Asian Walkabout

After lunch at the hotel, we decide to return to the park gate and explore the fort ruins there. Unlike many other tourists, we pass on the evening tiger safari. We figure it can’t get much better than our morning tiger sighting.
It does. This fort, which shares a name with the park, is an unassuming mass of red brick structures in various states of decay. Walk through a ragged entry door with worn-looking anti-elephant spikes and you arrive inside a vast patchwork of ruins, lakes, and temples. Wild brambles as well as mules, goats, monkeys, and low-flying peacocks give the place a strong sense of life. The premises’ overgrown paths and crumbling domes lend it a savory mystique that makes hours pass like honey.

We make the steep climb through the main door and encounter our first crowd of Hanuman langurs. Sun-baked mothers nurse infants and impassively supervise rambunctious youngsters. The monkeys are inert until a couple walks by with a plastic bag filled with flowers. Temple offerings.

When they smell the edibles, the monkeys synchronize faster than a SWAT team. Mommas strap babies to their bellies and emit larynx-cracking screeches. Thirty of them stampede up to the couple in a matter of seconds. The husband yells and brandishes a rock to scare them away. The monkeys readily ignore him and go for his plastic bag. He and his wife have to jog out of harm’s way.

After watching what might as well have been a live Discovery Channel episode, we explore the rest of the grounds, passing a lawn full of peacocks, a mosque, a Jain temple, and a Hindu temple dedicated to Ganesh. All along the way, we encounter Indian friends and families, many of whom want to take our picture. We stroll back at sunset and catch a couple of tourists and their guide gaping over the bastion walls. The monkey tribe is barking now, a low, guttural sound, and staring intently into the undergrowth below.

“They see a tiger,” says the tour guide, pointing down the fort wall. “This is their warning call. It must be right there.” We quicken our pace down. Dusk is just about to throw her veil on the park. The air on the ground is pregnant with anticipation. Our driver impatiently opens the back gate of our Jeep and lurches onto the one-lane road leading back to town. The road is hacked into a hillside, with the fort above and a massive lake below. Its tall, dense greenery is broken up only by barely-perceptible game trails.

We see nothing. Unbeknownst to us, the tiger, a stressed-out female, is looking at us at the same time we look for her. She’s feeling angry and has it out for humans. Lucky for us, she chooses to target two guys on the motorcycle behind us.

We turn our heads just in time to see a massive orange feline bounding from one of the fort-side game trails, a cloud of dust in her wake, swiping at them with a hooked paw. They swerve and almost fall off the bike when they realize they’ve just been ambushed by a tiger. She walks towards them and they leadfoot away, their faces pure alarm.
Once the motorcycle is gone, the tiger walks several distracted steps, her ears set close to her head and her tail flicking, and darts into the undergrowth opposite of where she emerged. I’m cowered in the center aisle of the open Jeep, ducking down in case she decides to go after us, too. Seth is bug-eyed, but has his camera poised and ready. By the time a gaggle of fellow tourists arrive in Jeeps and canters, she’s long gone.

We are lucky, indeed. Two tigers in one day! And one that almost attacked us. It doesn’t get much better than that. Unless, of course, you’re in Rishikesh with a German bakery. But I’ll get to that later.
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Back home in the States, tigers are relegated to zoos, refuges, and Vegas acts. Nonetheless, I urge you to go see a tiger anywhere you can. If you live in Colorado’s Front Range, you can see healthy, relaxed rescued tigers at the Wild Animal Sanctuary. In California’s Bay Area, the Discovery Kingdom has a tiger exhibit where you can watch the big cats dive into water through a glass enclosure. I also know of tiger rescues in Indiana and South Carolina. The list of links below will tell you more.

Secondly, I urge you to check out one of the tiger conservation causes listed below. The people involved work against big money, big government, and big poachers to keep alive a mythical animal that could eat them whole. That’s passion, that’s courage.

As long as conservation is around, we’ll all be able to catch our own Jeep past trash-filled streets and marble temples, through blaring Hindi music, jingling camel trains, and miles of rocky desert, where tigers are still stalking spotted deer, swimming in clear water lakes, and swiping at the occasional human, reminding us that their endangerment is also our own.

Tiger Conservation Resources:

http://www.SiberTiger.com
http://www.tigertrustindia.com
http://www.indiatiger.org
http://www.tigerfdn.com

Nature has an eye for beauty. Humans have been so taken by her elements that we have immortalized them as symbols of our own experience. Serene is a sunset over the Caribbean (just ask any Corona commercial for verification). Adventure is a sheer cliff overlooking a gaping jungle canyon. Love is a long-stemmed red rose. Then, there are some things so rare, powerful, and exquisite that you get an adrenaline rush just thinking about them.

This is why we headed to Ranthambore National Park. It’s the only place in Rajasthan to see the tiger, an animal so immaculate and precious that people still believe its parts to have supernatural powers. Tigers are being poached to the verge of extinction, but in Ranthambore, you can still hop on a Jeep at dawn or dusk and see them in their natural environment.

We decide on a dawn Jeep safari. At 6 am, we duck into a 6-person topless Jeep on a morning cold enough to freeze a carp. Park staff assign each Jeep a gate through a lottery, as only a limited number of vehicles are allowed in any one area at any given time. There are six zones, and no telling where the tigers will be lurking. We’re assigned Zone 2 and cross our fingers that it will produce the tiger sighting we’re after.

As soon as we drive onto the premises of the park, we enter a raw, pulsing kind of wild. You know those settings they put tigers in at the zoo, with boulders and undergrowth and shallow pools? It’s like that, but with the intrepid romance of reality added on. Ancient Banyan trees dreadlock into undergrowth as dense and cluttered as a shag rug.

Sheer-sided mountains stretch skyward around the flat, amoeba-shaped lake in the middle. Higher up, boulders rest on dun-colored plains where spotted deer graze and vipers sun themselves. Wild birds cackle from the 1,000-year-old Ranthambore Fort, which gazes down from the park’s horizon.

After this brief introduction to the park, we arrive at our assigned gate, Number Two, swaddled like infants to keep out the cold. A blink of an eye later, we see him.

He’s barely perceptible as he crunches through dead undergrowth ten feet from our vehicle. Eleven feet from head to tail, he’s one of the park’s biggest cats. He walks right up to our Jeep and stares at us with a tribal face the size of a hubcap. His white eyes indicate curiosity, but the pupils remain cautiously contracted. Stripes as wide as a human arm ink his powder-orange coat, its softness concealing the chiseled body inside.

He is perfect in a raw, aching way. The aching is his aesthetic flawlessness; the raw is our own human fear. We instantly imprint him into our memory banks.

After a long glimpse, our driver floors it in reverse, getting out of his way in case he gets wild. The tiger pads in our direction with pancake-sized paws, sniffing a bramble here, spraying a tree there. Our nervous driver keeps reversing the Jeep in fitful jerks. Tourists in Jeeps and canters (topless trucks with 20 seats) cluster behind the big cat to get a better look. The feline swings into thick undergrowth a full five minutes later, leaving our mouths agape.

He is our only tiger of the morning, but we’re satisfied. Luck will find us again nine hours later, but we don’t know that yet. The driver takes us deeper into Ranthambore’s fantastically gnarled wilderness, past cliff-hugging fort ruins, dense forests, lime-green parakeets, and magpie-crows that eat bananas out of your hands. A multitude of wild things—jaguars, alligators, mongooses—lurk unseen on the park grounds.