Not tiger spotting in Chitwan
Trip Start
Sep 25, 2008
1
14
29
Trip End
Apr 01, 2009
Sauraha,
Nepal
Thursday, October 30, 2008
After a great night's sleep and breakfast we wandered off into the town to see what there was to see. Sauraha exists for one reason, it is for people that want to go and see the animals in the park, but don't want to pay the 200 or so dollars a night to stay there. There's not a lot to the place, just lots of tourists offices offering the same package of Canoe rides, Elephant Treks and Jungle walks. Oh, and there's lots of Elephants walking around.
Too tired to really consider what activities we wanted to do, we tracked down a hotel with a swimming pool, paid for a towel and spent the best part of the day lazing around, reading and having the occasional swim, just what we needed after the exercise of the previous 10 days.
In the afternoon we took a trip down to the Elephant breeding centre to see the little baby elephants before returning for a nice early night.
Like everyone else we booked a little package of events for the next day, and like everyone else we got down to the riverside at 8am to catch a canoe up the river.
It was fun, we (thankfully) didn't see any crocodiles, but saw some massive Stalks, and a Kingfisher and it was generally just quite relaxing! The purpose ot the Canoe ride is to get you up to a good spot for walking in the park where we might see Rhinos, or Elephants, or Sloth Bears or even a Tiger!
Fat chance, and quite frankly I'm glad we didn't meet any of them as we were on foot and our only weapon was a stick, and only the guide had one of them. What we did see however, were lots of places where the above mentioned had been, supposedly! 'look, rhino sheet!', 'look, elephant sheet', 'look, here rhino scratch himself'
It was enjoyable enough though, you felt a little bit like an explorer in the 10' tall grass (which meant that you really would have had to be next to any animal to see it) and we did see some crazy kind of fern that closed in on itself when you touched it, a bit like a venus fly trap. I have no idea what it was, but it was very clever.
When we came out of the trees we did actually see a Crocodile and a Marsh Mugger (like a crocodile) sunbathing on the oposite side of the river.
After the morning's adventure we had booked an Elephant safari, which was like the jungle walk but on the back of an Elephant. So after lunch, along with everyone else, we hopped on the back of an Elephant who plodded slowly off into the park.
After a good 20 minutes plod from the town we reached the entrance to the park and joined the long line of Heffalumps. At this point we were very sceptical about our chances of seeing anything.
20 minutes later and having seen an empty watering hole, an empty clearing and generally no wildlife (except our Elephant friend) we were beginning to comment on how stupid all us tourists were for coming on these trips. But then I heard something in the bushes just off to our right. The driver (is that what he's called?) told us to shush and we plodded forward a few more metres into a large clearing. And then we saw it, grey and covered in muddy water from a watering hole and no more than 10 metres away was a Rhino!
This was quite exciting, no-one ever sees the Tigers, there's only a few of them in a huge area of park, but Rhino sightings are more common. We stood still for a while, and the Rhino munched the grass not really seeming to care about us or Dumbo, so we just watched.
As it turned out we saw to more Rhinos on our way around, and a family of Wild Boars with about 8 tiny babies (I saw the babies first and was suprised at how much smaller Wild Boars are to Pigs-stupid!)
So our cynicism was unfouned, there were some wild animals out there! So we never got to see a Tiger, but one guide told me in 200 trips he'd seen one twice but our little trip on the Pachyderm had made it all worth while, so we gave him a tip-a bunch of Bananas!
