Tigers and temples: An Indian safari

By Jayne Francis and Michael Parker

We were able to fulfil a dream of seeing and spending time with the Bengal tiger. Tigers are icons of beauty and power, and we experienced both on our 16-day safari to Bandhavgarh and Ranthambore National Parks in India.

We are very fortunate to have a friend who is a naturalist, professional wildlife photographer and travel company owner. Charlie Ryan (Sticky Rice Travel) pulled together a trip that was 90% focused on tigers and 10% focused on some of the must-do sites around Agra. Charlie and good friend and colleague Kaustubh Mulay (Pristine Safaris) accompanied four other friends and us on a trip of a lifetime.

We went in April when it is heating up, and the water sources in the parks are drying up, forcing the animals to use the few larger water sources that remain, making for better sightings.

The temperatures were in the low 40s throughout our time there – that’s hot! Hot temperatures and lack of rain also equal dust, so bandanas across our faces and towels across our camera gear became commonplace when we were hurtling through the park after the next sighting.

Our accommodation was very close to each park, minimising the travel time to get into the different park zones each day. The accommodation also had great pools, which after a hot, dusty safari, were so refreshing (in addition to a cold beer).

At each national park, we had two jeeps. They have three rows of seating, so the six of us took turns choosing a jeep each day. Charlie and Kaustubh split between the jeeps, leaving the front for the local driver and the park ranger who accompanied us on most of our drives. Charlie had requested specific drivers and it wasn’t unusual to find one had been replaced the next day if the driver wasn’t good at following instructions to have us in the right spot at the right time.

Charlie and Kaustubh have exceptional spotting skills and their intimate knowledge of animal behaviour meant they positioned the jeep where animals would be emerging or walking towards us.

We saw many other jeeps rushing up as close as possible, which provided only side-on views; then, they had to keep moving and fighting off other jeeps to find another vantage point.

Before the trip, Charlie kept warning us that they couldn’t guarantee sightings and not to get our hopes too high; this wasn’t like Africa, with most of the big five readily accessible. Before we went and whilst in India, we met many people who were either disappointed because they hadn’t seen a tiger or ecstatic that they had seen one or two. We had twenty-nine quality sightings (19 in Bandhavgarh and 10 in Ranthambore)! To say our expectations were exceeded is a considerable understatement. Our emotions had a complete workout ̶ the excitement of the chase, awe, as we spent time with these majestic animals, joy, as we watched a mother with her cubs, and humour watching a tigress roar in anger when she found her kill had been stolen.

From Delhi, we flew to Jabalpur and then had a three-hour drive to our villas just outside Bandhavgarh National Park. We saw our first tiger before we even got to our villa. Locals were huddled beside the stone park wall (which is all of a metre high ̶ so not designed to keep tigers in!) and there was a juvenile male, just chilling in the shade of a tree, wondering what all the excitement was from us lot. What a start!

With an area of 105km2, Bandhavgarh National Park was declared a national park in 1968 and became a tiger reserve in 1993. Before this, it was a game preserve for the Maharajas and their guests. The park is split into three main zones and your morning and afternoon permits are specific to these zones. The park terrain is a mixture of thick sal and bamboo forest interspersed with open marshland.

With the tiger at the apex of the food chain, the park contains about 37 species of mammals, more than 250 species of birds, about 80 species of butterflies and several reptiles.

...Tigers and Temples: An Indian Safari

By Jayne Francis and Michael Parker

Safari times are scheduled around sunrise and sunset, so they change during the year. In April, we could enter the park at 6:00 am, so we would need to have collected our permit for the day and got in the jeep queue at the entrance to our zone before that time. We had to exit the park and then get a new permit for our afternoon safari from 3:00 to 7:00 pm. Lunch, a swim and downloading photos quickly filled the midday break. By the time we returned from safari, showered, changed, dined and re-lived the day in conversation, it was back to our villa for the night. Hardly party animals on these types of trips!

Elephant safaris are available at Bandhavgarh, and in some zones, you can find a mahout and elephant close to a tiger sighting who will, for the right price, take you off the road and into the bush closer to the tiger.

The Bengal tiger is big, way bigger than I expected. They weigh between 100 and 225kg with a 1.5-2m long body and a 0.6-1m tail. Their average lifespan in the wild is 8-10 years. A hungry tiger can eat as much as 30kg in one night. Females give birth to litters of two to six cubs which they raise with little or no help from the male. Cubs cannot hunt until they are 18 months old and remain with their mothers for two to three years until they disperse and find their own territory. Because the tigers are territorial, the guides know which tigers are likely to be encountered in which zones, information about their age, offspring etc.

In the parks, tigers prey on deer, wild boar, jungle ox and even juvenile elephants. They snack on peacocks, crabs, turtles, fish, small birds and fruit. They tend to hunt between dusk and dawn; sight and sound, rather than scent, are used to locate their prey. They are too large and heavy to run for long distances, so they patiently stalk their prey until they are close enough to make a final lunge for the neck.

We retraced our steps and flew back to Delhi for a night (enjoying food that wasn’t curry!) and the next day boarded a train for a 5-hour journey to Ranthambore. The train journey was an experience all on its own, and it was nice to see some countryside outside of the national parks (from our air-conditioned cabin, which most of the passengers didn’t have).

Ranthambore National Park was established initially as Sawai Madhopur Game Sanctuary in 1955 by the Government of India. In 1973 it was declared one of the Project Tiger reserves, and then, in 1980, it was declared a national park.

The park covers approximately 400 km2 and is dotted with structures that remind you of bygone eras. There are numerous water bodies scattered all across the park, providing perfect relief to the wild animals during the scorching hot days. A massive fort, after which the park is named, towers over the park atop a hill. There are many ruins scattered across the jungle, giving it a unique, wonderful and mixed flavour of nature, history and wildlife.

There are ten safari zones in Ranthambore National Park. We had one of the few multizone permits issued (typically, jeeps are issued their zone randomly by computer on the day). This meant that we could pick our zone based on sighting information, and we had keys to unlock gates on the roads between zones. If a tiger crossed the boundary into a different zone (just a line on a map instead of a fence), we could continue to follow it. Often, we would pick up information from other drivers or the park rangers about sightings in a particular zone; we would high tail it across to that zone and find the tiger. It was a huge advantage to us and gave us ten different tiger sightings. Like Bandhavgarh, our typical day started with a 4:45 am wake-up for a departure at 5:30 am. The park was only a ten-minute drive away. After a couple of hours, we would have snacks ̶ potato chips and biscuits (we never ate so many chips and at such weird times of the day). We’d stop for a picnic breakfast around eight or nine before returning to the lodge for a swim and relax between 11:00 am and 2:00 pm. (We tried a full day safari on our first day, but it was too hot ̶ and nothing moves in the middle of the day.) Our permit let us go back into the park anytime. Others were only allowed in the park from 7:00 am to 10:30 am and from 2.30 to 6:00 pm. This gave us a few hours each day when there was practically only us; only five all-day permits were issued per day, and we had two of them.

Although our focus was tigers, Ranthambore provided us with superb sightings of other wildlife: leopards, blue bull, gaur, chinkara, jackal, flying fox, mongoose, langur, macaque, crocodiles, wild boar, owls, osprey and vultures. As a bonus, we had an extraordinary time spent with a sloth bear and her cub.

No journey to this part of India would be complete without a trip to Agra, so we finished with a few days visiting the fantastic sites of Fatehpur Sikri, The Red Fort, The Taj and the Baby Taj.