Chitwan National Park

Many, many months ago, I read about Chitwan National Park in a book.  The author had such a lovely description of doing an elephant back safari that I immediately wanted to do it, and we put it on the list of things experiences to have if we made it to Nepal.  Earlier this week we made the five hour bus ride from Kathmandu to Chitwan to finally cross that experience off of our World Tour To Do List.  (That list just keeps getting smaller and smaller…)

Elephant safari is one of the things to do in Chitwan, so we weren’t the only ones getting up early to explore the jungle.  When we arrived at the starting point loads of elephants and their guides were hanging out, just waiting to take groups of tourists for a ride.The elephants are so huge and cool.

This trunk was looking for a snack, no doubt about it…To climb onto the back of the elephant, we had to use one of these handy staircases.  Four people fit per elephant, with legs hanging out over the corners of the wooden platform.  It is not a comfortable configuration, I must admit.  As the elephant walks, you tilt heavily side to side slamming into the wooden rails quite a bit, and the bottom platform digs into the upper thighs.  I was definitely bruised the next day, but it was still worth it.

Once all four of you are in position, it’s time to wander through the jungle in search of animals.  For some reason I assumed the pace would be really slow, but that elephant can move pretty quickly.Some of the trails barely feel like trails.  Trees and bushes slapped against the sides of our elephant (and us) and I had to keep an eye out so as not to get hit in the face by a tree branch.  As we walked she would swing her tail to and fro to shoo off bugs, often hitting the soles of our feet hard with her tail.  Whenever an animal was nearby the elephant would make noises, and we could feel her growling beneath us.At one point we crossed this river.  It’s somewhat surreal to hear the sloshing of giant footsteps and be standing in the middle of  a river but be so far up in the air that you can’t feel any of the water.Sadly, the animals were not really out and about for us to see.  We spotted monkeys, wild boar (and a wild piglet), and spotted deer, but that was about it.  I was always on the wrong side of the elephant to photograph the spotted deer, which was a shame because they are actually pretty cool looking.  We didn’t even come close to spotting a rhino or tiger, though another group from our hotel saw a rhino somewhere.  It wasn’t our day for wildlife I guess.Once our safari ended, the elephants and their guides went to hang out by the riverfront, no doubt waiting for the next batch of tourists.

After our ride, I  asked one of the guides to take a photo of us with the elephant, and this is the first shot he took.  There are a lot of weird things going on in this image…

This was the second shot he took.  Still kind of a weird shot, but you can see that we were with the elephants.  Close enough.In addition to the elephant safari, we toured a Tharo village, where indigenous people live pretty much exactly how all the kids at Panya, Pun Pun and other eco-friendly/stustainable/permaculture communities try to live, but more successfully.  Then we wandered down to the river to enjoy the views.  (Another group enjoyed the riverfront via elephant, as you can see, but we just walked.)We grabbed a front row seat for sunset, and enjoyed some local beer (It was the first alcohol we’ve had in Nepal, actually.  10 days at a monastery really made me forget about drinking entirely, though I can’t say the same for many of the other course participants who were counting down the minutes until they could break free for a beer in Kathmandu.)The lovely sunset view, with a few Himalayas off in the distance…And after sunset we went to see the “Tharu Culture Programme”, which was basically a performance of tribal stick dances.  It looked a lot more like synchronized combat than dancing, and at one point there was fire involved.  I thought it was going to be totally lame and touristy, but we actually enjoyed it.

Though everyone tried to convince us to stay more than one night in Chitwan, one night was all we had.  I don’t think we needed any additional time, truthfully, since we aren’t really into birdwatching.  I guess another day would have given us more opportunities to see rhino, but you never know if they would have come out for us at all.  When our quick overnight trip was over, we boarded another five hour bus to Pokara in hopes of catching some mountain and lake views.