CHITWAN NATIONAL PARK AND JUNGLE SAFARI
January 27-29, 2001
Waking up on the Hotel Restaurant Floor
The rest day in Pokhara did us well after the last emanciating week in the mountains. The heaps of garlic bread, steaks, and pizzas probably made us regain most of the weight we had lost before. Gormandizing in Nepal normally requires the hunger of a 15-year old boy, but returning from a week with the same menu every single day in addition to strenous exercise we happily ate what was served. With stomachs like five-month pregnant women, we went to bed. A wake-up call had been ordered for 5.45 a.m. I had set my wrist watch to wake us up, just in case something went wrong. It did. The hotel personnel had enjoyed a respectable amount of whisky the night before at some big family gathering in the hotel restaurant (keeping Marcus awake half the night) and just barely woke up when we very clearly asked for a taxi for the fouth time. Notably, the staff was sleeping on the restaurant floor between two tables.
Hitting the Road Again
The mountain adventures were over for this trip and our next goal was the Chitwan National Park in the Nepalese lowlands. Fifteen minutes after the bus had left the water cooler pump broke down and the bus steered into a dirty junkyard. It was freezing cold and we sat inside the bus shivering in our down jackets. Outside there were cows and kids in t-shirts and flip-flops wandering about. Not freezing, as usual. Soon the water cooler was extracted and scores of Nepalese men gathered around it. We understood that we had arrived at the local mechanic. An hour later, i.e. about 20 man hours of work later, the leak was fixed and we were once more en route. Until five minutes later, when we had to stop for gas...
By good fortune, the gas pump worked and we finally left town. This was probably when the tragic earthquake catastrophe hit north-western India. I don't know what a bus ride in Nepal scores on the Richter scale, but it was obviously enough to quench a 7,9er in a distance, because we didn't feel anything. Somehow the bus arrived safely in the Chitawan National Park where the passengers were greeted by a mob literally screaming for dollars. They were representatives of the jungle hotels in the park who hadn't learned that westerners normally prefer a hearty welcome to tearing of clothes and shouting.
Vive le Chili
The first activity on the agenda was an ox carriage to an elephant parking lot. Accompanying us on the wooden coach was a young couple from Chile. The guy had a Fidel Castro beard and looked quite lost in general. His girl-friend did as well, only the beard missing. In addition to their hippie caracteristics they stuck to the typical latino interpretation of time. For me it was OK, being on vacation, but for Marcus, who is of German descent and prefers precision to sloppiness even in his sleep, they got on his nerves after a while. But this obviously didn't concern them, as peace and understanding radiated along with the marijuana smoke. The peace was probably complete, though I doubt they understood much at all.
Crocodile River Log-Driving
Early in the following morning, we left our bungalow hotel to go on a jungle walk. To get to the jungle we first had to go by canoe for an hour. The atmosphere was peculiar, almost surrealistic, with the morning fog surrounding us like cotton candy. Here we headed down a subtropical crocodile river by the means of an excavated tree trunk that looked exactly like a Stone Age canoe found in a museum. The Chilean couple liked it a lot and further befuddled their minds by puffing a few more joints, looking more and more absent for every turn of the river. Luckily, they filmed and photographed every single moment of the hour-long log ride, so they would be able to see afterwards what they could have seen in reality, had they not been stoned.
On the river bank right next to the water was a crocodile laying around, waiting for the sun to warm up its cold blood. Our guide explained that there were two kinds, one fish-eating and one man-eating. This was the fish-eating species, so no worries. We scared it off by walking too close and then turned around facing the jungle.
Rhino Poop Hopscotch
Things were getting exciting. Everywhere we found huge piles of rhino dung, from old and dry to steaming (un)fresh. These undependable giants lurked there, somewhere in the bushes. The guide explained that whenever a rhino attacks, which is not that uncommon, one should immediately climb a tree. The problem for us, we figured, was that there were almost no trees, only a "forest" of tall, reed-like grass sheafs. The problem for the Chileans was that even if they would have found a tree, they probably wouldn't have been able to climb it anyway. Occasionally, we heard a rhino in a distance ploughing its way through the shrubs like a Juggernaut, an unstoppable force on its way from point A to point B with no mercy. Although we didn't get to see a rhino in reality this time, the adrenalin buzz just from hearing them was intense enough.
