The Real Land of the Tigers

As the gate at the entrance to the Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve says, this is the real land of the tigers. When I looked it up on google, it told me the distance between Tadoba and Goa was 1,032.6km and 19 hours 1 minute. This calculation is  if you are travelling at 80 km/ hour the entire way, this is not the possible. It would have taken us days to get there. I think we would have lost our minds had we driven to Tadoba so we decided to fly from Goa to Mumbi to Nagpur and then drive 3 hours from Nagpur to Tadoba.
Before we left for India I contacted Shalik Jogwe who has a blog about Tadoba. He offered to come and pick us up in Nagpur and get us to the Serai Resort where we were staying. It was comforting to have a contact who spoke English.



Shalik, Paul and I at the Tadoba gates

This was in the morning when it was cold driving in an open gypsy jeep. Notice the layers we are wearing. The driver and the guides wore toques and Down filled jackets. We wore sweaters. Although our heads were cold. I laughed when I took a close look at this picture, notice the gate guards sneaking in to the picture directly behind us.



Our Gypsy

This is the gypsy jeep we rode around in during out four safari's.  We were in the reserve talking to a group of people in another gypsy when I asked the very well spoken Indian guide if he would take our picture. He happily obliged. This is the spot where Paul's glasses fell off his head and we ran over them. Oops!

Tadoba Ambassadors

We spent two days with these gentlemen. Their English was very minimal but their love of their jobs and their knowledge gave us the sense of being lucky to have them as our guiding team.. Ganesh on the right was our young driver  and Inconth on the left was our Tadoba safari guide. Inconth (I may be spelling it wrong) was a very good guide. He had an uncanny sense and an eagle eye for spotting tigers. On our first safari, three other jeeps sped by but Inconth spotted a tiger in the deep brush. We saw our first tiger after being in the park for only 15 minutes.

View from a Gypsy

This is the view of the Tadoba Andhari gates before our afternoon safari. The gates open at 2:30 pm and close at 6:30 pm. Ganesh made sure we were near the front.  

We were not alone

We had to share the tigers with everyone.This was the row of Gypsies behind us.