We started the day slowly, and had a bit of a lie in before breakfast at 9:30. The fireworks went all night, even at 9:30am you could still hear crackers going off around the town.
I took the opportunity of our slow morning to take a couple of snaps around the Palace. I walked out in front and found that the “Royal Residence” must have had an open day, as there were bus loads of people queuing to get inside.
We left the hotel at 11am, but not before being presented with a parting gift from the Palace, I got a Tie and Cuff Links and Deb got a scarf.
The drive to Chhatra Sagar was uneventful and an easy 2 hours.
We “checked-in”, ie handed over our Passports, and were taken to the 3rd tent along from the “Lounge Tent”. It is a very comfortable tent, yes, it has canvas walls and roof, with a polished concrete floor. This is camping, lol, queen size bed and ensuite. All the facilities here are built on top of a dam, constructed by the owners Greatgrandfather, the nobleman Thakur Chhatra Singh, in 1890, and all the tents look out over the lake formed by the dam. The water of the lake attracts large numbers of birds, including migratory birds from Europe, Russia and the Hymalayas. They say they have identified over 220 different birds here + a few more that they couldn’t identify.
After a very tasty Indian lunch we rested up a bit, then went for a bird-watching nature walk with one of the owners, Nandi and his 3 dogs. The walk started at 4pm and went for aout 2 hrs, so we finished right on sunset. We saw around 27 different types of birds (Deb wrote down everything we saw), a very large frog, a smallish monitor lizard, grass hoppers, antelope, and even a zucchini! At one point the dogs, a great dane and 2 fox terriers, spotted a baby antelope in the bushes and set off after it. It was so funny, the antelope was so much faster than the dogs, but that didn’t stop them trying, even the little ones, all you could see was the rustling of the bushes as they chased after the antelope. Anyhows, the antelope doubled back on the dogs and they lost it. Great laugh.
Once the sun goes down here it gets dark, very dark, very quickly and strangely quiet, something we really haven’t really had for the last 10 days. Bliss!
We are both looking forward to a peaceful day tomorrow, just chilling around the tent, after a trip to the local village.
Number of Views :3582
Tie and cufflinks hey??? That’s better than swiping the little bottles of shampoo!