BootsnAll Travel Network



Day 42: 27th Mar – Chitwan

It’s sunrise and the group gather for our first tour of the day, via Nepalese gondola.  Despite the early start, I feel very positive and eager for the day ahead.  To say Nepal reinvigorated my sense of adventure would be wrong, as that sense never really goes or dies, but there was a sense of excitement towards the next week or so ahead.  As we hop into our shallow gondolas, two in total for the group, the river was calm and eerily quiet.  As we got deeper into the tour, the birds and animals around start to wake and sing their morning song.  It provided time for us all to reflect and admire, broken only by our captains jumping in to push our vessels over shallow water or accidentally falling in (out of sheer excitement, obviously).

Our long canoes drop us off by a bank where we are greeted by a couple of guides, taking us on our next tour; a walking jungle tour.  With nothing more than a vague idea of why we were going on the tour, our minds start to fill with grand conceptions of what we will find: rhinos, elephants, deer, tigers, monkeys – I could go on.  Half way through and the best we’ve had to spotting anything was a puddle of rhino pee.  The guides, much to our surprise, were very pleased with such a find.  They immediately took out their empty plastic bottles and started to collect samples.  Apparently, rhino pee has very high medicinal value in the park.  Who knew?  Further delving into the bush we manage to come across a rhino grazing.  Now, Indian Rhinos, like all rhinos, have poor eyesight.  But, standing still doesn’t really help with the mind’s eye (which at this point was envisaging a mad rhino charge).  Luckily, she just waddled off without a care in the world.  Great fun!

The group has split by this time, between the three tour guides we had been designated.  We had, however, lost the other two groups.  We were all going to the same point – a wide meander in the river near the village where the hotel was situated.  Our guide, keen as he was, wanted to see where the rest of the group went.  So, he found the tallest tree and started to climb.  Not really know what to do, we stood around shouting out names and getting attention.  Good thing to do?  Our guide didn’t tell us otherwise.  Eventually we set off to the river, only to find that the rest of the group had already arrived.  At the river, some of the local kids were splashing around and playing while an elephant was having a bath with it’s minder.  Some of the group were taking a small dip in the river too – the two hour walk plus the heat meant many of us were fairly drained.  After a while, I get suckered into getting on the elephant while it sprays water into your face from it’s trunk.  Looks like great fun from a distance, but you can’t tell how it feels from far away.  Imagine a huge bucket of cold water being thrown in your face by someone travelling in a car.  At a 45 degree angle above you.  While sitting on a rocking horse.  That rocks sideways.  It’s great fun!  Then after being shot with water, the guy standing on the rear of the elephant shouts out something and the elephant slowly rolls over onto its side, tipping you in.  And, after all that cooling off, we get a lift back to the hotel on the back of the happy fellow in time for lunch.  First, and probably last, elephant taxi I’ll have the privilege of taking.

My second elephant ride of the day was the Elephant Safari; travelling through the national park on the back of very tame and occasionally disobedient elephants.  For those into animal rights and the mistreatment of such animals, you can’t help but feel bad for taking advantage of such dominating and docile mammals.  Once you conquer that, you begin to see a different side of the situation.  You begin to see how insignificant of a thing you are in reflection to this huge animal underneath you, which helps settle those activist nerves within.  Unlike my previous experience (which was simply sitting on the back of an elephant), we are placed in a small high-chair-like seat – four to a seat with the ‘driver’ sitting just behind the elephant’s neck, our legs dangling off the side, each of us situated on a post covering NE, SE, SW and NW (made it very hard to see where you’re going, especially for those at the back of the seat, SE and SW).  The sights were spectacular, ranging from Rhinos bathing in tiny rivers to deer running away from the hoard of elephants approaching, right down to our transport deciding to veer off course away from the pack and have a little fight with another elephant, then have a roll around in the bushes.  Eventually, we rejoin the marching band of elephants and head back to base.

Dinner was similar to the previous night, but I had missed the whole thing because I was sitting in a room with Rachel and Jerry talking about very little.  Tomorrow is a lake resort, high up near the mountains called Pokhara.



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