superfluous after our adventurous morning, but this time we were going to a different part of the park and the different time of day would mean different animals. We loaded into the jeep for a second time. When we had been on the road for less than a minute, just about 20 feet inside the gate, we came upon an old ruined building. And inside the structure...a TIGER napping in the shade! She was close enough to walk 10 steps to (they didn't actually let us do this), but just far enough into the shadows to make photos a challenge once again.
When we eventually decided to leave tiger #2 alone, we carried
on past some more monkeys. The monkeys, our guide told us, were staring at us because of our "punny white skin." With that, we moved on to see some birds. We stopped our vehicle next to a lake filled with storks and many other tropical birds cooling themselves off alongside a few herds of deer. As we sat observing birds and looking for crocodile noses peeking out of the water Jessica, an avid bird-lover, revealed a package of cookies she had brought along. It didn't take a tree-full of rufous treepies long to discover the crumbled cookies in our hands. As it happens, rufous treepies make really strange, electronic-sounding little chirps like little robot-birds. It was fun to feed the birds, but once the vehicle stopped moving and the wind was no longer in our faces, the heat and humidity became somewhat intense. So when all of our isolated sweat-patches had enlarged to whole-body dampness, we unanimously opted to leave the park having seen two tigers, several varieties of deer and antelope, dozens of monkeys, a few wild pigs, a really huge lizard, many tiny lizards, a rabbit, a few submerged crocodiles, and birds birds birds birds birds (eat your heart out, Rudyard Kipling).Today we drove back. I uploaded my photos to discover I had taken nearly 200 in a single day-- The Handbook of India is at least accurate about the inexhaustible supply of photo subjects, it seems.
Tomorrow: back to class.
omg. i hope you bought me some souvenirs. or maybe packed away a monkey for me.
ReplyDeleteSounds like a great, adventure filled weekend. I'm so glad it was a successful journey.
ReplyDeleteEven in the photos, the tigers look biiig
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