It is Sunday evening and I write this lying on my bed in the doctors quarters. I can hear all the sounds of nature from outside; the bugs make SUCH a lot of noise! One in particular sporadically makes a noise very similar to a car alarm it is so loud! But it feels peaceful, and I am feeling very content.
We arrived back here about an hour ago, having spent the weekend at Mudumalai National Park and Tiger Reserve –which is basically a huge – I can’t remember how many hectares – but huge forest full of tigers and leopards and panthers and wild dogs and bison and spotted deer and mongooses and porcupines and peacocks (fun fact: national bird of India!) MONKEYS and ELEPHANTS J My favourites! They were all roaming free, and although we didn’t get to see any wild cats, we saw everything else!
We stayed in a place right at the edge of the reserve- which was a really nice sort of camp/resort with cabins that had HOT WATER- which was incredible after a week of freezing showers or boiling hot water over the stove and using a bucket! I had three hot showers in two days…it was heavenly! However as it was basically on the reserve, we had to have two male escorters to and from our room after dark because of the wild animals (usually wild dogs and leopards) that sometimes decided to stop by! I don’t know what they would have done had a leopard jumped in our path – I guess maybe just make us stop screaming! The people were really friendly and we had a really nice time. We were taken out by two of the guys in a jeep to the elephant camp where we got to see the elephants that had been trained being washed in the river and fed a massive amount! The people here seem quite concerned about elephants and talk about them as being the most dangerous of the animals around – far more so than tigers or leopards, however I think my past experience of elephants having been shows at zoos where the elephants spray the audience with water and seem super friendly and cartoon elephants from the jungle book, my opinion of what elephants are like was very different until this weekend. It was explained to us that the reason elephants have started to be more disruptive is that their ‘corridors’ the paths they use to get around, have been disrupted by humans and so they have gotten confused – kind of like a human with an out of date sat nav- and end up where they can cause trouble. We met one elephant at the camp who had killed 15 tea pickers in Kerala about 10 years ago by crushing them. You could see all of his bullet wound scars from where they had tried to kill him. They didn’t succeed and the government then decided to catch him instead and move him to this ‘camp’ to be trained. And he is a really lovely elephant now! But it just made me really realise how dangerous they can be in the wild. After the camp the two guys – whose names I can’t remember, (I’m sorry – Indian names can be really hard!) took us on a drive through the reserve- kind of like a safari. It was great! As I said, we saw loads of animals and the best part were all the wild elephants that we saw, just bopping about, doing their thing- eating and hanging out. They are such beautiful creatures and it was wonderful to see them in their natural habitat. It got dark whilst we were driving and by the time we were en route back to where we were staying it had gotten completely dark – so much so that we didn’t realise we were really close to a mother elephant and her baby until we were right up close to them! They were about a meter away! We tried to take photos but it was a bit tricky as it was so dark – also the mother did not like this AT ALL and went to charge after us! We laughed about it afterward – but our two drivers did freak out and drive away really fast! A narrow escape!
As it is Sunday today that means a day off for Mala (our lovely cook and general looker-afterer) so on our way back to Gudalur we stopped in town and bought hot Parotas (unbelievably delicious round breads) fresh off the hot plate and some bananas and pineapple from our favourite fruit seller and we had a parota and fruit feast for dinner…yum yum. I’m feeling all sleepy lying on my bed so think I’d better leave it there, I am going to go to the hospital now to see if the internet is working so that I can upload all my blog entries! It really has been so unreliable which is why I haven’t been able to, so fingers crossed! Bye for now!
UPLOAD OF BLOG ENTRIES SUCCESSFUL! Yay :) Photos of the weekend to follow! Off to bed to get a good sleep ready for week number 2! Goodnight xxx
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