The Jungle Book

At 5:45am a tray with coffee and hot milk was delivered to our tent. We dressed quickly in as many layers as possible and went to reception to wait for our safari jeep. This gave us all a quick hit of wifi time - important as so much still goes on back at home while we are away. We were all provided with a thick woollen blanket and a hot water bottle before we climbed into the open top Jeep for the five minute drive to Ranthambore National Park. It was still dark, with the dawn just breaking and it was exhilarating to be speeding along in an open car in this exotic place. The roads are dirt and very rocky and the car goes about 60km/h, dodging and weaving around potholes, rocks, goats and cows. There were no seatbelts and the sides were low. We had a few giggles about the difference between this and the safari ride at Disneyworld in Florida, which is clearly the theme park version of our experience. The entrance to the park is through an old fort gate overgrown with trees - very Indiana Jones. Everyone we spoke to prior to going on the safari, wished us good luck for tiger spotting. I understand that quite often, there are no tigers seen on the safari trip.

We headed into our area for the morning, Area three. There was then a period with a lot of driving back and forth and talking with other Jeep drivers. We are a bit suspicious that the talk was just chit chat and nothing to do with finding a tiger. We saw monkeys, a few different kinds of deer, antelopes and a lot of peacocks. The guides would stop and listen periodically to hear other animals making alarm calls and then drive in that direction. We stopped a few times for them to show us fresh tiger tracks in the dirt. When they found the tiger, it was quite exciting. She was majestic and completely unfazed by the watchers. She walked across the road in front of us and then along to the side and then disappeared into the jungle. The wild pigs and the crocodile after that were an anticlimax. Our guide told us that we couldn’t tell anyone that we had seen the tiger, since we had been driving in a section where we were not supposed to be. On the way back, we were stopped by the park security who we THINK fined the driver and the guide for driving on the path we were on. We are not sure if this is a normal occurrence or whether we just had a guide that was extra nice to us.

After a bit of down time in the sun, we ate lunch and headed off for the  afternoon safari. This one outdid the first. The track we were allocated to was in a different part of the national park, heavily forested on one side with a dry river bed on the other. The cliffs with the old fort on them towered a few hundred meters above us, and we could just make out monkeys scampering around the fort walls. We were lucky enough to find a tiger cub, about 18 months old. We watched it sitting about then stalking a sambal deer for about an hour and a half. I think the guide was hoping it would attack the deer but that didn’t happen and eventually we headed off back to our hotel. The boys wandered off to “meet the cows” (don’t ask) and I found another scarf at the textile shop that I needed to buy. There were the most beautiful fabrics and would have loved more time and available spending money to indulge. Dinner was vegetarian and tasty, with all the vegetables grown on the home farm. We settled in for the night to refresh for the early start on Friday.