Corbett Tiger Reserve

The whole purpose of our visit to the Corbett National Park, was to find Kiruba the elephant Bryan sponsors for Elizabeth through the WWF. The guided jeep tours are quite expensive so we opted to just turn up at the jeep meeting point to see if we could join someone else and cut the cost of the safari. As we have said, the Indian people seem to genuinely want to help so after we had made it clear why we were there, we stood back to let the Indian magic do it’s work. After about 15 minutes a very friendly chap introduced us to an Indian couple from Delhi who had agreed to share their jeep with us as they were on their own. Doing it this way it cost us half the price, so... result! We started our Safari at the Corbett Tiger Reserve, we went in our 4x4 jeep deep in to the jungle, through two rivers, down jungle track roads in search for Kiruba. The driver stopped as he could see elephant and tiger tracks in the sand in front of the jeep. Yeeks a tiger and the paw track the tiger had left was very big, approx 15cm in size. Anyway the elephant tracks were easy to spot and elephant’s feet are huge and leave a foot print easy to follow. After following all the tracks they disappeared in to the jungle and we lost the trail. How can we lose an elephant? We continued deeper in to the jungle where we reached a lookout in an ancient banyan tree. It was like a tree house about 20 metres up. From the tree house you could see for miles. But no sign of any wild animals. Still further in to the jungle. We spotted some spotted deer and lots of wild birds, peacocks, a very rare hornbill, parrots and then we found the monkeys all in the trees. We stopped for something to drink as the dust from the jungle road were very dry. When we stopped the monkeys were all over the jeeps. One thing you are not aloud to do in the jungle is press the car horn. But we found out that the monkeys don’t know this and one baby monkey sat on the car horn which scared him and all the others. Back in the jeep and still no sign of Kiruba or any of her family. We were almost out of the jungle when someone on a bicycle, yes someone is on a bike in the jungle with tigers around, said they had just seen a herd of elephants just down the road, our driver went speeding down the jungle track to the point where they had been seen. But nothing. Then in the bushes we got to see two yellow chested martins. Wow what a surprise and how lovely to see. But still no elephants. :-( So we ended our safari without seeing any elephants or tigers. So no pictures of Kiruba or her family. But it was fun trying.