A day in the park

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Yesterday we arose at 5:30 (difficult for Jamie) and climbed into a "canter" (open-topped bus) for a morning trip to Ranthambore National Park, a 1300 km2 reserve about 300 km south of New Delhi. It's a dry area, mostly acacia thorn scrub, with larger trees in the riparian areas. It was good to have this tour, because it shows what much of India would look like if it didn't have 1 B people.

In the morning it was cold, luckily the operators provided blankets. The hope of course was to see tigers; there are reputedly 35 to 40 tigers in the area (one per 3500 ha?), and most of the other passengers appeared to be fixated on that hope. We saw many peacock, or pea fowl, (this is their native habitat), chittal the spotted deer, (and we spotted many), sambar the larger deer, chinkara the gazelle, crocodile, mongoose, jackal, and loads of birds including red-vented bulbul and wooly-necked crane, both of which I had never seen before, but given I had only been 5 days in India, not surprising.

You may have noticed that the above list did not include tigers, but we did not have illusions that such a sighting would be likely.

Later we visited Ranthambore Fort, originally built 1000 years ago, and modified by numerous later occupiers including the Moughals. It is now partly occupied by langur monkeys. After visiting a hindu temple in the fort, we were given flower garlands. On walking back we noticed the langurs were peculiarly aggressive, like macaques in southeast asia. Later we realized that they were after the flowers on our garlands. Finally we gave up our garlands to the monkeys but they exhibited not a gram of gratitude. such ingrates!

On the way down I was surrounded by an extremely friendly group of about 30 muslims, young men and women, who found it amusing that I could say salaam ouh alaikim in greeting. There followed a swarm of speaking that I couldn't understand, and offerings of sweets and handshakes, pictures. If only I could speak more of the language. Next time.

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Comments

[ALisha]

I wish I could be there too
Hey gordon, I don't know how this works, but if you get this say hi to jamie for me.

[steve]

howdy