A boat ride to nowhere
Trip Start
Jul 15, 2007
1
103
195
Trip End
Jul 16, 2008
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Kumily,
India
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
The Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary, 777 square kilometers of mountain, lake and forest, was once the Maharajah of Travancore's private hunting preserve. (Those maharajahs lived like, well, maharajahs.) It has been a wildlife reserve since 1933. Based on the pictures in our itinerary, we came here expecting to see a riot of wildlife, especially playful herds of wild Indian elephants.
Fat chance. Most of what we saw were excursion boats, a battered fleet slowly trailing each other at two-hundred-yard intervals into, around and back out of the lakes.
Critters in Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary are like the cheese in Monty Python's famous Cheese Shop sketch, not much in evidence
The lake at Periyar
. The Sanctuary is very clean, in the sense of being largely uncontaminated by visible wildlife. Of course, being on a two-deck excursion boat with no guides to keep order, accompanied by about two hundred noisy Indians of all ages, is probably good assurance that the only creatures you might spot will be deaf ones. The sight of a single ragged deer was enough to send dozens of eager Indians scrambling for the railing, cameras and video equipment at the ready, just in time to catch a partial frame of the deer's hindquarters scampering away into the undergrowth.These guys need to get to Kruger Park. They would be all over those impala.
