Southern India - 15 February 2012 (1)

Driving through the Jungle

Papaya Tree

Working Elephant

We left the hotel at 0730 and headed off down the mountains.  There were some spectacular hairpin bends, but Guruprasad got the bus round with no problem.  The scenery was wonderful and we passed two reservoirs and their dams.

  

Grey Langur

Bonnet Macaque

We stopped for tea and coffee at a very nice café.  Lukose brought us a marble cake and an orange cake, both ready sliced, which went down very well.  My white coffee tasted like it should, but Lukose had to try his old trick of watering down the black tea because it was so strong and stewed.  The toilets were good too and Bella and I stood outside, chatting and admiring a fully laden papaya tree while we waited.  The fruits were still green though and far too high for us to try to procure one.

Chital

Grey Langur & Baby

Soon afterwards, we entered Mudumalai National Park, so I stopped reading and started staring intently out of the window.  We saw two working elephants, grey langurs and bonnet macaques, chital and a wild boar.  I spotted the last three chital so I was pleased.  Actually, some of these sightings were in the adjacent Bhandipur National Park.  The two National Parks are really one, separated by a state border.  The only way we could tell we had passed from one to that other was that we crossed from Tamil Nadu into Karnataka, so Guruprasad had to go through the necessary border controls – that and the signs.

Grey Langur

The most frustrating thing about passing through the National Parks was that we were on a main road and going fairly fast, so wildlife viewing opportunities were limited.  I know the holiday wasn’t a wildlife holiday, but... to be so near and yet so far!  There are tigers in these reserves and it would have been wonderful to have had an off road ride in an open vehicle.

Sheltering in Shade of a Tree

Guruprasad stopped whenever we spotted something and we managed to get some photos, although mostly through the bus windows which meant they weren’t great.  At one point we were boarded by some very naughty langurs on the scrounge for food.  I was on the back so didn’t see them climb on the bus.  Instead, I was watching a group sheltering from the sun.  They were stretched in a long line in the shade of a tree trunk.  These included a very young monkey, who kept trying to escape his mother to play with the others, but then lost his nerve and ran back to her for a cuddle.

Chital

Wild Boar

When we hit civilisation again, I resumed reading and made good progress on what was only my second book of the holiday.