Jungle Blog...

  the view from the top...
  Waiting for something... anything... this is the place where i saw the snake...
  Evidence that Leopards do exist in the park...
  view of inside the National Park

Well, I have spent the past few days in the Jungle of Nepal, at a National Park called Bardia. Yes, Nepal has a jungle! The south side of Nepal borders India, so it has a lot of animals that I imagine are indigenous to the Indian sub-continent. This is also the Jungle area of Nepal, and the northern section of Nepal is the part containing all the high mountains, including Everest.

For some reason it is possible to walk around this park that contains Leopard, Tigers, Rhino and Elephant, and all the guide carries for protection is a bamboo stick...I just can’t imagine doing that in South Africa, it would just be like offering yourself up as food to the lions. Maybe if they had lions here it would be a different story.
At 6am I had a ride on one of the domesticated elephants through the jungle. I don’t usually condone such actions(supporting the domestication of wild animals), but i was being selfish and wanted to get close to the elephants. The ride lasted an hour, wading through jungle and rivers. It was an interesting experience, though one i don’t feel i need to repeat should the opportunity arise. Afterwards I went on a whole day trek through the jungle, in the 40degree heat, and we saw... footprints of Tigers, Leopards, Rhino, the remains of a tigers meal (now the meal of a million flies)... and at the end of the day we saw a lone elephant bull. At this point I was in a bit of pain and the elephant was far away, so I didn’t even bother taking out my camera. The couple i was walking with wanted to follow the bull, so we went off chasing it. We did manage to catch up with him as he was grazing, but the grass is really high – like 8ft high (no exaggeration) – so all I could see was his outline, and by this point i just wanted to get back to my room and take a paracetemol. They also have domesticated elephants, and we saw a few of those being taken out to graze, but that doesn’t really count as a sighting of wild animals. The park haa amazing bird life, so I saw a few blue Kingfisher, a hornbill, and some others which I don’t know the name of. I thought I saw a snake coming out of the side of a river bank while i was sitting close by in a tree... I continued to sit in the tree, hoping it would come out again... but it didn’t. As it is really sandy, and a very fine sand, the animals leave a lot of evidence of their existence, as a result, we later saw evidence of a python – but didn’t actually see the python itself. What we also saw were peacocks, deer and monkeys, and loads of beautiful butterflies. It is quite a beautiful jungle with such a strange mix of creatures.
The place where I have been staying is called the Bardia Jungle Cottage. Now i am not sure if they are calling it the Jungle cottage because it is next to the jungle, or because of what they are growing around the property... it appears that I have been staying amidst a marijuana plantation. Which makes me wonder what the owner put in the medicinal tea that he gave a Dutch couple that were staying here...?