Advertisement
Published: September 28th 2014
Edit Blog Post
Our next adventure was to go to Chitwan. Chitwan is around 3-4 hours from Pokhara by very bumpy bus and is Nepals first national park, established in 1973. There are lots of animals such as leopard, Deers, wart hog, pythons, white rhinos and Bengal tigers. It is located in the lowlands and again, is so different to Pokhara and to Kathmandu. Very quiet and much different scenery.
We didn't have much time so we took a one night/two day trip to the Rhino hotel. Our guide was called Jum and he was fantastic, very knowledgeable about the animals he spotted as well as the different types of fauna. We took an elephant ride through the jungle and saw wild pigs/kestrel, Deers, Craig swore he saw a tiger and at the end we got right up close to a white rhino! As we were on elephants they hide our smell and they can get close to the animals without them worrying that any harm will come to them. I'd never done safari like this before and it was a great way to get up close to the animals. One thing l didnt like was the elephant keeper who kept prodding the
elephant with a sharp piece of metal to control him. We put it down to experience, with no desire to do this type of safari again if the animals are treated like this. The next morning we were up very early for a dug out canoe boat ride, we were the first on the water and the mist was still lurking. It was very exciting, we saw crocodiles, lots of deer drinking water at the river and some birds like the kingfisher. We were also shown what I would think would be the scariest place to wake up in..a crocodile dug out den. Eek! I remember Dad telling me a tale of a guy who woke up in a crocodile den with sleeping crocodiles around him, having been captured by a crocodile who wasn't hungry at the time to eat him straight away, this guy had to escape whilst the crocodiles were still sleeping. scary stuff. Even the entrance looked scary. We also had a short walk through the forest and our guide was in his element pointing out different things to us and telling us about the jungle. We then went to an elephant rehabilitation centre. The elephants here
had been rescued (we hoped) and ones who were ok were trained to work either on the land or for tourists (more like an elephant work camp). But we got into the spirit of things and had a good luck round. Elephants are lovely animals (my mums favourite) and we watched them go about their daily routine and also met some babies who were roaming around causing trouble. Craig was patting one when it's jealous friend pushed Craig out the ways! Jum said he gets jealous of anyone else around his friend. Good thing they were only Babar sized!
After lunch we got on another other local bus (this means music blaring, lots of people piled in, rally driver, honking, swerving) back to Kathmandu. We had one night here before we headed to India. We treated ourselves to what we thought would be our last steaks for a while (we thought going vegetarian would decrease the risk of Delhi belly and much of India is vegetarian) as well as an alcoholic drink (there are a lot of dry states in India and if there is alcohol it it taxed very high). We talked about how much we had enjoyed
Nepal, and that we were pleased we had spent 3 weeks here. More time would have been great, but in 3 weeks we were lucky to do lots of varied things and take our time. I really liked the people of Nepal, very placid and very friendly and chatty. I loved Pokhara the most and highly recommend going and spending some days relaxing there idling the days away.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.34s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 14; qc: 68; dbt: 0.1192s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb