Stalking Tigers on Elephants

I had already broken into my packet of Tums, trying to persuade my stomach to hold out the thirteen-hour overnight bus journey, when a man plops down beside me on the bed. On overnight buses, you are give a single bed instead of an upright seat, yet as he lied down beside me, giving me the odd look customary to when most see I am not Indian, I came to realize that this small single bed was two seats. Trying to sleep on a bus that is weaving through traffic, catching every bump, with a Bollywood soundtrack blaring from the speakers and a stranger snuggled up next to me is not easy. I turned, tried to get comfortable yet lay awake, wondering how it was so easy for the guy next to me to simply lie on his back, motionless, and fall into a deep sleep. Twenty seven hours and four bus transfers later, I arrived in Nagpur, then Seoni, then Mandla, and finally Kanha National Park, in the state of Madhya Pradesh.

We hopped into our gypsy safari the next morning at 5:30am, dressed in long sleeves and ready to head into the park and hopefully see some tigers. Kanha is a 2000-square-kilometer national park that regularly tops lists of the best places to glimpse a tiger. The park also lays claim to Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, which is based on a case in 1831 of the capturing of a wolf-boy in the Seoni district. To attempt to see a tiger, we were armed with Santos (our knowledgeable driver), a British couple with two cameras and four lens attachments (one of which was bigger than my arm – “just in case the lighting was right,” he said), me and my Olympus auto-focus hand-held, and a guide who was bundled in five layers of clothing and didn’t speak for the first two hours due to the cold.

The park was fantastic as we drove through a virtually-untouched and overgrown forest, searching for tigers but running into hundreds of spotted deer, langur monkeys, peacocks, gaur (big buffalo), turtles, jackals (small wild dogs) and sambar deer. The rarest were the barahsinger deer, which can only be found in Kanha, and were useful since they howled to each other when they sighted a tiger. Seeing a tiger is no easy task and our driver would often stop in the middle of the road for thirty minutes (we could not leave the jeep), waiting to pinpoint the sound of a howling deer or monkey, and then racing over to the closest area to search for paw prints or listen for another hint.

As we gave chase, we ended up running into elephants who had located a tiger within the forest, so we climbed aboard these massive beasts and trekked out in search. As it was late morning, the tiger was already beginning to relax in the heat and we found her lying under some overgrowth, trying to get some sleep despite the huge elephants gathered around her with humans clicking away on giant cameras. We watched it lie there for some minute and then wobbled back to our safari jeep to let others get goosebumps too. In our jeep, we waited for the tiger to get up and walk around, following it down the road and watching it pay no attention to the fifteen jeeps stalking it as it headed down the road.

The next morning we felt not so lucky, as Santos camped out in the road due to the howling monkeys in the trees overhead but the tiger would not come into the open and show itself. After waiting for an hour, disappointed of not seeing one, we decided to head off in search of other animals, but as we drove we nearly ran over a huge male tiger crossing the road. We stopped and for a second were too stunned to even take photos. It went back into the forest, turned to look at us, decided it wasn’t interested, and continued into the forest. Considering the disappointed state five minutes before, the excitement was similar to watching Chipper Jones hit a three-run home run in the bottom of the ninth down by two runs, when you think the game is all but over and now you have newfound life and enthusiasm.

Kanha lasted only two days and before I could regain sleep I was back on the bus, this time headed to the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences in Sevagram, where Gandhi set up an ashram and where he began the ‘Quit India’ movement. Traveling through Kanha was great, though, and trekking in open-aired jeeps searching for tigers and other animals was surely an awesome experience to say the least.