Tiger Parks in India

Article by: James Bainbridge, June 2007

Its parks and reserves are among the best spots on the planet to get with the tiger. Kanha is the daddy of Indian tiger parks, Bandhavgarh has the world's highest density of the big cats and Pench Tiger Reserve sits in the area that inspired Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book.

It took me a while to get to the heart of the feline furore, mainly because it took me 12 hours on glacier-slow trains and backwoods buses to cover the 150km between Satna, ('Cement City') and Bhandavgarh.

As we drained the last of the Royal Stag, the naturalist said, 'This behaviour might seem bizarre to you, but I spend most of my life doing things other people find strange.'

I made it to Bandhavgarh just as the sun was sinking into the Vindhyan mountains, but my timing was all out. The park hadn't yet opened for the season. Luckily, help was at hand in the form of a local naturalist: a swashbuckling character with a ponytail, board shorts, and a motorbike that he straddled with Easy Rider flair. We went to his cabin and, while we were looking at photos of Bhandavgarh's wildlife, his friend phoned to make an unusual date. 'There's a tigress who's been crossing the road with her cubs the last few nights,' he explained. 'She gets a bit frisky and charges the jeep, but hey, we'll have a few beers, it'll be fun.'

This seemed like a questionable way to commune with nature, but also my best chance of spotting a tiger, so I signed up for the mission. We met up at 5pm, jumped in the jeep and hit the pothole-ridden track leading into the jungle. Before long we were lying in wait for the tigress and watching the sun slide beneath the tree line. A glowing bus bounced past, bearing cramped passengers. 'Perhaps she waits for the last bus of the day,' suggested one of my companions.

We smoked a few bidis (leaf-wrapped cigarettes), drank some Royal Stag (which purports to be whisky) and waited. It was pitch black when we heard the alarm call. When antelopes spot a predator, they emit a terrified shriek to warn their fellow prey. We gunned the jeep towards the noise, stopping to listen then screeching forward when it came again. Eventually it sounded like we were within a hair's breadth of the bleating creature. I felt tense but excited as we sat in the darkness. 'Is that a growl?' someone whispered. More silence, then the naturalist whispered, 'Turn on the torch!' The beam flicked briefly out into the forest but before long it was back to being used for preparing more whisky and sodas.

That seemed to mark the end of the mission. We swung by the rangers' lodge to share more bidis and yarns. One of the gamekeepers explained that the distant din we could hear was one of his cohorts crashing through the trees on an elephant, searching for poachers.

'She gets a bit frisky and charges the jeep, but hey, we'll have a few beers, it'll be fun.'

We could have been any bunch of guys in the world, just drinking and chewing the fat, except our topic of conversation rarely deviated from the subject of tigers. As we drained the last of the Royal Stag, the naturalist said, 'This behaviour might seem bizarre to you, but I spend most of my life doing things other people find strange.'

But it didn't seem strange at all. In fact, their enthusiasm inspired me so greatly that, many trains and Hindi pop-fuelled buses later, I arrived at Kanha on the first day of the season. Unfortunately, when I did meet a big cat in the popular park, it was a circus involving an elephant, a coach party and a mildly irritated-looking tiger. But doesn't the spirit of the journey matter more than the destination? Crossing a sprawling, obscure Indian state like Madhya Pradesh is an experience that will embed itself in your memory.

Join James Bainbridge on a flit through the Punjabi party scene in Chandigarh, India’s modernist masterpiece.