Sawai Madhopur - gateway to Ranthambore

Sawai Madhopur is a very basic Indian town really, and the vast majority of tourists seem to stay a bit outside the town, on the road to the national park in expensive resort hotels. Obviously that didn't much appeal to me, so on walking out of the train station I popped into the first decent looking hotel I saw and managed to negotiate a great price for a lovely room.

This was a stroke of luck as our guidebooks gave no map of the town and strolling around a strange town looking for a hotel with no map is no fun. This way we didn't have to lug our rucksacks around town, we didn't have to haggle with a rickshaw driver and we were right in the centre of town and beside the train station for when we moved on.

So settled in there the next priority was to check out getting on a tour of the park. I checked in our hotel and then at the tourist office in the train station, and both told me it would be no problem getting a tour the next morning by just arriving at the official booking office. So 5:30am the next morning we get a rickshaw to the booking office, and after queuing up with the local touts who buy tickets for the guests at the resorts, I manage to book a jeep safari leaving in an hour. The guidebooks both said that 6-seater jeep safaris are much more expensive and much more difficult to get than the 20-seater canter trucks, but things must have changed recently as I had no problem at all getting a jeep, and it was only marginally more expensive than a truck (or again, it was just our timing in coming towards the end of the season).

So after a bite of breakfast we headed off in our very comfy, open and modern jeep (which was incredibly quiet too, unlike the huge canters that are really buses!). We stopped off at one of the luxury resorts to pick up the other 4 tourists, a Canadian family of 4. This was their 3rd safari trip in Ranthambore, and they were very keen to see a tiger, which the park is famous for. I think they said everyone else at their hotel had spotted tigers the day before, but they hadn't.

The safari was 3-hours long, and was through beautiful scenery, but although our driver certainly seemed very keen to find a tiger (waiting for long stretches at specific locations, and circumnavigating the same route 3 times, much to the annoyance of the Canadian wife!), we never spotted a tiger. I didn't mind in the slightest really, as I never thought you'd have much chance of spotting one, and anyway I really enjoyed the park and the other wildlife we saw, such as small crocodiles, lots of deer and antelope, lots of birds and a huge stripey hyena that ran right across the road in front of us before we'd even picked up the Canadians.

On the way back from the safari myself and Sarah hopped out of the jeep to explore the huge fortress that overlooks the entrance to the park. I had planned on exploring the fort for a couple of hours before heading back to the booking office to try and book another safari for the afternoon (the park has 8 zones, so I wanted to try a different zone to see a bit more of the park).

The fortress is pretty impressive in itself, but really it's location is just fantastic, as it's built on the edge of high cliffs. At the top we found a lovely secluded spot to sit, have a bite to eat and just soak up the view of the lakes in the park. The fort also has a famous Hindu temple, and it happened to be a holy day for that temple, so lots of local pilgrims were visiting (as well as hundreds of monkeys, more than I've ever seen in one place before).

To get back to the booking office we had to hop into an extremely crowded jeep with all the pilgrims (I counted 20 people in the 8-seater jeep, all very 'African'), and they dropped us off at the office on their way back to the town. Again I had no trouble booking a jeep, and in fact we ended up sharing with the same Canadian family again.

So after a lovely lunch across the road from the booking office, we hopped into another jeep, picked up the Canadians again at their hotel and went off looking for tigers again. This time, amazingly, we got lucky and actually managed to spot 2 wild tigers.

It wasn't a great sighting though I have to say, as the tigers (they were 2 young adults) were quite a distance away. Our guide reckoned they were waiting in a cave for their mother who was out hunting. He pointed out the tigers to me at first, but all I could make out was a very faint orangey smudge. Eventually I managed to borrow a pair of binoculars from the jeep beside us (they were very reluctant to give them away), and with them I could just about make out unmistakable tiger-ness markings, but no discernible body parts!

I was standing up on the back seat of the jeep, and the other people in our jeep kept moving, so I couldn't keep the powerful binoculars steady, but I was sure I was looking at a tiger. We all stayed staring at the distance smudges for what seemed like ages, but our guide kept telling us to wait until the tigers moved. And the amazing thing was that once a tiger did move, just by turning it's head, lying down or sitting up, or even just shaking it's head, what had been a smudge suddenly became discernible as a real live tiger, as clear as day. It was really weird how your vision seemed to adjust, but by the time we left we had all gotten what we considered a good view of at least one of the tigers - and by that stage there were about 10 jeeps and trucks all crowding around trying to see (we were lucky to have been the third vehicle at the scene).

So after that we spent some more time looking for tigers, but to no avail, although again the landscapes were beautiful. We then dropped off the lovely Canadian family (who incidentally had discovered after their 3rd safari that their hotel was charging them literally double the real safari price, and so the father, who needless to say was a tad peeved, booked their 4th and successful safari directly himself. How many other tourists never get to find out just how much they are being ripped off though...?).

We had to walk back to the town from the booking office, as there were no rickshaws or taxis. Literally everyone else on the safaris was staying at the resorts and got dropped off on the way back to the booking office. It was a nice walk though and after booking train tickets for the next day to Jaipur we got another really tasty dinner at the Asha Hotel.