We were up
before dawn, and after breakfast, loaded up into another of the open-air trucks
for a very chilly ride back into the national park. Fortunately, the driver
brought a stack of heavy wool blankets for us to wrap up in, and we'd been
warned to layer up, so it wasn't terrible. As the sun rose, the layers began
coming off.
Our guide, Sujay, handed us over to
a young man named Bittoo, who is trained as a naturalist and wildlife guide for
the park. There was some paperwork at the main gate, as our vehicle was
assigned to one of the eight zones into which the park is divided. Only five
zones are active on any given day. We were assigned to zone 3, which was
fortunate because a female tiger with two young cubs has been sighted in that
area recently. The roads were extremely bumpy and dusty, making our game rides
in Tanzania some years ago feel like cruising on a superhighway by comparison.
We
saw several types of deer and antelope, peacocks and many other birds, many
monkeys and a few wild boar. But Bittoo was reluctant to stop for any of these,
as they would be visible any time. The illusive tiger is usually only about in
the early morning and just before dusk, so the hunt was on. The moment came
somewhat unexpectedly. We were crossing one of the many dry riverbeds that fill
up quickly during the monsoon, but are simply rock piles this time of year. Two
smaller jeeps and one other open truck were stopped at the crossing, using the
"bush toilet," when one of the jeep drivers shouted something in
Hindi and turned off the road, up the riverbed. The other jeep quickly
followed, and our driver took off right behind (the other truck had to wait
until all passengers finished necessary business and got back on board). The
riverbed was entirely large rocks, so it was a slow, rough ride at least 200
yards downstream.
How the
driver spotted the tiger at that distance is beyond me. But there he lay in the
grassy riverbank, down on his belly, but head erect, simply watching the world
pass by. He was totally unperturbed by the noisy vehicles full of tourists, or
their clicking cameras. Our truck stopped about 35-40 feet away from him, and
he looked us over, but did not move for the longest time.
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| Tiger selfie |
A half dozen other
vehicles arrived on the scene, none able to get as close as the first three or
four, but still the large male tiger, identified by Bittoo as D-24
"Ustad" (meaning "master"), simply laid in the grass. After
about 10 minutes he slow got to his feet, stretched, and ambled a few yards
farther down the dry river, to a place where there was a puddle of water, had a
drink, and ambled on in the same direction, out of our site and beyond where we
could follow.
Leaving the riverbed was not as easy
as getting there. Our driver had great difficulty getting turned around and
nearly got stuck, but we made it. Several of the other trucks had a hard time
of it, too. One truck got high centered on a large rock and could not move.
There was a lot of shouting in Hindi among drivers, most getting out of their
vehicles to help assess the situation. Finally, our driver got into one of the
jeeps, whose passengers had been abandoned temporarily, and moved it 20 or so
yards up stream. Then another driver got behind the wheel of our truck, revved
the engine, and backed hard into the back bumper of the truck that was stuck.
He succeeded in getting that truck off the rock and free, but he continued
backing into the front of another truck that, frankly, shouldn't have been so close.
Those two drivers got into something of an argument, but our driver returned
to our truck and we went on our way.
As we returned to the hotel, Sujay
met us at the truck (Bittoo had apparently texted him). Sujay then admitted to
us that we were the first of his groups since last August to actually see a
tiger at Ranthambore. We celebrated over lunch, and then had some free time to
rest.
At 2 p.m. we met once again to go
once more to the park with Bittoo, this time with a different truck and driver.
We were assigned zone 5 this time, so a different area of the park. Given that
it was unlikely we would see another tiger, we were looking for a leopard this
time. However, as we came to the bank of one of the lakes, Bittoo noticed a
jeep and a truck across the lake that had stopped, with everyone up and taking
photos. Unlike our Africa trip, the trucks here do not use radios, but he could
see that there must be something interesting there, so had our driver head
around the lake quickly. At least two or three other trucks converged on the
spot at the same time.
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| A Kingfisher lands on a man's hand in a nearby truck as we watched tigers. |
This spotting was more difficult, as
the animals were probably a couple hundred yards away, but we saw a female
tiger and three cubs ("teenagers" about a year old, nearly fully
grown). They were playing in the water, wrestling, and picking at a kill -- a
large deer that the female tiger, D-19, had brought down several hours earlier.
Sujay later told us that he has never heard of any group seeing five tigers in
one day here.
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