Today our train carried us from Jaipur to the village of Khujarao for an excursion to Panna
(Image courtesy of VENT)
(Click on images to enlarge)
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Lee still had a very heavy cough this morning and seemed to be more feverish
than yesterday. He decided that he was going to take the day off, even though
it promised to be a very good one: a visit to the village of
Khujarao
with its formerly lost and now beautifully restored temples, followed by a trip
to the Panna National Park, an important tiger preserve. I had to agree that
he had made the right choice, though I hated for him to miss such treats.
Unfortunately, the train was running very late. The plan had been to disembark at Khujarao at 10, tour the temples, have lunch, and then spend the afternoon at the tiger preserve. What actually happened was that the train didn’t get to Khujarao until 2, so the tours were cut short. By that time, alas, I had developed some gastrointestinal distress that convinced me that I, too, had better stay on the train. Drat! (Though I was just as glad to be able to look after Lee for the day, and we both certainly needed some rest.) Keith was very concerned about our being holed up in the train and brought everything we could possibly want and offered to call a doctor. When he found that we were both really cold, he offered to turn off the air-conditioning for the car after the others disembarked, which I’m sure made him and his assistant uncomfortable, but allowed us to sleep much more comfortably. Late in the day, when he brought a tray with tea and cookies that I’d requested, it included a get-well card with a quotation from Luke. We were touched. Meanwhile, the others did get their tour and we experienced it vicariously through Amy’s photos. There was a dance festival going on in Khujarao, so it was even more colorful than Indian villages usually are: |
 Khujarao (Image courtesy of Amy Sheldon) |
 Khujarao (Image courtesy of Amy Sheldon) |
 Khujarao (Image courtesy of Amy Sheldon) |
 Khujarao (Image courtesy of Amy Sheldon) |
| They had half an hour to enjoy the millennium-old Hindu and Jain temples and their erotic sculptures: |
 Khujarao (Image courtesy of Amy Sheldon) |
 Khujarao (Image courtesy of Amy Sheldon) |
 Khujarao (Image courtesy of Amy Sheldon) |
 Khujarao (Image courtesy of Amy Sheldon) |
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Then they squeezed in two hours at Panna National Park. There has been a great
scandal about this park. In 2007 it received an award as the best-maintained
park in India, but by 2009 it had no more tigers. The tigers had all (around
40 of them) been killed by poachers (the incentive being Chinese traditional
medicine’s demand for tiger body parts), and it became clear that this
happened because corrupt forest department officials were in collusion with the
poachers.
A few tigers have since been reintroduced into the park from other parks and some of them have bred successfully, so there may be hope for the future, though one of the reintroduced tigresses died due to an infection caused by her radio collar. All in all, we were not surprised that the group didn’t spot a tiger, and we were especially sorry for Amy and Zach, who won’t be going on to Kanha with us and have never seen a tiger in the wild. But they did have some good sightings in Panna, especially a pair of Sloth Bears, which are mainly nocturnal: |
 Brown Fish Owl, Panna National Park (Image courtesy of Amy Sheldon) |
 Sloth Bear, Panna National Park (Image courtesy of Amy Sheldon) |
| I hope we can both resume the normal schedule tomorrow, which is Varanasi (Benares). Keith, who is a real mother hen, has warned us it’s a very dirty city and that we shouldn’t touch anything there. |
