Ranthambore
Although the buildings that we had visited, including the Taj Mahal, were clearly highlights of our holiday, one of the bits that I was most looking forward to, and which did not in any way disappoint, was the trip to Ranthambore to look for tigers.
The journey from Agra to Ranthambore was a long one – not made any easier by the fact that part of the road was still in the process of being built, and that the day of the journey was the one on which a number of people on the trip were beginning to feel more than a little delicate.
Ranthambore National Park is a large national park in northern India, best known as a sanctuary for Bengal tigers. The park is about 150 square miles in size within which there are around 70 tigers and a similar number of leopards, as well as a small number of sloth bears and, as everywhere in India, lots of monkeys.
We had a total of three game drives during our time in Ranthambore, and were lucky enough to see a male tiger lying, quite undisturbed, in the grass at the end of our second game drive on the first afternoon (followed by a mad dash to get back to the exit of the park before the gates were locked for the night), and got a brief look at a female tiger over the other side of a small lake on the final game drive on the morning of my 50th birthday, before she decided that she did not want visitors and calmly stood up and walked into the undergrowth to not be seen again. We did not manage to see either a leopard or a sloth bear, but did see some marsh crocodiles, various deer, hogs, lots of birds (some of which were so friendly that they would come and eat biscuit crumbs off people’s heads!) and, of course, lots of monkeys.
