Today we were up early, before our 6:10am wake-up call (Deb was awake 1 3/4 hrs before our wake up call – she will be a tired girl tonight). So we had a comfortable non-rushed start to the day. Our Safari started at 7am and we were assigned to Zone 6. Some on the go research (after our morning safari) revealed that Zones 1 to 5 are the best, with little wild life, let alone tigers being seen in Zones 6 to 9 and the roads, well it might be better to call them poor 4WD tracks. And this is what is was like for us. We spent 3 hours in the park and saw a few deer/antelope and the highlight sighting was a couple of owlets hiding in a hole in a tree and some Tiger tracks, (Our naturalist guide told us it looked like the tiger had come from and gone back to Zone 1 which adjoins this zone and we were not allowed to venture into it.) In summary after our morning Safari we were a bit like a James Bond Martini – Shaken but not stirred!
We have since spoken both to our naturalist guide and the A&K Rep and hope they can fix it for us.
Early in the afternoon we went shopping in town, we went to a womens workshop that purports to give fair wages to its workers and some money back to the park. We did our little bit for the local economy. 🙂
Our naturist guide and driver arrived at 3pm for our afternoon Safari, and informed us we were going into Zone 8 this afternoon and that it was likely to be as bumpy as this morning. Deb needed no convincing when she decided to not go out this afternoon because of where we were headed. This caused some concern for the A&K rep who was there at the time After we ecplained the problem he said he would try to fix things for our last Safari tomorrow morning.
Anyway, after getting a back saving cushion for the car I headed off by myself with the driver and guide as we had been assigned zone 8 for the afternoon, which was going to be more of the same as the morning, so Deb chose not to go. We took an unusual way out of town and when they started going down backstreets and seedy looking back alleys I was a little concerned, this didn’t look like the way to the NP. We made our way out of Ranthambhore and went through a very small village, the roads were all bitumen up until this point. We came to a curve in the road and instead of following the road we headed off straight ahead onto what looked and felt like an old goat track, to my relief, about a km down the road we came to a gate into the park. We picked up a local farmer “guide” (The government stopped the farmers grazing in the park, and in return all visitors to the park in their area has to “hire” a “local guide” to compensate them for the loss of earnings.) Generally the afternoon went similar to the morning, crap, Rocky tracks pretty well at every turn. The “highlight” of the afternoon was being taken to a “fresh”kill. A tiger has taken one of the local cows the night before, and had chewed a good portion of the back end of the beast. It was now lying beside a farm plot playing host to a swarm of flies, and waiting for the tiger to come back for another feed. I was a bit dubious of all this, as we had heard that they feed an old female lion that can no longer hunt and the area in which this beast was lying was strewn with bones of cattle. This theory would have worked well, except for the fact that they are all Hindu here and cattle are sacred, now if it had been a goat my theory may have been a winner. Either way, it seems the tiger(s) (there are 4 in this area, a male of 6 1/2 yrs, a female of 8 yrs and 2 6 1/2 month old cubs ) weren’t in the area and not hungry. So we moved on and hit the rocky tracks, the guide quickly pointed out a partridge (and I quickly looked for the pear tree), and we moved on. We eventually finished up on top of the escarpment, and had amazing views over the NP and surrounding area. In the 2 hrs we were in the park we covered 16 km’s. At 5:30 we started to head back to our hotel and it took 45 mins to travel the 15km to get back.
While we were at dinner the A&K guy came to our table and assured us that tomorrow, for our last Safari, we would be going in either Zone 1,2,3,4 or 5. We were very happy with that and are looking forward to tomorrow.
Number of Views :2775
