Tigers of Kanha

Kanha National Park : what a place it is, maybe one of the best national parks I have visited in the country! One of course for its abundant tigers(comparitively that is, with parks like Sariska having
none left) and the second for its magnificent green jungles! Its a huge park, with two main gates from where tourists can get in. One of them is the Kisli/Khatiya gate and the second one is the Mukki gate. The Mukki gate is where most of the high-end resorts are located, while the Kisli gate has the not so high-end resorts. The Khatiya village is also located at the Kisli gate.

Reaching Kanha is a big challenge though, its not one of the most easily accessible places to go to! For Mukki gate, you need to fly to Jabalpur and drive a couple of hours from there. For the Kisli gate, you need to fly to Nagpur and then drive till Kanha. We went to the Kisli gate this time. The drive took us about 5-6 hours and you drive through the Pench Sancturary on the way. The roads are quite average, with lot of patches of bad roads. The landscape is quite pretty mostly, with lots of forests and shrublands on the way. The setting is rural throughout the way, passing through villages and small towns of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh.

At Kanha, we stayed at the Mogli resort, which is located just next to the Kisli gate and the forest guest house also located just
next to the gate. The rooms at Mogli are basic; they will have all you need and the staff is helpful. About the food there, I wouldn't know much, as we everyday ate at a dhaba next to the gate called Kamlesh Dhaba. The food at the dhaba was so amazing, a little oily but so tasty and all for 300 bucks for 4 people! We ended up eating all our meals at this restaurant itself:). The best places to stay would be the forest guest house and the bageera tourist resorts which are located inside the gate, within the jungle. I guess you can take small walks there, and feel you are closer to the tigers too:)

Anyways, we did 3 safaris in the park over two days. Two morning ones and one evening one. The morning safari starts at sunrise. The safari gypsies queue outside the gate from 5am onwards waiting for their turn
to get in when the gate opens. Apparently the earlier you get inside the park, the greater the chances of spotting the tiger (apparently!!). The day we landed at Kanha was the first day of the park opening after the monsoons and our entry was delayed by two hours because of a dispute between the park officials and the taxi union! Anyways it was quite a show in negotiations with the forest officer finally coming out to sort the issues.

Once the issues were sorted, we all rushed in, with each group trying to outdo each other to spot the tiger the first! Each
gypsy has about 5-6 tourists with one guide provided by the forest officials. The spotting of the tiger as well as the whole park experience depends a lot on your guide. There are some guides who really dont know much while some do know the forest inside out. So they
regale you with stories of the forest to entertain you while you are looking for a tiger. We were lucky to get a very good guide in the first safari itself, and we learnt a lot about the jungles from him.


Our first morning safari was all focussed on spotting the striped
one! We saw one napping in the bushes, pried on him for a long time but anyways gave up when he refused to wake up or budge (plus some 10-15 gypsies landed there, so it wasnt any fun either!). After roaming around in the other parts of the jungle, we finally came back to the same spot and what a sighting we had of the same tiger (once he managed to get out of his slumber that is).

We caught the tiger stalking his prey: a couple of chitals in the
grass. The deer caught wind of the tiger however, after the tiger has sat patiently for half an hour (and so had we!!) and ran off, making a barking sound and warning other animals in the vicinity too about the presence of the predator.


With his prey running away, the tiger then started walking on the path towards us for a minute and a half, posing and giving us all the photo time we wanted. It did get a bit


scary after a point though, as the tiger was one gypsy away from us and moving towards us, while the gypsies behind us were not backing off at all! Anyways the tiger was a friendly one, so no incident occured and we all went back happy from the safari:).

Once the sighting was over, we just roamed around in the jungles.
The weather was awesome, pleasant and a bit chilly, with no sun in sight. The jungles green and lush after the monsoons. A nice and pleasant drive away from everything else!

Our evening safari was bereft of any tiger sighting; apparently they just sleep through most of the day and walk around only at nights and
mornings. So we just drove around and enjoyed the green jungles of sal trees, the Kanha meadows and the hills and the grasslands and water bodies and the white foam covered grass.


The next morning we were again off to a 5 am safari, we spotted
the same tiger as the previous day walking towards us! There were three gypsies on the other side, with us getting the front view. The tiger kept walking towards us, leisurely, sometimes venturing into the grass but then choosing to stay on the road.

Behind us also, suddenly there were ten other gypsies all trying to get a look at the tiger, while it continuously continued to walk towards us. We backed down an incline, crossed a stream of water but I guess we were too slow for him. He just decided to go off into the shrubs.

It was again a long sighting, with the tiger continuously walking
towards us, and us again trying to back off faster than the tiger. And what a royal animal the tiger is, the leisurely ' I don't care about anything walk', the cute cat-like look, its really regal to look at and observe. And scary too, when you imagine, even a friendly slap from his paw and you are gone!




Once the tiger sighting was over, we went off for the other sights of smaller animals in the jungle. We saw wild boars and jackals and lots of very colourful birds that day.

We also went to another part of the jungle where we saw some of the most beautiful butterflies ever. They were just everywhere.





We also saw a small brook where on three specks of grass were sitting dragonflies of three different colours, yellow, blue and red.











And the spiders! If you can manage to tolerate them, some of the webs they make are amazing!






Actually Kanha has a lot of other wildlife too, like bears, leopards
(which are very rare to spot), wild dogs, barasingha etc etc all of which would be fun to spot in the wild. The tiger however eclipses all the other wildlife as everyone is only excited to see one while all the other wildlife is forgotten. (Well I guess we were also the same category:) but still!)


We did see the usual Cheetals and Sambhars too. Two animals which we did not manage to see though were the bison and the barasingha which are quite common sightings actually.

One thing which we missed is the tiger spotting done by elephants. Mahouts on elephants try to follow the tigers pug marks into the forest and when they spot a tiger sitting somewhere/resting, they then take the tourists in groups one by one to where the tiger is sitting, on the elephant itself. Its apparently fun, we however missed it, there were no tiger spottings when we went!

An interesting thing we saw were trees with the tiger paw scrappings, that is how the tiger marks his territories as well as some trees with leopard paw markings, where a leopard had climbed the tree. Other than the safari, there are also nature trails to walk on, through the forest.

Also while in the forest, you would come across multiple forest checkposts where forest rangers stay. Its quite impressive and scary too, for these people to be staying all alone like this in the jungle. Apparently they don't even keep guns with them!

One point to note is that since we went there after the monsoons, it was colder and the weather was a lot more enjoyable and tolerable, even though the sightings of animals is not as
much as in the summers when all animals come to the water bodies in search of water. Still I'd rather enjoy the woods and the weather in the winters than the summers! Would generally suggest to visit such parks in the winters only.

A lot of the tourists who come to jungle are quite a disgrace though, I must say. They use flash to take photos of the animal and behave like kids when there is a sighting, making sounds, refusing to budge, trying to get their vehicle in front of the other one when there is a sighting. Quite irresponsible behaviour, leaves quite a bad taste.