Advertisement
Published: December 8th 2009
[youtube=32yRsBToyAE][youtube=32yRsBToyAE]
Royal Chitwan
Chitwan covers over 900 square kilometres.We departed Kathmandu early to travel to Chitwan National Park in the south of Nepal. We were to spend two nights on the outskirts of the park, in a town called Sauraha. Unfortunately due to a tax dispute between the lodges inside the park and the government, all the lodges inside were not open. After a six hour bus journey through some small valleys (not quite of the scale of the Himalayas), although still amazing, we reached Chitwan.
Our first day was spent being educated by our guide on the local traditions and ways of living - mud huts and subsistence living. We then went to meet the government elephants which are used for labour as well as tourism. Natalie was very excited about seeing the elephants as they are her favourite animal and managed to take far too many photographs! We watched the sunset over the river before being encouraged to attend a local dance demonstration. Unfortunately Daniel had a bout of man flu so retired to bed leaving Natalie to attend alone (Dan was real disappointed). Daniel missed out on a cracking evening - the dancing was excellent, all men smashing sticks
River Rapti
The view from the bus on the journey. together, throwing fire and banging tambourines, the best though was two dressing up as women and dancing suggestively with one of the men (why they couldn’t find some women I’m not sure?)
The next day we were to take a hollowed out canoe along the river to a quiet area of the park where we were to hopefully see some wildlife. On the way to the canoe we were told a rhino has been spotted so we took a detour and saw, from a distance, our first sleeping rhino! On the river we passed many crocodiles warming themselves on the bank, luckily none in the water, and saw many birds including a bright aqua kingfisher. The nature walk prove elusive of wildlife (apart from boring birds) although we did see a tigers foot print (or was it put there to keep us interested?!).
Chitwan has an elephant breeding programme as the numbers of wild elephants a few decades ago was very low. They have been very successful and last year the first captive born twin elephants were born. We went to see them and although all the adult elephants were chained up the two brothers were able to
Big Fella
Elephant with his keeper. wander freely. They were playful and inquisitive and even kicked Natalie when they came to say hello.
Later that day we had the amazing experience of bathing an elephant. His keeper lead us to the river and we were able to have a ride bare back as he waded into the river. For his keepers amusement, he commanded to elephant to roll over throwing us into the cold river! We climbed back on, got squirted with water and thrown off again before giving the elephant a hard scrub with rocks. The elephant seemed to thoroughly enjoy himself and so did we! (Check out the videos!)
An elephant ride followed where we were again lucky enough to spot two more rhinos. The rhinos didn’t seem worried by the elephants, even though there were 5 people on top, and we managed to get to within about 5 meters - lots of photos but we won’t bore you with them all!
That night we went out to a remote lodge in the Park in the hope of seeing a tiger and other wildlife. Our basic lodge was surprisingly comfortable but unfortunately no tigers, in fact the only thing we saw
was a peacock! With no wildlife and no beer, it was an early night and a great nights sleep.
We rose early the next day to begin our next adventure to cross the border from Nepal to India.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.067s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 7; qc: 25; dbt: 0.0283s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb
