Wednesday, March 4, 2015, Kanha National Park, Madhya Pradesh, India

Today we flew south from Delhi to Nagpur and drove to Kanha National Park
(Image courtesy of VENT)
(Click on images to enlarge)

We started the day in Delhi in our familiar hotel with the familiar breakfast, but they had defeated our scheme to lift a couple of granola bars each by not having put any out. Rats! We were in the lobby with our suitcases well before the 8am scheduled time and were greeted with one of Gajendra’s nice smiles. Harish was also there, just to help him out. We were soon joined by Kaaren and Stephanie and then on our way to the Delhi airport to fly to Nagpur (west of Raipur on the map above, which is slightly obsolete). The flight involved a bus between the plane and the terminal on both ends, but it was organized ever so much better than at Charles DeGaulle (which Dion described last evening, and we agreed, as “a sort of prison”). In Nagpur we were greeted by signs welcoming us to “the centre of India”. This is a reasonable claim, as Nagpur is the site of the Zero Mile Stone, a monument denoting the geographic center of India. The British used it as a starting point for measuring all distances in India. (We didn’t actually go into Nagpur to see the monument, though.)

Zero Mile Stone, Nagpur (Image courtesy of The Times of India)

Two taxis had been arranged to take the five of us to Kanha. We stopped at a hotel near the airport for a buffet lunch (more gulub jamuns) and then we were off for a six-hour drive through dry farmland and poor villages. (There were some signs of prosperity, such as the many motorbikes and bicycles and the satellite antennae atop precariously decrepit red tile roofs.) In much of the area we passed through, it was rice-planting season and we could see groups of women in bright saris planting the new rice crop. Bundles of rice seedlings had been positioned around each paddy, and the women worked on the bundles together, probably having a good chat while they did it. The result was very even lines of seedlings, a lovely bright green. I was reminded of how much Mark Twain enjoyed the vivid colors of saris. In Following the Equator, he wrote: …gorgeously-clothed people not still, but moving, swaying, drifting, eddying, a delirious display of all colors and all shades of color, delicate, lovely, pale, soft, strong, stunning, vivid, brilliant, a sort of storm of sweetpea blossoms passing on the wings of a hurricane…

Newly-planted rice

One very pleasant feature of our road was that now and then it passed through an avenue of ancient mango trees, obviously past their prime but still a welcome relief in the dry landscape. Traditionally, good rulers have caused the roads to be lined with mango trees to provide travelers with shade and, in season, fruit. Emperor Akbar is said to have planted 100,000 of them. (The mango is native to India.) Everywhere we’ve driven in India, we have seen the failure of what must have been a massive project to fill in the gaps in these avenues. We have seen hundreds of sturdy round brick enclosures along the roads that must have been meant to protect newly-planted trees, but, unlike in this photo, every one of them was empty. It seems a great pity. Mango tree, a native of India (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Successful tree protection (Image courtesy of Iain McDonald)

Black-shouldered Kite (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

As we drove along, Gajendra pointed out birds for us. I was pleased when Lee and I spotted and identified a Black-shouldered Kite on our own. There were Indian Rollers perched all along the road; I was particularly delighted when one flew low over the road catching the sunlight with the wonderful turquoise iridescence of its wings. A new bird for the trip was the Barn Swallow that Gajendra pointed out in one of the towns. Indian Roller

Toward sunset, the road (which was quite a good two-lane road) rose up onto a wooded plateau. Despite the full moon, we began to see why Dion says he really doesn’t like to drive after dark in India. Our cars were constantly swerving to avoid cows, buffalos, monkeys, dogs, goats, and people walking on the road and unlit motorcycles, bicycles, and bullock carts. It was a bit unnerving. Most of the slower-moving vehicles here have signs (in ornate lettering) on the back telling anybody following them to blow their horn but often adding to use the “dipper” at night. I noted that after dark, our driver indeed took to flashing his headlights as a warning rather than constantly honking. We had one really good sighting (though I had just taken my glasses off): a Jungle Cat ran across the road right in front of us, a golden blur in the headlights, but clearly a largish cat. It appears to me that Jungle Cats use the same approach to crossing a road as Felis domesticus, i.e., close your eyes and run like crazy. Gajendra told us that he has seen both tigers and leopards on this road at night, so we kept our eyes open but saw no more felines. We did make out Wild Boar, Hanuman Langurs, and Rhesus Macaques along the way.

Jungle Cat, India (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

It was well after dark when we arrived at the Baagh Resort and were greeted with glasses of lime juice with salted rims. As soon as we were shown to our room, I set about doing the things that needed doing, such as getting the phone charged so that the alarm will work in the morning (we leave at 5:30) while Lee went off to dinner. I was more than content with a granola bar and the antibiotics graciously bequeathed to me by kind-hearted companions before they flew home (I’ve come down with Lee’s bug, alas). Lee had already figured out that he could use the electric teapot to make us some night-time cough medicine when he got back. He reported that dinner was unusually good. We got to bed as soon as we could.

My (not very many) birds for the day: