An Expotition

 
Mid-August, I took a brief excursion to Sauraha, a small village on the edge of Chitwan National Park. I stayed at a small resort owned by a friend of Anish’s (he knows everyone) along with the other four volunteers who were living in the house in Bharatpur. The main road is quite short, a few tourist-tat shops with the same little elephant carvings you can find all over Nepal (though I hear they are all made in Kathmandu anyway.) The village itself is home mostly to Tharu people, who have lived in the area long enough to develop a natural immunity to malaria.

Our package deal included two nights, meals and activities, starting with a little guided afternoon walk around the village (during which I saw some hornbills as well as the only pig I have seen in Nepal), a visit to the elephant barns and, after dinner, a really entertaining Tharu cultural dance program, held at a nearby hall.

At dinner, there was a brief discussion of things we needed to have with us for our jungle activities, namely dark colors, long sleeves and pants, insect repellant, a rain jacket, and shoes you can run in. Many in our party were missing at least one important item, including me. I’d known we’d be going into the jungle on the back of an elephant; I was not aware I would also be going in on foot, asked to keep a sharp eye out for any of the various wild animals which would want to kill me if they knew I was around. So I didn’t have proper shoes.

I hardly slept that night, despite reassuring myself that if people were maimed on these trips with any kind of regularity, they would stop running them. Just a couple of weeks before, the military had declared an end to the long-standing tourist activity of bathing the elephants in the river after safaris because a guy drowned.

In the morning, we followed an early breakfast with a ride downriver in a very straight-sided canoe carved from a log. On either side of us, the water surged and calmed over and over, disturbed by the just-below-the-surface movements of enormous alligators.

Forty-five minutes later, we disembarked on the steep, muddy riverbank and walked into the jungle. Our guide was kind and smiley and thoroughly experienced. Once in the trees, we came to a little clearing and he gave us a quick briefing about the wildlife that lives in the park and what to do in the event that we should encounter any of them. I cinched my sandals uncomfortably tightly to my feet. He also spoke about treading lightly and speaking in low voices, if at all. We continued solemnly into the understory on what one of my companions had been calling our “jungle walk of death” since hearing the description of dangers at the hotel the night before.

I have never been so alert. Our guide paused now and then to point out the claw marks of a tiger or a sloth bear in a tree trunk. The air was very still, so every swish of leaves or snap of a twig in the trees on either side of us caused my eyes to widen like a lemur’s, darting all around. Eventually, we emerged from the green jungle into the dreaded elephant grass. It is meters tall this time of year (hence its name), making it impossible to see if there is an animal mere feet from you at any given point. This can be good or bad. If an animal can hear you, it may charge or attack; on the other hand, you may escape detection by an animal which could see you if the grass were not so high.

Well, we survived our death walk having seen only a couple of interesting caterpillars, a millipede, and some deer and monkeys that were far enough away to be mostly hidden in the trees. Most everyone got at least one leech on them at some point, as we had plenty of deep puddles to wade through. Oddly enough, though I was the only person wearing sandals, I didn’t get one until the last two minutes of the walk, when we had to wade through knee-deep water, and even that one was only about ¼ inch long.

Relieved and exhausted from too little sleep and a nerve-wracking morning jaunt, we came back to the river bank just across from the village and were ferried across again in dugout canoes.

That afternoon was the part I had been looking forward to since first opening a Nepal travel guide: the elephant trek. Fed and rested, we walked over to the elephant boarding area, climbed some precariously-balanced metal stairs up to the platform, and climbed one at a time into a little wooden basket on top of an elephant. Each person sits, legs dangling, in one corner of the box, with the driver straddling the elephant’s shoulders, his feet in little rope stirrups behind its massive, leathery ears. He had a couple of tools with him, a wooden stick for guiding and a nasty-looking sort of fire poker/gaff, which he said was only used if the elephant got really unruly. I was glad I didn’t have to see that one in action.

Our trek lasted a couple of hours, during which we saw a peacock, a rhino and her offspring and lots of spotted deer. We also got to ford a couple of sections of river, which was both fun to do and fun to watch. There were several elephants in our group, but apparently in high season they might have 40 out there at once.

The next morning, our final activity was another trip across the river to the elephant breeding center, where we learned about the history of keeping elephants in Nepal and saw lots of little elephant families.

And that was Sauraha.