Hunting Tigers

Our week with the street kids went by way too fast. I'd arranged with Sager for a weekend excursion to Ranthambhore National Park, a four hour drive south of Jaipur, known for its tigers. This wouldn't be like an African safari, but when in Rome . . .

The six passenger gypsy ride through the national park proved a much better choice than the noisy 30-some passenger caravans for our Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning safaris. The landscape was more forested than the Serengeti, so we searched through the trees to see antelope and spotted deer with some good sized antlers, springbok and gazelles. We saw huge alligators at the water's edges, and clusters of baby alligators sunning themselves as well as they could through the ever hazy India skies. Though there are said to be 45 tigers in the park, our search for the big cat was in vain. In its place, we relished the sight of a dark slough bear as we made our way out of the park on Sunday morning.

Was our trip to the park worthwhile? Yes. Even though we didn't see a tiger Justin got a taste of a safari, and I'll not be surprised to hear him planning a trip to Africa at some point.

The trip to and from the park gave us more exposure to life in India. My eyes were drawn to watching people as they lived their daily lives--working in the fields of yellow flowered mustard and the rich green of basmati rice, selling their yellow apple-like fruit along the "highway", barbers shaving men in what seemed to be every fourth shop, men using blow torches in their repair shops, restaurant patrons lazing away their day in the dusty open restaurants, and the backs of men as they urinated on the sides of the roads. We were already used to the honking horns, and laughed at the painted instructions on the back of trucks: "blow horn please", "dip lights at night", " wait for side" and "stop". People here didn't use their horns because they were irritated, it's simply a way of life and courtesy to let others know where you are. Maybe they just don't like to use their rear view mirrors. Despite the chaos on the roads, we saw few accidents, probably because their roads don't allow them to go fast. Many trucks also had signs of "40 km" which lead me to believe their maximum speed was 40. That could be because of the number of "speed breaks" along the various roads.

We passed through Jaipur on the way to Delhi, seeing the more modern side of town. A Marriott, their convention center and more streamlined road system, though this didn't mean the sound of horns honking diminished, or the weaving between lanes. On the five hours to Delhi, our driver circumvented the construction of overpasses in some phase of construction. It seemed like the materials for all the overpasses were delivered, no matter how soon the construction was going to start. Just imagine a three hour traffic jam along dusty roads. I'm not sure that faster highways will be an asset here, because the habits they use the slower speeds, e.g. weaving in and out of lanes in proximity to other cars that we'd use for parallel parking made me very uneasy the few times we were able to travel at a faster speed. We did make it to Delhi safely, where the driver dropped us at a hotel close to the airport in preparation for our early departure the next morning for the Andaman Islands.