November 18th, 2016

Day 234: Ranthambore National Park

Imma save you the suspense and tell you right now: we didn’t see any tigers. Part of is our own fault though – our original itinerary was supposed to include two games drives: one today in the afternoon and a second one tomorrow morning before driving to Agra. However, we accidentally booked our flight to Bangkok too early in the day on the 20^th, meaning we had to cut a half-day of activities in order to get back to Delhi on time. Sadly, the morning game drive was nixed which is a huge shame as our time in Africa taught us that Big Cats are lazy motherf*ckers who are only active in the early morning. No matter how good our safari guide was, we knew it was a long shot that he would be able to find a sleeping tiger in the afternoon heat.

It didn’t help that our driver and guide (two different people) were complete sh*t. According to our local contact in Ranthambore, we were supposed to be picked up from our hotel between 2:15-2:30PM for our afternoon game drive. After waiting in the hotel lobby for 45min and making two calls to the guy’s cell phone, we were finally the last two guests picked up at 3:00PM. Once we were in the safari “gypsy” we had another 45min drive to the park entrance, where we picked up an official park guide to join our game drive…expect the guy barely spoke English. There was an Indian couple in the car with us, along with a British couple, but the guide only told the Indian couple what was going on *in Hindi*. The British couple got pretty annoyed (as did we!) and constantly had to ask the guide/Indian tourists to please translate for the other 4 people in the car.

However, under different circumstances, I’m sure Ranthambore would have been great. Situated 150KM outside Jaipur, the park used to be the royal hunting grounds for the Rajput maharajas. In 1980 it was designated as a national park and part of the “Project Tiger” program established by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, in an effort to conserve India’s remaining population of wild Bengal Tigers. There are around 40-60+ tigers in the park, and it has the reputation of being your *best shot* at seeing these elusive animals in the wild. In an attempt to prevent overcrowding, the park is divided into 10 safari zones, each with a cap on the number of safari vehicles allowed at any one time. Had we had a *better* guide, we would have been told at the time that each zone has a certain number of tigers living in each territory – the zone we drove through supposedly had 2 adult tigers, one of which was spotted during the morning game drive with 2 cubs. After our disappointing safari, we did a little research online and found out that some of the other zones have 5-7 adult tigers and are therefore much more reliable for sightings (the website tigerwalah.com has a very helpful breakdown) – although we’re not sure how helpful the information would have been ahead time as we’re not sure if visitors have any ability to request which zone they visit.

We reached our hotel in Ranthambore just in time for their *awesome* buffet lunch! Having major Africa flashbacks – feels like we’re back at the Sopa Lodge! (Too bad that’s where the similarities end…)

Ranthambore is divided into 10 safari zones – our tour took us to Zone 8 “Balas,” where there are supposedly 2 adult tigers, one with two cubs

Sadly, these stuffed animals were the only tigers we saw in Ranthambore

There are two types of safari vehicles – a 20-seater open-top bus or a 6-seater open-air truck. We made sure to request the smaller car, so that we could get a better view, but ended up sitting apart as we were the last two picked up from our hotel. Lindsay at least had polite seatmates who scooted over make room for her – poor Igor was seated next to a very self-obsessed Indian girl who was constantly taking selfies

Our first wildlife sighting – a huge Sambar Deer – apparently one of the tigers’ favorite meals

A good 20min of our 90min safari was spent at a sunset lookout, where there were *clearly* no tigers as the guides told us it was fine to get out of the safari truck