Oo,oo, ah, ah, Tooki, Tooki

Yep, Deb and I went on safari to deepest India last weekend. The photo is a tiger print made earlier in the day as it stalked a deer whose print is in the upper right. We don't know the outcome of the evidence. OK, it doesn't sound as good as "a safari in deepest Africa", but then again, nobody, but NOBODY is off-shoring anything to Africa except production of vuvuzelas to annoy everyone and all smuggling of blood diamonds to keep Naomi Campbell's brilliant repartee with prosecutors in the news.
When I was planning this little excursion, I added a one-day jaunt out to the Rajiv Gandhi National Park about 50 kilometers southwest of Mysore. This is some teak wood forest area with loads of bamboo stands and a boat load of poor Indian Farmers. Oops, my bad, the 'poor' is definitely redundant. A number of years ago, Deb, the kids, and I went out to Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico in search of Anasazi ruins like those at Mesa Verde. The reason I bring this up is that you can see that the large Anasazi population centers had people who knew what they were doing when they built their dwellings; they were well-engineered and purposefully built. When you got out a distance from these centers, you notice that the dwellings are much more rudimentary, shall I say "primitive". Well, that's kind of what you find in these very rural areas. The huts are, at best, mud brick with thatched roofs of palm and coconut leaves the rest leave off the mud bricks. These places made the corrugated steel enclaves of the Dalit "recycle centers" look palatial. Now being at 12 degrees and change north latitude, we are talkin' tropics, so there's only two seasons: wet or dry. We were in the start of the dry season. It was wonderful. Here are some pictures from where we stayed. Deb on the veranda of the lodge above. Deb outside our hut below.

Deb relaxing on the porch of our hut.

Then we went in search of big game. We were in a Tata pickup specially designed to jolt every organ in your body loose from its moorings. I still haven't figured out were my gall bladder has ended up. Of course, we wanted to see a tiger and/or a leopard. We saw the tiger paw print and that's about as close as we (or most other visitors) came to the predators. But we did see wild elephants grazing in the bamboo thickets. We also saw over a thousand deer of various types. In fact, I imagine that the leopards can inadvertently fall from a tree and kill their prey by landing on them. The most work the leopard has to do is drag the carcass back up the tree to dine.




Alright, we weren't in a hut and there wasn't much chance of the wildlife terrorizing us as we slept. I am going to close this posting with a view from our porch at sunrise.



I will be posting our visits to Bangalore and Mysore over the next couple days.