Kanha Kesli

This will be a briefer post than I wish.  I have many days to talk about,  but not much time to do it in.  This is our last day at Patanadi.  Sanjay will give the message at this evening’s English church service, we’ll have a potluck meal with all of the family, I will give a brief message at the hospital staff chapel tomorrow morning, and then we will be on our way. 

First we will have a drive to Bhopal tomorrow and will stay at the home of an old college friend of Sanjay’s—Mickey Singh.  The next day we will take the fast train up to Delhi, where we will spend two nights until we go to Germany for a 3 day layover, and then home.  We’ll see how internet coverage is and try to post once or twice along the way. 

But, first, a look back for the past couple of days.   On Thursday we loaded up for a long car ride to go to Kanha—a big National Tiger Preserve.  Ashish and Lisa and their two kids Andy and Jeetu, Mon and Ritu, the four of us and Mom went for the occasion of Uncle Raj and Aunty Rosa’s 50^th wedding anniversary.  The ride took 8 hours and was about 400 km each way.  For those of you who haven’t been to India, it is difficult to convey the complexities of a road trip.  The roads are a constant unpredictable morass of cows, bullock carts, goats, cars going every which way and honking the entire time, bicycles, and humans.   This is not the kind of driving where you can sip your cup of coffee and listen to the radio.  The driver has to be on constant alert.  And the riders in the back often bump their heads on the roof of the car from bumping up and down.

So we met many other family members at the Safari Lodge at Kanha.   “We met tons and tons of cousins at the jungle,” Elysia reported to her Dada (grandfather).  Kanha is not a jungle in the tropical sense of the word.  I think we would call it a forest—huge tall trees of teak, Sal, and others that I don’t know.  We had to awaken very early in the morning and load up into open jeeps to get our tour through the forest with a guide who was from one of the local tribal groups and very familiar with the ways of the jungle.   

Some trackers go out on elephants each morning and track the tigers.  If they have tracked them, then the groups all come and climb onto the elephants to go find the tigers.  We didn’t get to do this, much to the disappointments of the girls.  We also didn’t see a tiger, although another jeep full of our family did.  So we rode around in the forest for 5 hours or so and although it was bitterly cold, it was just spectacular.  We saw peacocks and hen, many bright and amazing birds, a big bison, lots of various sorts of deer including huge elk-like animals, wild boar, and lots of monkeys.  It was an unusually cold morning, but watching the frost melt off of the fields and drip off the trees as the sun hit was just gorgeous.  Daya and I went out for another safari in the afternoon and again struck out for tigers, although apparently one walked behind our jeep and the jeep behind us saw it. 

In the evening we celebrated Aunty and Uncle’s anniversary and as a special treat they had arranged to have a group of tribal dancers come and dance for us around the fire.  This was a spectacular experience and the we even got to join in the dancing for a bit.  After a nice dinner with family, two very tired little girls went to bed.

We had to do the reverse drive the next day to come back home.   But the scenery of rural India and fun playing games in the car made the ride quite nice.