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Published: November 19th 2018
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On our way out of Diu, we stop off at the bird sanctuary. We’ve been looking forward to this, but there are disappointingly few birds to see, so we’re soon on the road to Gir. The surface is poor, but it only takes a couple of hours. We’re staying at the Gir Birding Lodge, which is tucked away behind other larger hotels and is not easy to find. We settle into our little cottage, and enjoy a very tasty lunch before getting ready for our first game drive.
Getting into an Indian national park is always a bit of a bureaucratic palaver, but Gir has elevated this to stratospheric levels. We had to book our safaris months in advance - in fact, that’s why we booked with the lodge because their owners were willing to arrange the safaris for us. We’re picked up in an ancient Maruti Suzuki jeep and drive 5 minutes to what we assume is the park entrance but is, in fact, just the entrance to where you get your permit. Having our own jeep – or gypsy as they call them - we are at least spared the queue for jeep rental. David follows the driver
and heads into a mass of people – queuing is an unknown concept here. The first queue is to register your gypsy number. The second is to get your permit stamped. The driver worms his way to the front of the throng and then having got the permit stamped, our passport details recorded and our route allocated, David is taken to a second crush where he pays another 1000 INR as the price has gone up. Then we go to an office without a label to pay an old crone with no teeth for our camera permits. 30 minutes has elapsed in this salute to Indian bureaucracy, but at last we are ready to drive to one of the two actual entrances to the park. The paperwork is checked again.
We are on route 10 this afternoon. We set off through the now familiar scenery that is dominated by teak trees shedding their huge leaves, which turn dusty brown before falling to the ground, where they produce a crackling sound every time the jeep drives over one. We drive through a small ford, where people have got out of their vehicles to pose their children standing in the water,
seemingly oblivious of the big poster nearby with a warning picture of a crocodile eating a man. Boringly, all survive.
We stop to take photos of various birds, including a tiny owlet peeping out of a hole in a tree. We see several species of deer, including the sambur, and a blue bull and some mongooses. Gir is famous as the home of the only Asiatic lions in the world, a beast that once roamed from the Mediterranean shores to China, so obviously we’re hoping to see lions. But today at least, that’s not to be.
Our best sighting is of a huge eagle, perched on a branch eating a white water snake, having killed it be ripping its head off. We return to the lodge soon after 6.00pm, have an early dinner and an very early night ahead of a 5.30 start next morning.
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Keep Smiling
Mike Fossey
Oh dear!
There I was thinking that Gir would somehow be less commercialised than awful, overcrowded Ranthambore. Just shows how wrong one can be, eh? Never mind, you did at least get to see some deer and birds! (BTW: I'm no great shakes at bird identification, but I think your pictures captioned 'Fine plumage' and 'Buzzard' are both of the Glossy Ibis.)