Thursday March 7
Our adventure really began today, but first we had to get there! We left our Delhi hotel at 4:45 am, for a 7:30 flight to Jabalpur. The Delhi airport is much nicer than Katharine’s memory from a decade ago; in fact all of Delhi was impressive for its cleanliness. Airport rules about what can be, can’t be, and should be in carry-on is quite different from other countries. Thanks to great guidance from our trip leader we were able to get through the tough Indian security with no issues.
Jabalpur is located almost exactly in the center of India. For this reason, when the British wanted to move the capital from Calcutta, Jabalpur was considered for the new capital. Its competition was Delhi, which had been the imperial capital for the Mughals. We were told that “Delhi won on a coin toss”. We drove for about 3.5 hours southeast to the Bandhavgarh National Park and a late lunch at our lodge. We will stay here for three nights, and are pleased with our up-on-stilts cabin.
Later in the afternoon we entered the park for our first game drive. We saw (huge) tiger tracks in the sand. While we didn’t see a tiger today, we did see two kinds of deer, two kinds of monkey, a Gaur (the largest hoofed mammal in Asia), a jackal and quite a few new birds. We also got to watch and listen to a family of wild Asian Elephants munching their way through a Sal tree and bamboo thicket. While domesticated elephants are key to the management of the park, wild elephants were extinct in this area for one hundred years, until a herd migrated in from eastern India around 2017. We were told seeing the elephants in this park is a rarity, which made today’s viewing even better.
Pictured: baby elephant, rhesus macaque, spotted owlet
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