Well this is where we were for 3 days. Bandhargarh National Park is in Central India and was a 14hr train ride from Agra. The trains in India are quite fast. At one point I clocked it at 67mph on my handheld GPS. We got off at the station and took a van 34kms to the resort. This was a slow ride. The roads were everything from sand to clay to asphalt to broken sinking asphalt so we were only able to average about 30km/h. Once at the resort we checked in and took a nap as it was 6am. We had this first day to relax as the park was not yet open for the year. We had to wait till tomorrow. We woke up at 5:30am and quickly grabbed our things and met at the jeep for 6am. I wasn't too sure what to expect of this safari as the park has been closed since July and not a single person not even a park ranger has been in the park since then. We met about 12 other jeeps from other resorts at the park gates all waiting to get in. As we all got our documents to enter the park we slowly made our way in. Each jeep is designated to a specific route in the park as to not have everyone on the same road. After about 10 minutes we rounded a corner in the road and saw about 10 jeeps all parked and jammed up on the road. People were standing up on the seats, hoods, windshields and roll bars all pointing at the bush. I thought to myself, "wow these tourists really get excited about spotted deer". We pulled up and a guide in another jeep said something in Hindi to our guide then he whispered to me, "two tigers right there in the bush" AHH... PARDON!! We maneuvered our jeep into place and there they were a male and female tiger growling and roaring at each other. The sounds echoed through the entire jungle like they were hooked up to a 20000 Watt sub-woofer. The guide said to me, "they are mating" Wow; so here we are 10 minutes into the safari on the very first day the park opens and we see this. Can you say lucky? We snapped as many pictures as we could and then the jeeps started to spread out again. Throughout the day we saw, spotted deer, Jackal, red-faced monkey's, wild pigs, a ton of birds and huge jungle spiders. These spiders had webs the size of truck hoods and themselves were the size of drink coasters. We went on two jeep safaris each day. A morning safari; 6am-10am and an afternoon safari 3pm-5:30pm. We saw these same two tigers on three of the four safaris we went on, however, they were very difficult to photograph on the other occasions. But we tried our best.
Kelly is standing in front of our cabin. Our door is on the right and our friends is on the left. Its kind of like a duplex.
This is inside the main lodge dinner area.
First tiger spotting
This one was taken through binoculars and then zoomed in
"Common Langral"
One of the rangers on the elephant
Fresh Tiger prints from earlier in the morning
Day two, same male tiger from yesterday
The walking path from our cabin to the dining room
Wild flower growing in the pond at the resort. Was about 8" diameter
up in the park hills, my GPS reads "1875 ft"
The meadows
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