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March 18, 2006

An exceedingly good camp

Kipling Camp is one of the most amazing places that I have ever visited, and a world away from the bustling cities and air-conditioned hotels where I have so far been staying.
It consists of a number of huts built around a covered bar and eating area called the Shamiana where the staff, volunteers and guests all eat and drink together and discuss the day’s sightings.

It is also home to Tara, a fifty year old elephant with whom nearly every visitor to the camp falls in love. In the afternoons we would follow Tara down to the river where she and her Mahout would play together before she would lie down on one side and a crowd of us would gather round and help scrub her skin with stones.

At the slightest sign of movement we would leap back and give her space to get up and then lie down again on her other side. I leapt back particularly far at these points, much to the derision of Tom, a volunteer at the camp. She weighs two tonnes, for goodness sake, but clearly in the wild it doesn’t do to show your fear.

After being scrubbed Tara would like to invest a little time blowing water at us all as we feebly attempted to splash her back. It seems that no matter how hard you try, you cannot beat an elephant in a water fight.

We were there for three nights and in that time saw an astonishing array of animals; langurs, samba, peacocks, wild boar, jungle cockerels, jackals, spotted deer, barking deer, barasingha, serpent eagles, kingfishers, and Indian bison.

But the highlight of the visit was our final morning. It was the third safari that we had ventured out on with our guides and naturalists Neil and Sidat. At about half seven we discovered that a tiger had been seen making a kill by a group of mahouts on their elephants, and so we set off to find it as quickly as possible.

There are 126 tigers in Khana national park, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you will see one whenever you go out. No guest at the camp had seen one since we had been there, but at about half eight we met up with the mahouts and we climbed from the jeeps onto the elephants’ saddles so that they could lead us from the tracks and through the undergrowth. There we came across the tiger.

It was an astonishing sight. Not only was he an unbelievable size but he also looked so astonishingly calm and relaxed as he dozed in the sun. But then, what does a tiger have to worry about? Poaching and extinction in the wild, but in a national park he has no such fears. Just like Tara, he plays the camera beautifully.

Later in the morning we came across him again, when he crossed the track about two jeeps in front of us. A moving tiger is a different proposition altogether, and there was a real sense of fear when he appeared to be heading straight towards us. In the end, he changed his mind and headed off into the undergrowth and of sight to be a King in private, and leaving about ten tourists desperately hoping that their cameras had been working properly.

Thankfully they were. That would have been really annoying.

Posted by Miles.Jupp at March 18, 2006 2:07 PM

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