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Published: October 21st 2009
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Day 8 - Bandhavgarh
When we were awoken by our 4.30am wake up call, our room was still quite warm, as we had left off the air conditioning as it was too nosiy but left on the ceiling fan. When we went outside however, there was quite a nip in the air, and it was still dark, so another layer was in order. We had been wondering why we had been carrying fleeces round in 90deg heat for a week!
After a cup of tea and a biscuit, we set off in open topped, open sided jeeps to the entrance which was close to the hotel, as we had passed it on the way the previous day. When we arrrived, it was what can only be described as chaos. There was a long line of jeeps waiting to get into the park, and all the drivers had taken entrance money and completed forms up to an office and were waiting for clearance. After sitting in the line from 5.30 for an hour, it transpried that because this was the first day of the season, some of the jeeps were not registered with the park. Two jeep changes later, we
were all still sat there. In our jeep were Dan and Nikki, and the others were split between two other jeeps. We were finally the first to get into the park, which we took as a good omen, and the safari began. Everyone picks up a park guide at the gate, who is there to point out wildlife and help spot tigers. In this park, each jeep is alloted one of four routes to follow round the park.
Not far from the entrance, we saw langur monkeys in the trees and also a large number of spotted deer. In the park there are 12,000 deer in total. We also saw some of the largest spiders webs and spiders we had ever seen, roughly around 3m wide, some of which have a nasty bite. We also saw some of the more shy Samba deer, which are larger and plain, however no tigers.
After a couple of hours, our jeep headed to a central point in the park where we could eat our packed breakfast that had been provided by the hotel and compare notes with the other jeeps if they were there. Our breakfast turned out to be butter
sandwiches and jam sandwiches on stale bread, with hardboiled eggs and no drink! We saw the jeep with Mark, Adam and Puja in it, and were disappointed to find our that they had seen a tiger shortly after entering the park. We were heartened to learn that this was to be our next route to follow, and so were keen to set off again.
We followed the route the other jeep had taken, but didn;t see any tigers. Dan did spot lots of birds and was able to get some good pictures as the light improved in thje park. However, the later and warmer it got, we knew our chances of seeing a tiger were fading, and when we started to head for the exit at 10.30, we were disappointed to come away withbout a sighting.
When we got back to the hotel, our disappointment was compounded by the knowledge that the jeep with Becca, Jackie, Louise and Chloe had also seen a tiger. We were the unlucky bus.
We were given the option to go on a further safari in the afternoon, which everyone opted to do, especially those of us that had not seen a
tiger in the morning. The safari was after another Indian lunch at 2.30pm.
Once again, we set out in our jeeps, and sat at the entrance waiting for the red tape to be sorted, and we had a form to complete with our passport number on it. The afternoon safari was very disappointing, in that the length of time in the park is less, and the routes are the same. Their method of dealing with this was just to drive faster, so how we were ever going to spot a tiger at 40kph we'll never know. No-one saw a tiger that afternoon, so the unlucky bus continued to form, althought we did amuse ourselves and laughed and joked most of the way round. We tried everything to attract the tiger including "here puss puss", and "here kitty kitty", but to no avail.
Puja had arranged for some of the local villagers to come to the hotel and dance for us. We sat round the pool and watched the men and women perform for us, and they brought out snacks of pakoras, fries and puris. The dancing was very African tribal with drums and chanting, and nothing like the
Bollywood films at all. Kathryn had reached her Indian meal limit having eaten nearly the same thing for a week, and just had chips for tea as she couldn't face another meal of rice, dahl and a veg curry, After a beer, which was verging on nearly cool, we went to bed, another 4.30am start - tiger tiger!
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rebecca
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OMG
There Was Of Them Kinda Spiders In My Mums Room :/ It Keeps Changing Room And Wee Cant Get It :/