Sauraha, gateway to the Royal Chitwan National Park lies about eighty kilometres south-west-west of Kathmandu as the kag flies. By road it's a six hour journey. If you add a couple of hours rafting on the Trisuli
River, it's a full day's journey there by the time you've waited for
things to stop, start, and stop-start. The bus doesn't go all the way
to Sauraha, but to Tadi
Bazaar, a town on the highway a few kilometres north. From there it's
a motorbike ride - either via a circuitous road route, or using a
slight shortcut over footbridges which fail to inspire confidence as
their planks are widely spaced and wobble, and concrete pilings from an
older structure lie tumbled in the creek.
Sauraha lies on a flood plain across the Rapti River from the RCNP.
With the exception of the tourist hotels and bars clustered near the
river, the area consists mainly of farms. I arrived there at dusk, the
air smoky, and the sun a deep red half-submerged in the grey of what I
think was a band of cloud but what may have been distant treeline. It
reminded me more of images of Africa than those of India. My hotel was
on the Rapti,
though on that first evening little could be seen from its grass-roofed
cabana: a sandbar in the middle, and a dark mass beyond that. Further
upstream there was beach, with more hotels and many more cabanas.
The Tharu are the native people of the region, the Terai; they migrated from the Thar desert region in India and managed to survive Chitwan's malaria-infested mosquitoes (now pretty-well eradicated) - allegedly with the aid of spicy food and raksi,
an evil strain of firewater. Many still live in traditional
wattle-and-daub huts, the wattles being dried elephant grass, and the
daub being a mixture of cow dung and mud. Some of the women had rings
through their septa and tattoos on the backs of their hands; men
traditionally dressed in white, though it seems that it's done mainly
for the benefit of tourists nowadays.
If you ever go to Chitwan, the Tharu
cultural show is well worth a watch. There's a great courtship dance;
the remainder is interestingly analogous to Morris Dancing - the performers are all male, sticks
feature prominently, one of the dances featured a peacock (much as Morris
Dancing has its hobby horse) and one a transvestite. The instruments used were percussive (drums, tambourines, rattles, cymbals, and the
clashing sticks) but there was singing and recorded music. I suspect that the
courtship dance may be non-traditional since it's the only one to
feature a female dancer (who also probably played the peacock).
The region is a twitcher's paradise. Mated pairs of ruddy sheldrakes
have flown in from Siberia; Nepal house martins, which pock the
riverbanks with their burrows, swarm everywhere; kingfishers are fairly
common, particularly the blue variety; prides of peacocks wander the
grasslands; egrets and ibises flock on the sandbars; and lots of other
birds were seen, though neither my guide nor I could identify them -
we're not twitchers. The local bird society's office was closed when I
passed so I couldn't see whether their checklist had pictures, but
here's a text-only list; twitchers, have a field day.
After an hour's ride in a dugout canoe, passing a multitude of
birds and one barely noticeable mugger crocodile, we disembarked and
walked cross-country to the shore opposite Sauraha. Chitwan has
diverse vegetation regions. There are areas where elephant grass grows
taller than you, and you follow game trails hoping not to meet
anything. Other places are tangles of bushes, where you walk low if
following a trail, and walk lower if not. Along the rivers are tall
hardwood trees, low grass, and patchy bushes. Further in, there are
tall trees and trails running between thickets.
I saw a hog deer, which saw me and bolted. There was evidence of something (possibly a tiger) leaving
tiger-paw-shaped pawprints around the river, some digging around the base of a tree
which my guide identified as being a sloth bear hunting for
termites, and the footprints and droppings of what may have been a
passing one-horned rhinoceros. And there are other species to be found in the park:
the elusive Pangolins (a scaled anteater), Gharials (a long-snouted
crocodile), Fishing Cats, and Hyaenas
were all to be seen appearing in drawings in
the Visitors' Centre, but not in the flesh. Most species in the park
are nocturnal and there are 932 square kilometres of wilderness, so
it's not entirely surprising that it's rare to see many of the
creatures on a morning tour, particularly given that some of them are
uncommon if not endangered - there's only a hundred and something
tigers, for instance.
Cynic
Realist
that I am, I
did start wondering how long it would be before enterprising locals
somewhere in the world set up a nature park with no animals in it to
steal their livestock and produce. Every morning before tourists would
arrive, they'd go in with their special shoes, a spade, and some shaped
patties of processed vegetation. Every so often, someone wearing a
tiger suit would pop up momentarily, which would cause great
excitement; even more so if the nature park were in Africa, say, or on
O'Connor Ridge in Canberra.
As
we waited for the dugout canoe to ferry us back to Sauraha, I we saw an elephant standing in a field on that side
of the river. It wasn't one of the exciting dangerous wild ones, though, but a privately owned
domesticated one. In the afternoon we visited the Elephant Breeding
Centre, a rather depressing place, where adult and
juvenile elephants stood around each with a foot chained to a post
while the few baby
elephants were unchained but herded to remain near their mothers. The
babies are all sired by wild bull elephants; their mothers were transferred from elephant rides to forced labour at the age of 20 or so.
Early
on a foggy third morning, three Nepali tourists and I squashed into a
wooden howdah atop an elephant. It was a poorly behaved elephant,
frequently attempting to turn when it wasn't meant to, and occasionally
bolting. The mahout would flail at the top of its skull with his cane,
and when that failed to work would unhook his iron goad and prick it
until it was approximately cooperative. I was grateful that the elephant never
decided that the easiest way to deal with the annoyances above was to
roll over.
Riding on an elephant has a certain image of
glamour. The reality is that it's uncomfortable because elephants move one
foot at a time so the howdah - hard, wooden, and cramped - is
constantly rolling. In addition, you may hit branches - there are lots of them at such a height, and if someone
pushes one out of the way incorrectly, a branch (some of which are thorny) may spring back with
force. Spider webs criss-cross paths. Elbows from fellow passengers can be a problem. Still, on an elephant, you're safe
from attack, they're speedy and manoeuvrable, and they
can go where vehicles cannot. They're really the only way to travel.
My riding companions had a lot to say, and said it at length. Perhaps wild animals
don't run away when people on an elephant chatter away; we saw one
deer, seated and unmoving in frozen stillness. And then everybody
stopped talking for a while, which was very nice. We saw peacocks
waddling, and other birds flew by.
Suddenly a call rang out,
musical tones breaking the relative silence. The tourist seated behind
me had a lengthy conversation on his mobile phone. It was a busy
morning for him -- over the next
hour and a half he answered and made several more calls. I restrained
myself from reintroducing trophy hunting to the area.
Just
when I was wondering if this was going to be as unsuccessful a safari
as the day before - a deer and some birds are nice, and all, but
they're not really so special - we crossed over a river and saw a
distant rhino.
Everyone was volubly excited. Rhinos have terrible
eyesight, but their hearing is excellent; this one turned and bolted.
Our elephant headed at pace around one way through tourist-high
branches; another elephant went the other way. Eventually the rhino
was cornered against thick bushes and we had a good period of up-close
rhino viewing. Nearby, we came across another pair - a mother and cub
- both lying down and unwilling to even move!
I was very lucky. Others
who went riding that morning saw no rhinos at all, and I not only
saw those three but another one later that day, standing in the water at 20000 lakes
(being dry season, the number was off by a factor of a thousand). No
tigers appeared, unfortunately, but I guess that's an incentive to return.
