restaurant by the water near Chitwan










bath time


jungle






view from elephant






my hut in Sauraha


the river Rapti near Chitwan National Park


my hotel in Pokhara


last evening in Pokhara

I spent most of another day on a bus from Pokhara to Chitwan National Park. The town near the park is called Sauraha, and it is quite a rustic place. The bus dropped me off in a field outside of town where jeeps awaited to drive the tourists to specific hotels. In the jeep, I met two other folks from Los Angeles, one who went to UCLA at the same time as I did. Small world. Anyway, after wandering around town for a while checking out the meager hotel options, I chose the Jungle Adventure (something) Hotel, which gave me my own hut with screens on the windows and mosquito nets. (I popped my first malaria pill!) The managers at the hotel were not very friendly after I didn't book my elephant ride and bus ticket with them; there is a very aggressive atmosphere in town for booking different activities--that is perhaps the worst part about the whole experience of Chitwan.
The next morning, I took a jeep loaded with tourists out to a remote field where we all boarded a number of different elephants (four people to an elephant), and lumbered around the forest for a couple of hours. It was a very very uncomfortable ride, wedged between several other people and hanging on with all my strength. We saw several deer along the way, but no other wildlife (what animals wouldn't be scared off by 15 elephants and 50 tourists?).
In town, I ate at the same restaurant 4 times that had seats right on the river. I watched the sunset twice, and the sunrise another time, and all of the shore birds flitting around, and the canoes going up the river. This was the highlight of my Chitwan experience. Across the river was this huge forest and grassland, and I know that it is teeming with animal life--it is humbling and thrilling. For me, it was enough to have that close proximity to that place where the wildlife is protected and thriving; it's nice to know it's there, and I don't necessarily need to be trouncing through it. Dusk is so incredibly beautiful in Chitwan, with the blue mountains of Nepal on my right and the Terai in front of me; it is very memorable.
I also watched the local elephants being bathed, which is a big tourist spectacle. I happened to be near the river when the elephants and their trainers first came to the water, and watching them bathe the animals was a very moving and natural experience. But then the tourists began to come in their speedos and bathing suits and pasty white skin and boarded the elephants, and the mood changed distinctly. The trainers had to pull hard on the elephants ears and yell at them to get the elephants to spray water onto the tourists over and over again. Some of the elephants were reluctant, and would shake their backs to topple the tourists into the water. After about an hour, there were 100 or so tourists on the bank, all shooting photos with their telephoto lenses and $2000 cameras, trying to get the perfect posed photo atop the wet elephants.