We dragged ourselves out of bed just before 6am to be collected in an open jeep half an hour later. We were the 2nd pickup from hotels, ours being on the main road to the wildlife Park. Several other hotels, described as being in an “idyllic rural setting” and “peaceful and natural” were tucked away in the scrubs and tourists from these places were moaning about how they found it difficult to locate the places, and how they were in the middle of nowhere! Some people are never happy!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An American couple boarded the jeep, she was dressed very inappropriately in a thin ankle length denim dress with slits up the side, 3\/4 length sleeves and a straw hat! I did mention that it was very cold on the road and she might want to grab a blanket from the driver and wrap up, but she was “fine”! So 20 mins later we head into the park, American lady shivering and moaning and two Aussie women behind us discussing face creams with sun protection! The park is divided into 12 zones and zones are allocated at random, 1700 sq m of wilderness, 70 tigers, chance of seeing one that day was 50\/50. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The guide did tell everyone to stop talking and keep very quiet, a task the American found very hard to do, she kept asking stupid questions like “will we see a tiger today, what do they eat, where do they normally hang out????” The guide who’s name was Amstrad, took a very deep breath before responding. I was waiting for him to say ” yes, they knew you were coming, so they are hanging out at the shopping mall, before grabbing a Costa…..”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Patience paid off and we got to see a glimpse of a Bengal tiger as she crept through the foliage, my pictures are not great because I was too busy watching her, and ignoring the American! The leopard was snoozing up a tree, there were plenty of beautiful stags and their broods, as well as 3 lazy crocs sunning beside a lake. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
An early cold start was well worth it, we returned to our hotel happy, dusty and cold and ready for breakfast. From the 12 guests booked onto a safari by our hotel that day, we were the only ones who had seen a Bengal Tiger and the leopard!!! Talk about lucky!!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n After showering and warming up with breakfast, we called our driver and asked him to take us to Ranthambore Fort. This hilltop structure overlooks the National Park, was built in the 5th century and has several gates, temples and lakes within it. That particular day was a rememberance day, people remembering their dead relatives, so was full of locals dressed in their finery heading to the Temple to be blessed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We were a bit of a spectacle, climbing the few hundred steps to the top, all the young men and girls wanted to stop and take a selfie with us, us being the only white skinned bodies in sight! One group of 3 young boys asked if they could take a selfie with us, we replied “yes for 300 rupees (about \u00a33)” they laughed and sneakily took a photo of themselves with us in the background! <\/p>\n\n\n\n We have seen: Monkeys (King Louie – everywhere) Wild Peacocks (Mao – with their hens) Spotted deer (Choo Chip – several beautiful specimens) Warthog (Fred – common in the rubbish piles) Crocodiles (Jacala – 3 sunning by the lake) BENGAL TIGER Shere Khan – briefly spotted in the shrub LEOPARD Bagheera – snoozing up a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3861,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5,4,86],"tags":[94,96,95,97],"class_list":["post-3816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-churches","category-general","category-history","category-india","tag-bengal-tiger","tag-elephant","tag-leopard","tag-safari","post-preview"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.samsonandsuzi.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/20200212_095756-scaled.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samsonandsuzi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samsonandsuzi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samsonandsuzi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samsonandsuzi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samsonandsuzi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3816"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.samsonandsuzi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3863,"href":"https:\/\/www.samsonandsuzi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3816\/revisions\/3863"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samsonandsuzi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samsonandsuzi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samsonandsuzi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samsonandsuzi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.samsonandsuzi.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/20200212_064711-1024x768.jpg\")
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<\/a>Ranthambore Fort<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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