My travel diaries
Saturday 26 May, 2007 - Bardia National Park and Lumbini, Nepal
Finally today we get to see some decent wildlife after Tina's crusade to get hold of a ride on an elephant comes good. We're up at 5am, and Bikram drives Tina, Siling and me to the Tiger Tops luxury lodge to meet our transport. Tiger Tops have their own private elephants to hire out for tourism, as well as their own troop of trained mahouts (elephant drivers), and both are waiting for us when we arrive.
The elephant is boarded by climbing up a tower rather like a small machan and stepping off an exit platform onto the elephant's back. We start with a long plod through sal forest as dawn is breaking, with very little to see but termite mounds and several interesting examples of that most evil of plants, the strangler fig. This parasitic species coils its way up the trunks of sal trees, gradually strangling them. Once it grows as high as the canopy it reaches out along branches to adjacent trees to coil around and strangle them as well. We see one or two examples of strangler figs clinging to as many as four separate trees.
Closer to the Karnali river the forest opens out into scrubby grassland covered with smaller bushes and shrubs. A network of streams and tributaries in this area is a magnet for wildlife, and we see many different birds, as well as examples of all of Bardia's main species of deer (spotted, barking, hog and swamp deer). We only have eyes for the rhinos, though. There are loads of them, and the safety of the elephant allows us to get incredibly close. We start by sidling up close to a mother with a baby, but the best is reserved for when we return to the fringes of the forest and spy some rhinos bathing in a small stream. Our mahout decides to take our elephant right across the stream just a few feet away from them. This close proximity is too much for them, however, and they stand up in the water in alarm. There are at least four of them. A couple scurry off along the stream bed, but two stand their ground and snort at us before following their comrades.
Tina is very excited. "That's my all time best rhino encounter," she says.
"And you wouldn't get it on foot," I reply. "If you did, you'd be s-tting yourself!"
Back at Tiger Tops we meet up with Uttam, who has arranged breakfast for us. The walls of the bar are covered in photos of Raja Gaj, a giant mammoth-like elephant with a high forehead, discovered in Bardia in the 1990s by the conservationist John Blashford-Snell, who led an expedition here after hearing reports of a "huge elephant" described by villagers. Standing over 11 feet tall it turned out to be the largest Asian elephant ever found.
We discuss the rhino count which has just been completed. The figure we have gleaned is just 35 rhinos in the whole of Bardia, mainly in the region around the army barracks, where the army have been able to protect them from poachers. There are several areas of Bardia where they've reportedly been wiped out.
Tina isn't sure about figure, though. By remarkable coincidence, when I asked the colonel about tigers earlier in the week, he told me there were believed to be only 35 of them as well. Tina thinks the tiger figure might be inflated to attract tourism, while the rhino figure is artificially reduced for an entirely different reason. Corruption is rife among government officials, and she thinks members of the census team may have been bribed by poachers to quote a smaller number to allow a few rhinos to be taken without affecting official figures. Siling finds this amusing.
"Honestly, you're so suspicious!" he says to her.
Even so, powdered rhino horn, believed to be an aphrodisiac, can fetch as much as $20,000 on the black market in China, untold wealth which is sure to be too much of a temptation for a poor or unscrupulous Nepali. Poachers take advantage of the rhino's strange habit of crapping in the same location. Once a mound of rhino droppings is located, the poacher digs a pit deep enough to prevent a rhino jumping out if it and covers it with a latticework of branches and grasses. When the rhino returns to defecate and backs into its pile, it crashes into the pit and the poacher is able to kill it and remove its horn.
We later find out that the actual figure obtained by the census is just 31 rhinos, to compare with 67 in 2000. An area of Bardia National Park where 30 rhinos were introduced from Chitwan National Park no longer contains any. By comparison, more than 300 rhinos were recorded in Chitwan in 2005, though this has probably now been reduced as well. On a slightly more positive note, we also learn that the Nepalese government has just rejected China's call to lift the worldwide ban on the international tiger trade, though this is countered by an article in a Nepali newspaper reporting that the Indian government is considering the introduction of tiger farms. It's all very depressing, and I feel convinced the tiger will become extinct worldwide in my lifetime.
After 3 hours on an elephant followed by breakfast, we're on the road and heading out of Bardia by 9.30, on our way to Lumbini, a village on the southern borders of Nepal which has the distinction of being the birthplace of Siddhartha, the founder of Buddhism, better known as simply The Buddha.
The drive is uneventful for much of the way, although I'm amused when we cross a small river signposted as the Kunta Khola. Then at 2.30, up in the mountains, we have a long delay at a detour offroad to avoid a collapsed bridge. A lorry has broken down in the middle of the makeshift track and its driver is refusing to move it to one side so that other traffic can get past. The stand-off is eventually resolved after two hours, when angry passengers from a public coach begin throwing rocks at him from the switchback above, and he belated realises a possible lynching is imminent. I've noticed such incidents are not unusual on the Asian subcontinent, where common sense can often be despairingly lacking.
We finally reach Lumbini at about 7 o'clock, after driving for a couple of hours along narrow roads through flat featureless farmland. The place has a rural rather than urban feel to it, but the roads are teeming with traffic, bicycles, cattle and people on foot going about their business. Lumbini itself is strangely quiet, though. It's out of tourist season, and we check into a posh Japanese hotel. The place is closed for the season, but Uttam has managed to obtain rooms for us through one of his contacts. It's now long after dark, and we manage to find somewhere to eat by Lumbini Bazaar, but with difficulty. We seem to be in the middle of nowhere and there are hardly any buildings to be seen, let alone commercial premises. I'm intrigued to find out what sort of place this is, and set the alarm on my watch for an early start the following morning.Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 Next
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