On the trail, our guide found a poisonous snake and played with it with his bamboo stick until it almost attacked him. Maybe he knew what he was doing, but it didn't look like it. Anyhow, we left the snake and continued along the side of a little jungle river. A tree had fallen over the water and provided a natural bridge. The fact that we had seen the last crocodile only five minutes earlier made us a bit uneasy about crossing it, but it went by without complications. For us, that is. The high Chilean guy had a hard time to keep his balance. Suddenly he staggered and fell. By some divine intervention, he landed right on top of the log and was helped to his feet by the guide. The general lesson from this fellow is that one should avoid taking drugs when there is a risk of falling into the jaws of a crocodile or being skewered by a rhino.
Crocodiles and rhinos were not the only large, dangerous animals, however. The royal Bengal tiger also roams the jungle. At one point, we found droppings from a tiger. It was full of clay and pieces of crushed bones. The clay, our guide explained, helps the tiger's intestines from being punctured by the sharp bones. It felt good that at least these droppings were dry.
Riding a Beast
Embarking an elephant can be done in three main ways. Either the way of the driver, who steps on the trunk and is lifted up to his steering position on the elephant's neck. A more touristic way is to have the elephant kneel and then via a stool swing oneself up and into the cage on its back. The third possibility, which we used, was what I would call an elephant station. The embarkment platform was reached by a ten-step staircase. This means of transportation is not for people who suffer from vertigo.
Once the passengers were settled, the animal took off in a slow but mighty stride. The driver steered between the tree trunks by scratching and kicking behind the elephant's ears with his bare feet. When the elephant didn't do what she was told, the driver hit her on one of its big skull humps with a blow of a steel rod that would probably knock out Mike Tyson for a day or two. So it went on for a while, our rears becoming increasingly sore every minute. Elephant riding looks like the laziest you can do, but it's not. One has to be vigilant all the time not to dash the head into a tree or to get one's glasses stuck in the foliage of yet another tree passing by.
Suddenly the driver told us to be quiet and pointed into some bushes. Excitement rose and we soon saw two rhinos only 10-15 meters away from us. It was a beautiful scene with a mother suckling her calf. Stupid and half-blind as rhinos are, they only sensed the presence of the elephant and kindly grazed on. We got a really good view from the elephant's back and it felt totally safe, too. Yet seeing their respectable size, we were happy that we hadn't met any of them during the jungle walk earlier in the day. Afterwards, this is what I read in Lonely Planet about rhinos: "It has poor eyesight and, though weighing up to two tonnes, is amazingly quick. Anyone who encounters a mother with its calf is likely to be charged, a disconcerting experience even if you are atop an elephant." Oops!
Our elephant must have been hungry. Whenever she got the chance she ate a bush or felled a tree, ate the leaves and chewed on the trunk. Clearly, it takes a lot of food to make this huge chunk of muscle move around. The guide said they eat approximately 250 kg of food every day. This figure is hard to believe when you read it, but not when you see what comes out the other end. Or hear, for that matter. Before, I considered Greek donkeys to be the masters of cracking off loud farts, but believe me, an elephant going uphill gives a totally new perspective on the subject. Luckily the Chileans weren't smoking at the time, which could have made the blast even more impressive.
Dormant Ornithologists
The next morning the hotel offered bird-watching as one of their standard activities. Every morning the fog was dense as whipping cream and one would certainly not see any birds. Since we think bird-watching is extremely boring even in ideal conditions, we stayed in bed. Also, it was supposed to take place in rhino territory, and who would like to stumble upon a sleeping rhino? After a rather tasty breakfast with coffee, chewy toast and omelette it was time to leave for the bus-station.
But where were the Chileans? Of course, taking their time, eating breakfast, smoking a morning wake-up joint, packing their backpacks, etc. We wondered what on earth could help them wake up from their daydreaming and realize that the bus was about to leave without us. Then we remembered: By definition, public transportation is not on time in Nepal. There is always a chance that someone will be late for the bus, and who would like to miss such an income? So, we made it in time and even had to wait quite a while in the bus before it finally left. I hit my head in the roof four or five times on the way back to Kathmandu, otherwise there were no incidents. On the contrary, we met two nice Swedes on the bus and chatted away the long hours.
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