Tyger, Tyger burning bright

I read William Blake when I need late 18th-early 19th Century mysticism, and I know I'm no Blake. But we went into the jungle southeast of Jaipur to go on safari in the hopes of getting a glimpse of a tiger. Mind you, Deb and I were already exposed to the experience in Kabini reserve where the closest we got to a tiger was a paw print on the muddy trail. At Aman-I-Khas we were roughing it out in tents for the evening of our stay. The temperature dipped to 10 degrees Celsius at night. The roads to the encampment made me long for the potholes of Hyderabad. For David and Sarah, this was their first experience with rural Indian life and their eyes were at times as big as saucers when we went through some of the towns/villages. The dung disks drying in the sun beside the wooden lean-tos were enlightening. Now they think of any of the New York streets above 125th as being rather civilized. After about a three-hour drive out of Jaipur, we got to the campsite.
Fortunately our batman had the porters set up the tents before we arrived so we could stow our gear and grab a bite to eat before we left on our trek.
Deb had been jostled so much by the drive over the bad roads, that she decided to bow out of the afternoon outing, opting to stay back at camp and try to get all vital organs back in their proper place before attempting the safari.

So David, Sarah and I set out with our guide, Islam, to the Ranthambore reserve. David would later regret having a beverage at lunch that is a natural diuretic as the reserve does not allow humans to mark their territory in The Indian Way. The sky was slightly overcast, which was good as it allowed us to see some of the flora and fauna better, and there was lots of it. The "jungle" in Ranthambore reserve is more like savanna with Acacia trees and cactus along with the tall grasses.

This environment sustains a great deal of the wildlife just like those you see in the National Geographic magazines on India: lots of birds, crocodiles, and lizards. Where the deer, and the antelope play at not being some predator's next meal and the sky is only partly cloudy all day.



There were three ponds on the stretch of the reserve we were on so there were lots of egrets and other water fowl along with the crocodiles.
And the water birds did not bother with us as they went about their fishing. The reserve had originally been the hunting lodge (and second largest fort in India dating back to the 10th century) of the Maharajahs right up to the 1970s when Indira Gandhi endeared herself to the Nawabs, Maharajahs, and Nizams by exercising eminent domain and confiscated and nationalized these lands. Just like we saw in the Kabini, some of the most prolific fauna are the deer and antelope. Like this large antelope below, they are pretty much ubiquitous along with the deer population.

And the water birds, as well, go about their work with only a slight irritation as the bit 16 passenger tour bus pulls up.

Sarah, of course, is a natural with, well, nature. Just like Snow White, the little birds come to her while she was singing and dancing her way through the jungle.
I wanted one of the many green parrots to land on my shoulder so I could be one of Jimmy Buffet's parrot heads. Instead, I'm just one of the bird brains. Many monkeys populate the park in different gangs with their own colors and signs we were told by Islam (the guide, not the religion) and they send out alarm calls whenever there is a threat such as predators, rival gangs, or an invitation to a cocktail party. Suddenly Islam asked for silence as he listened to the monkeys. It was like watching Jeanette McDonald listening for Nelson Eddy singing "I am calling You ooo ooo oooo, ooo ooo oooooo".
David was the one to spot the leopard running off into a ravine not too far from us. He said he could see the tail and back legs as the animal took off into the scrub. And not too much later, we found out why it had beat a hasty retreat when coming up from under some dense brush by the lake, a female tiger came up the hill, directly at us. She wasn't charging. She was deliberately following a scent of the leopard, not to be confused with Al Pacino's tango partner in Scent of a Woman.
My Canon Powershot is a nice camera, but it doesn't have a long telephoto lens, so the shot below was no more than 6 meters from where we were. As David observed later, this was a risk-free meeting for the tigress. She knew that virtually all humans pose no direct threat and if need be, they could provide a meal since on any one kill, the tiger consumes about 35 kilos of meat. I would have been the obvious target. So this was a win-win for her and our presence did not deter her from continuing her tracking of the intruder leopard who has only one of the bigger-stronger-faster attributes for territorial domination (the answer would be C -- faster).

Now I could hear both David's and Sarah's hearts pounding at this meeting. You could almost see the adrenaline rush in both of them. The tigress padded off in the direction David had seen the leopard. We watched her for a while as she moved back and forth trying to figure out where the other cat went. She marked a few saplings and, after determining that the leopard was no longer invading her space, she came back toward us, passing incredibly close to where we were.
I switched to the video mode (Sarah had already switched and had some great segments) and got a few seconds as the tigress headed back down toward the lake. Now THAT was cool!

I gotta tell ya, the rest of the jaunt was anti-climatic, very nice, but the tiger meeting was great. When we got back, Deb was at the camp spa still trying to get straightened out. David, Sarah, and I wanted to tell her that we had seen the usual: birds, crocodiles, deer, and then nonchalantly mention that, oh, yeah, we saw a tiger. However, timing is everything. The batman had told her about our sighting before we got a chance.

So after we had a chance to relax, we had dinner and sat by the campfire (we could have had marshmallows).

After a day of the drive to the camp, the exciting safari, we retired to our tents. It is deceptively roomy on the inside.

We had a wonderful time. We were all sorry we couldn't stay longer. After this experience, I looking forward even more to our outing in Kerala in about 10 days. We'll be Keraling in Kerala for Christmas Eve and Christmas day, we're taking time to be on the shores of the Arabian Sea. We'll have more for you from that. Next post will be about the some of the living conditions of the Mogul kings and Hindu Maharajahs in the north. Stay tuned!