Mandla Trip - II

Continued from Mandla Trip - I

4 October
Plan this day was to go to Kanha Tiger Reserve (KTR) and spend the whole day there. We're not allowed to take our vehicles inside, but go in the vehicle provided by the forest authorities. There's a reason why. We can't drive our regular vehicles inside the forest. There's usually no proper road. Even better for me was we get a driver, so I don't need to drive, and can take pictures myself.

We finally entered KTR around 9 am. This is the Khatia Jungle Camp entrance.
Note - although the signage says ‘National Park’, it is to be referred as Tiger Reserve (TR), since a TR has more protection and legal standing.

This was the Gypsy we went in. Except our mom and driver, rest of us sat in the back in the open. It's very convenient to look around from the back. Some places we stood up on on the seats to get a 360-degree view!

We were invited by the sight of a couple of forest guard's elephants (notice chains on one of the elephant's leg) inside the national park. There aren't any wild elephants in this part of India.

Going a small distance further we saw a bison grazing alone. This was a wild beast, huge and intimidating.

It wasn't very far from us.

 We stopped. It slowly walked towards us while grazing, and looked at us for a moment.

And then it continued its business. So did we.

The forest was dense, road was patchy, but the atmosphere was pure and clean.

And sometimes, the path was all covered in grass.

After driving around for over an hour, the driver spotted pug marks on the road, they seem to belong to a tiger! He said these pug marks are very fresh, not less than couple of hours ago. But we didn't see any tigers that day.

We saw other wildlife though. This is a sub species of swamp deer, endemic to KTR (ie found nowhere else in the world). It's an endangered species, but very easy to spot as they are abundant in KTR due to special care & they live in herds. They only stay near wetlands as they are very specialist species, so chances of spotting a herd is very easy and anyone visiting KTR has a glimpse of it for sure. My 32x zoom camera was very useful!
This looks like the Barasingha, but they were drastically reduced in number due to human disturbances which are removed now from KTR.

The by-now-ubiquitous lion tailed macaque.

We saw a lot of peacocks, but they're very difficult to capture on camera. They run around a lot, or escape into the bushes in a jiffy.

But I did manage to capture one on reel - not bad, I thought.
However, it's easier to see them during the monsoons when they're dancing.

Wild boars - they spotted us first and ran away before we could get a proper picture of them!

Sambar deer, another endangered species having nimble feet. They're even more difficult to spot since their numbers are smaller and are very stealthy.
Our sis informed us that tigers prefer eating these deer the most, followed by wild boar, and then spotted deer.

Spotted deer. We saw lots of these.

A huge herd of spotted deer. It seems there are more than 10000 spotted deer in this national park alone. We find spotted deer in almost every national park in India.

At most places the grass was too tall for us to spot any wildlife. Here are a bunch of spotted deer.

We were arranged a forest guest house (upper cabin, usually occupied by forest officers on their night stay in KTR) to have lunch. After the lunch, on our return journey we didn't spot any wildlife. Our sis said there are better chances of spotting any at dusk. No animals roam around when its blazing hot.
We left KTR, disappointed that we didn't see any tigers. But happy that we were able to see other wild animals.

On our way back to Mandla, saw some people immersing goddess Durga idols into the Banjar river. The slab submerged in the river was the old bridge, now overflowing with water. It seems the old bridge is usable during summer when the water level is low. Sometimes when it rains heavily, even the new bridge submerges!

Zoomed-in view of the immersion.

And buffaloes bathing in the same river on other side of the bridge, downstream.

A pandal, on the way back.

The temple beside river Narmada, at Mandla.

We had returned by 4pm. Since we had a lot of time left in the day, we went to Sahastradhara, about 5 km from where we were staying.

Luckily saw the sunset over the waters.

The shiva temple was submerged in water.

The trees around the temple were submerged too.

This is the main temple (from behind).

Fishermen catching fish.
Obviously, we had fish for dinner again :-)

5 October

There wasn't much to do this day. Our mom and sister had gone out. So Revanth and I went to the Archaeological Museum close to our house (forest department quarters).

The museum was really small. To kill time we took pictures of almost every object and read everything we could. And yet we were out within an hour!

An ancient copper plate with inscription in Sanskrit.

Sun god, Surya and Elephant god, Ganesha.

Some antique utensils.

There were a lot of fossils as well, but nothing much to see or read about them. We walked through this section the fastest.

Towards the end was a section dedicated to Indian Independence. Most of the artifacts were related to Mandla.

 

Outside, in the verandah, were some more items displayed exposed to the weather.

We were almost done going through everything, and were getting bored as well. We got a call inviting us to attend the Elephant Rejuvenation Camp. The sudden invitation was exiting, the day wasn't boring anymore. We had to hurry back to the house.

Every year, all elephants in the national park are given a week off from their duties in and around the KTR (such as patrolling the forest for protection, helping forest guards, tracking tigers, etc.) for socializing and cleaning themselves up. This year there were 16+1 (the +1 refers to a newborn since last year). In that week, the elephants are treated like VIPs, given oil massage, good bath and a sumptuous meal twice everyday (morning and evening) - all food they love - coconuts, jaggery, sugarcane, chapatis and lots of fruits - sweet lime, apples, bananas, pineapples, etc.

We arrived at the camp by around 3 pm. Most of the elephants had assembled already.

Every one of them had name plates, and food allotted to each of them.

After a brief worship of all the elephants, the feast began.

It ended with feeding them their favorite, sugarcane.
After watching the elephants, participating in feeding the elephants, we returned Mandla by dusk.
Had fish for dinner again :-)

6 October
There was a Rangoli competition at a nearby school in morning, organized by the Kanha Tiger Reserve authorities. Our sister was in the judging panel!

Some of the popular/prize-winning designs:

Posters in the school about Project Tiger. Reminded me of what reintroduction of wolves did to the Yellowstone national park.

After having lunch, we left for Jabalpur, to see couple of waterfalls and Marble Rocks.

Part 3 continued here - Mandla Trip - III