Feb. 15. 2015

My guides are a little late so I enjoy one chai more in the morning with a guy from Switzerland. Today we walk (!) to the east and will be back at Sauraha at night. It is the first time for me to explore a national park by walk and considering all the animals being at home here this is rather dangerous. Crawling through the jungle, the grass and the bushland we sometimes are caught in a maze of tunnels formed by grass that is more than 5 meters high. We don’t see further than 3-4meters but this is the place where the animals and especially the slot bears are hiding at daytime. I ask myself what we will do if a slot bear or another big animal appears right in front of us but don’t ask. Pray probably….

Until lunchtime we arrive in an area of a dried out riverbed in the forest. All is full of foot prints of deer, tigers, slot bears, leopards, rhinos,….. On the way back we are far of the ways and even Ram, my guide gets lost some times. At one point we have to cross a river but the place where we could do so using a big tree is occupied by crocodiles. No problem we go 200m downstream and wade… I really have fun and Ram seems to be exactly the right guide for me – totally crazy. That day we see 2 Rhinos, 5 gharials a few wild boars as well as neverending birds (amongst them two hornbills flying rather far away from us) and deer.