Seat of Our Pants

Today, we took time off from our Arunachal Pradesh quest to visit a national park – and what a park. Kaziranga is perhaps not the best known park in the world, but for us it ranks among the top attractions in India – it even counts as one of the major highlights of this whole trip. Being eye to eye with a full-grown, silently ruminating one-horned Rhinoceros is . . . but let me start from the beginning.

We arrived yesterday afternoon at the National Park entrance in Kohora, Assam, after a sweaty six hour bus ride from Guwahati. Apparently we lucked out, because the first hotel we tried had an affordable deluxe room available – other travelers later mentioned that they had made their bookings weeks or months in advance. After checking in we made arrangements for the morning after: at first we wanted to do just an Elephant safari, but we were talked into tacking on a two hour jeep ride (for an additional 20 USD). After that, we crashed out early, around nine thirty.

Eight hours later, we found ourselves on the back of a mama Elephant, face to face with a curious Rhinoceros. It’s pretty much an unbeatable feeling to get that close to one of the world’s great mammals.  It’s an even better feeling doing it from on top of an even bigger mammal. Thanks to the fact that Rhinos and Elephants are friendly, we were able to get very close to the animals – as close as 10 feet at times. Other animals were also lulled into letting us close: water buffalo, a few kinds of deer, wild boars and so on. The tour lasted only one hour, but again: what an hour.

Next up was the jeep tour: we had braced ourselves for a bit of disappointment after the fantastic Elephant ride, but again Kaziranga NP came through. Thanks to a bit of wheeling and dealing, we managed to have our tour go off in between the other tours, so during two hours we didn’t see another soul: just us and the park (and our hired rifleman – for the unlikely eventuality of us meeting a Tiger). We didn’t get as close to the animals as we did from the back of our Tusker, but we saw wild Elephants, Rhinos, Vultures, Red Jungle Fowl, Buffalo and a whole heap of turtles sunning themselves on a log.

We arrived back at the camp at 9, just in time for breakfast. Not a bad morning, really.

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