Rhinos, Elephants, and Tigers

I was squinting hard. At first I didn’t even know if I was looking in the right direction and sneaked a peek at the guides nearby. Yes, that slightly darker spot in the water was a tiger. The binoculars I was handed were close to my age, if not older and I had to keep closing one eye so that the image didn’t jump around like a mad kangaroo. But it was a tiger!

It was my second day in the jungle and I already had the feeling that I knew the place. Of course, I didn’t, and I could have gotten lost twenty times over and never even realise it. Pardip, my guide, had walked me around quite a lot the previous day and had showed me a lot of the park, but there hadn’t been any tigers around. This was the day and everybody knew it: in the morning we had hitched a ride in the jeep of the two Nepalese tourists and the owner of the lodge I had been staying at, who’d come for half a day jeep safari. Little did they know that it’s a lot harder to spot wildlife while riding a two-ton metal mammoth that roars like a household appliance out of control and runs around in its private, self-produced cloud of smog. The upside was bypassing the excruciating hour of walking from the lodge to the part of the National Park where you could actually see some wild animals and it had been Pardip’s cunning craft to convince the Boss to take us along. The downside was that the ‘jeep’ in ‘jeep safari’ was meant more like a vague guideline of what would really happen, as a considerable part of the safari was walking through trees, vines and creepers, trying not to get tangled in the thorny bushes, and dodging the numerous spider webs that had been systematically constructed at head’s height. So, we walked most of the way to the Supermarket and stopped there in our enthusiastic search for the tigers. And one came soon enough, so that all the guides and tourists panicked at once and started whispering so loud that the tiger might have thought we were having a party in its honour.

Finally, Pardip produced some good binoculars – skilfully subtracted from another guide – and rammed them in my unresisting hands so I could make out the shape of the huge animal stretched out in the water some 200m away. I tried photographing it but all I got was a neatly arranged blob or a slightly differently array of coloured pixels in the middle of the photo. Still, the tiger was there and stayed there for some time and then suddenly disappeared into the bushes with two or three huge, lazy strides.

Pardip took me to a different part of the park, a sunburnt riverbed where birds twittered, deer ran undisturbed, and insects flied around sounding like nail clippers, and where we saw from the distance the great shapes of elephants. My guide advanced cautiously and didn’t seem to want to get too close to the elephants. The day before he had presented me with a whole ceremonial procedure on what to do if rhinos, elephants or tigers attacked and the only thing I could think of was how silly it all sounded: ‘If an elephant comes at you, drop your bag and run. Don’t try to climb up trees. If a rhino comes towards you, drop your bag and run, preferably in a crisscross manner. If you come face-to-face with a tiger, stop. Don’t lose eye contact and don’t make any sudden movements and, whatever you do, don’t run.’ Right now I was trying to figure out which one was it: to run or not? Also, I was desperately looking around for a safe, soft place to drop my bag and camera, and, if need might arise, where to run. At least there were no trees in sight so I’d probably not be able to make the mistake of climbing a tree even if I wanted to. But, as we silently got closer to the elephants, I saw Pardip relax. He patiently waited for me to take some photos and then pointed out the collars around the elephants’ necks: they were not really wild elephants, just elephants sent out for grazing. I still maintain that they were wild and just happened to stroll somewhere where they handed out collars to undomesticated elephants just because of the way the situation was presented to me, and because I had gotten so frantic about the running away part that they might as well have been wild beasts on the hunt.

We got to a place by the river where the waters were gurgling and sloshing heavily and where you didn’t have to bruise your knees if you wanted to swim. But the waters were strong enough to take me all the way to India so I only swam a little upstream and ended up 10 metres further down the river. It was quite refreshing though and going back to the Supermarket was not the same insufferably boiling experience it had been before.

A detour was called for on the way back, when Pardip noticed a medium-sized boulder in the river, which turned out to be a rather large rhino enjoying some private time almost completely immersed in the water. To tell the truth, it never would have dawned on me that the plain rock was really a wild, ferocious beast and I would have passed it without a second thought. The rhino might have done exactly the same thing if it would have seen me, but that’s almost never the case, as rhinos can’t see further than the end of their noses. Or horn, for that matter. The clicking camera did, eventually ignite the match of thought inside the rhino’s head and he tried to spot something out of the ordinary, but we got really close without much trouble.

By the time we got back to the Supermarket I was getting hungry so I sat down with my packed lunch and, as so many times before, wished for some salt… I only got as far as a couple of bites when Pardip came running to me and told me to come. Now! Fast! I left everything (including my shoes) and started running. Pardip grabbed my camera so, once I got to the spot he indicated (some 200m away), I realised I would have another chance to take some really bad photographs of another tiger slopping lazily in the river. Before long the other tourists came and started elbowing and nudging each other to get a better view; my good spot on the small platform had been worth the new series of thorough gasps and heavy perspiring. Twenty minutes later one guide slyly dispersed the tourists with a compassionate ‘let’s go back and leave the tiger in the wild’, only to double back seconds later and guide his own tourist closer to the tiger. But Pardip was even more astute and, after a brief tête-à-tête with the other guide, the four of us went closer. Pardip and I turned around soon after, as we only had one pair of flip-flops, that is to say, he gave me his flip-flops and I flipped and flopped unsteadily on the muddy trail while he didn’t show any signs of uneasiness walking barefoot. But with this mighty endeavour I got to see the backside of a tiger quite well and actually got a photo in which the shape of its tail is almost distinguishable. I say ‘backside’ because the tiger probably got bored with being the centre of attention and stylishly turned its back on us and vanished into the bushes.

I wasn’t looking forward to the way back to the lodge but Pardip once again came through and arranged a ride back in a truck full of Nepali people where the only discomfort was trying to take photos of yet another rhino over the dark heads of Nepalese teenagers holding up their smartphones to better snap shots with.