Animal watching

Trip Start Jan 16, 2009

Trip End Nov 20, 2009

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Flag of Nepal Royal Chitwan National Park, Nārāyanī, Nepal
Thursday, October 1, 2009

This was my first time to go to a national park to watch animals in their natural living conditions, so I didn't really know if I’ll like it or not but at least the safaris on elephants sounded cool and the idea of you going to see the animals in their natural habitat rather than the animals being brought and enclosed in zoos sounds reasonable. In Chitwan they should have animals such as rhinos and crocodiles, as well as some rarer ones like wild elephants and tigers, which are however unlikely to be seen anywhere near the tourist crowded the edge of the national park.

Our first excursion inside the park was a canoe ride on the river (there we saw a couple of crocodiles), followed by a jungle walk. The walk was however quite a disappointment, because first of all, instead of seeing any animals, we just saw three other tourist groups, and secondly, our group was rather big: eight tourists and two guides whereas I felt that the maximum size of a group should be something like three or four plus the guides

It's neither a rock nor a log.

. Starting the walk at after 9 AM, we were also a bit late as it already gets very hot so the animals hide in the shadows of the jungle. It’s also a bit depressing to see the garbage (empty water bottles, old shoes etc) in park and given also the number other tourist groups, you don’t really feel like being in the wild nature.

The next morning we had the elephant ride, which is a nice idea of course, since the animals don’t care about the presence of elephants (and people on them), while they would be scared of alien humans walking by themselves, let alone driving a car. It’s of course also safer as even the potentially aggressive rhinos will leave you alone if you’re on an elephant. However, it turned out that the elephant rides also had many of the downsides I mentioned in the previous chapter. At this time we were anyway able to spot some rhinos, although after we approached them, there were soon 15 other elephants carrying wondering tourists around us. Also the empty water bottles lying on the ground were quite frequent.

In addition to those, we also had a cycling trip near the national park border and we saw different kinds of deer, some birds and a small crocodile. During our two and a half day stay we also visited elephant breeding centre, where we saw some small elephants, but that wasn’t much different from your average zoo really.

All in all, my experience in Chitwan wasn’t really great. Maybe it would have been different if I had had more days and been able to do a four day jungle walk and hence gone beyond the most crowded parts of the park, though I’m not sure if I would have managed four days as the days were extremely hot, much hotter than elsewhere in Nepal I’ve been.

From Chitwan, we head back to Kathmandu for a day after which I’ll go to Pokhara for a week and Kai flies back home.

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