My second visit to Bandhavgarh Natlional Park and to Tigergarh, a wildlife resort on the edge of the park and the tiny village of Tala in Madhya Pradesh. I don’t really have words to describe what those three days were like because it’s something you have to experience to understand. But I’ll try.
Gagan and his staff are the consummate hosts. The food is sumptuous, the service impeccable. The lap of luxury in the middle of the forest. As I sat having a late lunch that first day, I was dumbfounded to see Jai walk into the dining room, along with a woman, Damini, who turned out to be his wife. Jai is the man with whom I shared a jeep the last time I was here. He asked (on Facebook) when I’d be here but it never dawned on me that he’d return and I would once again have the benefit of his vast knowledge of wildlife in general and tigers in particular.
i don’t know if it was Jai and Damini’s good luck or my own, but we saw 10 different tigers over five rides as well as a 30-minute viewing of a leopard, one of nature’s most reclusive cats. According to both Jai and Gagan (and they would know), this is unheard of behaviour for a leopard. There are various assumptions as to why it hung around as long as it did, but in the end, I only care that it did.
We saw lone tigers in the early morning sun, we were roadblocked by three older cubs (two years or so) lying in the middle of the road, but the piece de resistance was the tigress – one I saw last time – who is now a mother to three 3-month-olds. We waited four hours for her to make an appearance, and that moment will stay in my mind forever…Mom walking confidently into the sunny clearing with her brood in tow. They drank, swam and played in the water, climbed and fell clumsily out of trees and not once did I see anyone check their phone. (The people, that is, not the tigers.)
Which is why I have no pictures I can share. They are amazing, and they’re all on my camera…