Day 16: Sawai Madhopur and Ranthambore National Park
"TripAdvisor didn't lie"
Tripadvisor didn’t lie. You come here to see some tigers, that’s it. And we can confirm that is it.
Sawai Madhopur is the road to Ranthambore National Park basically. And we arrive to said road being resurfaced more or less cancelling out any benefit to our little lungs of being in the ‘country’ air.
Nevertheless we board a Jeep an hour after our arrival - who would have thought just being a bit higher up in a car could be so thrillling - and head further into the park to have a gander at ... you’ve guessed it, Ranthambore Fort and more monkeys than you could shake a stick at (we didn’t do that).
There’s a pleasing touch of the abandoned to it and we wander around for a few hours, along with bands of locals there for a special festival honouring Ganesh.
The evening brings a couple of drinks in a posher hotel than our own before squeezing in some Stranger Things before getting our head down in advance of our first 6am tiger alarm call.
Jacko has been talking about watching The Jungle Book for days (ahead of our next trip to Kipling country - Bundi) and as we board our ‘canter’ (think M.A.S.H) I have the songs on loop in my head. As it goes we don’t actually see any tigers this time but but do see antelopes, dear, crocodiles, monkeys, mongoose, boars and birds - vultures, cormorants, egrets and kingfishers; just the bare necessities.
Ranthambore is mapped into zones - some of which you’re more likely to see the fated tiger in than others. Day one was zone 4 and 5. Day two - 3, where we’re told a lady tiger and her cubs have been recently spotted. (These whispers travel with speed through the park’s grapevine - more to keep everyone’s spirits up I think).
Day two’s tiger search similarly sees us, head on a swivel, surveying the plains and tall grass for the merest tuft of tiger.
Our guide was sure he’d heard other animal warning calls so we waited engines off in near silence (aside from the chatter of some Germans desperately in need of the loo). But it wasn’t to be. We have two more national parks in the plan though so all hope is not lost, but we saw none of the 62 in this one.
NB. One further spectacle we did see though was the frankly eye widening addition of what I can only describe as bags of spiders hanging from many of the trees above us... weaved, webbed pouches suspended from branches which we were informed contained thousands of spider eggs. Righty ho.
Post the brief tiger disappointment, rather than wait a further 5 hours in a place where there’s nothing to do but not see tigers, we decided to try our hand at getting an earlier train. Straightforward yes? That would be a no.
Two sets of snaking lines - at the reserved and unreserved counters and flagrant queue jumping abounded. When we eventually reached the front we left with a ticket but only a very lose grasp of what was actually agreed and what ticket we had.
Not massively up for a two hour journey in the general allocation carriage (the sardine class) we tried our luck in a coach which had seats and where we definitely didn’t have a reservation. I am pleased to report 1) we were unbothered by conductors and 2) we discovered Indian dark chocolate Bourbon biscuits. Bourbons before Bundi.