There are two ways of "doing" Kanha. The classical way is arrive in the jungle in jeeps, with your senses on high alert, accompanied by a sharp-eyed guide. Once in the park, using gestures and eye contact with your guide, take in the jungle from its most intricate and hidden sights to its grandest encounters. Tracking tigers by following pugmarks, watching for dragged kill, listening for alarm calls ?- and in spite of all that, perhaps getting no sighting of this beast most elusive.
Or, you can register for what some sarcastically call the "tiger show", but which to my mind are "orchestrated" encounters ?- that hook you deeply to the wild. In this case, the mahouts drive their herd of tracker elephants into the forest, using a sophisticated radio system to communicate the co-ordinates and movements of the tiger.
All this happens while visitors buy their tickets and sip coffee at the visitor centre. And then it is just the traditional coupon number by which you get your turn to ride on an elephant into the jungle to see a tiger ?- that could be cavorting with her cubs, taking a soak in the waterholes or lying supine after a feed. And the reason I don?t wrinkle my nose is because there may never be another "National Geographic" moment like this again in my life. It was totally live, uncensored and literally in my face.
We were atop an elephant, just nine feet over a tiger who?d just hunted and eaten a 30 lb chital ?- of which only a carcass, hooves, bones and a rising smell of rot remained. Of the tiger we saw his chest heaving, his belly distended and his whiskers twitching. He was so desperate to rest and digest his food that he lifted his head just twice, as three elephants hovered above him and wheeled around so everyone could go ?khatak" with their Kodak.
Was it open day in the great wild? Was it getting so close to a tiger that you can?t see him for his stripes? It was all that and something more. Even if this was the result of highly skilled stage management, the fact is that we had found the tiger in his lair -- and we had taken away nothing but our own vision of his violently striking persona.
And straight from this encounter, we drove off in the direction of where the radio had communicated the location of dholes. Slim, red and bushy tailed, they are the most feared pack of savages in the jungle. A pack of them had taken down 3 chital in 35 minutes. We saw six of them, whose bulging bellies belied their lupine appetites. They were moving through the grasses close to Shravantal, an eye-catching water body in the park.
And just when we thought that there could be nothing to top that, there was the evening ride to Bahmnidadar, the highest plateau in the park and once an airstrip. The drive to Bahmnidadar is spectacular, the forests change from sal and bamboo to mixed trees, the soil is more loamy and the sky cloaks itself in its post-monsoon moods around hills of living forests. In two words, those who love it call it Sunset Point.
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City Guide
