Bandhavgarh is one of India's premier tiger reserves, supposedly still containing more than 50 tigers. There are long drives (> 70 kilometers) every morning and afternoon, and after three attempts we had good photos of varieties of deer and monkeys, boar, even wild peacocks, but we still hadn't seen the one thing everybody comes here for: TIGERS!
Fran slept in for the last drive Tuesday afternoon, to change the karma and bring me good luck, and it worked! After 16 hours of searching, we found a huge male (he seemed a good bit larger than the lions Davin and I saw in Africa), and watched him for almost 14 minutes until he strolled into the bush. Every deer within 500 yards was barking danger alerts. He really was magnificent.In addition, the lodge is more than a mile from the road, and very early this morning a jeep passed a tiger within 300 yards of the lodge, quite a ways out of the reserve. Somewhere around 30% of the vehicles seemed to see a tiger on each drive, which was a higher percentage than we expected. Our driver is an excellent naturalist who can answer any question about anything we see, and we were very fortunate to have him.
No sense of what's going on in the world for three days. We're not using a mobile phone, and the lodge has no TV, and only one dial-up computer for everybody to use, so we're really out of touch. Two more cities this week, then to Agra Friday night to see the Taj Mahal.
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