On elephant safari!

  (Royal) Chitwan National Park, Nepal
Friday, September 8, 2006

After a really fun and relaxing five days in Kathmandu when we said goodbye to all but one of our travelling partners (we're travelling with Claire for a week or so) we took a bus to one of the country's best known national parks.

The bus journey was interesting. We'd waved goodbye to Daphne our truck in Kathmandu, so we're now relying on local transport. Local it certainly was! As well as a handful of tourists, the driver stopped to pick up a multitude of passengers along the way. I say stopped, but that's not really true - he drove along at full pelt with the door wide open and the two boys charged with collecting people, money and various parcels for delivery along the way, grabbed people off the side of the road.

11 The windscreen wipers were decorative only!

Judging by the clamour on board at times, they occasionally misjudged it and grabbed a few pedestrians who had no desire to board the bus as well. All this was done to the accompaniment of *very* loud Hindi pop music and the "entertaining" sight of the driver having to contend with purely ornamental windscreen wipers when there was a full monsoonal downpour in progress.

02 Villagers harvesting grass

By some miracle we made it to the town of Sauraha in one piece (well, actually two, but you get the gist). Chitwan National Park is in the south of the country near the border with India. The last census a couple of years ago concluded it was home to 372 rhinos and over a 130 Bengal tigers; there are also said to be some leopards there too. As it was, the monsoon rains have made the vegetation explode and so seeing the big cats was always going to be highly unlikely. This didn't stop our enjoyment of the place though - it was amazing.

01 Local house

We got a tour of a local Tharu village - the people who settled here about 400 years ago came from near the Thar desert in Rajasthan and were famed for their resistance to malaria. Thankfully, careful application of DDT in the 1960s has seen the disease eradicated in the area and so we were free to sip beers at a riverside bar while spotting two different types of crocodiles (one of them entertainingly called Marsh Muggers) and watching the most glorious sunset.

04 Sunset over Chitwan

The next morning we got up very early to go on a jungle safari walk - in hindsight this was probably quite dangerous as our two guides were only armed with sticks. I have to say when we were given the safety talk we were slightly concerned. We were told that a rhino's sense of smell is really good, but it can't see too well, so if confronted with one we should try and find a tree to climb or just hide behind a large bush! The advice for the tigers, leopards and sloth bears was more encouraging "Don't worry they won't attack a group as big as this" - there were only 8 of us. The most alarming though has to be what we were to do in the event of coming face to face with the only wild bull elephant in the park - run!

08 Unstable

After the walk (when thankfully we only saw some monkeys and other small creatures) we got to do one of the most trilling things on our trip so far ... we got to wash an elephant! Well really she did most of the washing as we sat on her back and she squirted us with water before unceremoniously dumping us in the river - thank God there were no crocs nearby. After about half an hour frolicking she disappeared to get saddled up for the elephant safari.

10 Rhino

This was fantastic - once we got used to the hard wooden platform and the strange motion we really enjoyed ourselves. Naturally it poured down - rain like you wouldn't believe - but we got to see two enormous rhinos up really close and several huge deer too. Even better was feeding her bunches of bananas afterwards (a fully grown elephant eats between 140 and 270kgs of food a day, and 200 litres of water!). What a great way to end our stay in Nepal. We're definitely coming back!