Feb 17. 2015

Today is shivas birthday – a big holiday here and everyone who once experiences it will (have difficulties to) remember. Consuming Marijuana and Hash is kind of legal today and its offered everywhere at the temples. We are in the jungle though so get up early, make little sunrise meditation including some mantra chanting for shivaji and after breakfast we make a move towards back to Sauraha.

Today we walk the right bank of the river so we don’t need a ticket for the park for the nearly 20km walk. Sunrise at the riverside is incredibly amazing. In the jungle we see wild boar, lots of deer and again tiger foot prints – this time from a big male. We arrive at the borders of the “guide needed” area around lunchtime. A big big thank you goes to Ram, the craziest guide I have ever seen. He showed me exactly what I wanted to see and that was under the score:

All in all I have seen 10 rhinos (of which two I didn’t see because we bumped into them in the grass maze and had to run away – I count animals within a ratio of 5m as seen here even though I just smelled and heard them), 8 gharials, 3 slot bears, one tiger (within 5m) a tortoise, 7 wild boar, neverending white spotted deer, barking deer, hog deer and sambar deer, a not counted variety of birds of which the pictures show only a small part. It was the first time ever for me to see slot bears, rhinos and gharials in the wild. Before coming here I never hoped to ever see rhinos or gharials as they are both almost extinct.

If you plan to come here and enjoy the thrill of WALKING through a real jungle, give Ram a call and he will arrange all for you. His prices are more than fair and considering I was taking him as my private guide and he was risking his life to entertain me he is really cheap. His number: 981-2114298 – and tell him all the best from me as he doesn’t use internet to read this.

After saying good bye to the guides I still have to walk a little less than an hour to my guesthouse. Everybody is celebrating and just after stepping out of the jungle (dirty, sweaty and wasted) a beautiful girl stops me calling me bhole baba (today that’s ok) and makes pooja for me. I celebrate with the crowd at her family’s chai shop and then fall asleep soon after arriving at the guesthouse.