What could possibly go wrong #5 ?

After my rafting & Kathmandu shennanigans it was time to drop some altitude and hunt some animals in the Royal Chitwan National Park. Woke up in Kathmandu at 6am, hobbled to the bus park and had a nice game of hide and seek with my bus, which was one of about 80 and had no english signs on it. A hop skip and a bump (lots of bumps, in fact Nepali roads make my previous favourites - the Cambodian, look downright Autobahnlike) down the road and we arrived 7 hours later (170km as the bus bumps) in the nearest village - Sauraha.
It's a lovely sleepy village on a river and it was time for sundowners at the riverside, which was replete with deck chairs and smiling waiters bringing ice cold Everest & Gorkha beers. Wonderful.

Living in these Asian countries one soon gets used to sleeping soon after the sun goes down and getting up more or less as the sun rises (and the 4000 cocks crow). So I was in bed by 8.30pm.

Woke up at 6am and made my way down to the elephant stand to get acquainted with my dumbo who was going to take me and 3 other Elephant jockeys and the mahoot into the jungle. My co-riders turned out to be a nice Dutch dude and a pair of chain smoking Slovakians. One doesn't just throw one's leg over an Elephant as their backs tend to be about 3 meters off the ground, so there was a nice flight of stairs and a platform to board the Elephant. We all had to sit in a 1m square and wrap our legs around the posts. Most uncomfortable.

We plooded off into the sunrise and soon found ourself in a very eerie & quiet jungle. Mist was rising off the river and moisture was dripping off the trees. I could smell a tiger. We bashed through trees, forded rivers, climbed through ravines, slurped through a marsh in which Nelly must have committed Frogicide as each massive footstep of hers caught a few sleeping Kermits by surprise.

The minutes ticked by and after half an hour the mahoot pointed something out. I tensed and turned my head.

A deer.

A small deer.

OK. Quiet start. Fast forward 30 minutes and we have seen a couple of butterflies, a veritable frog soup, another deer and some wild peacocks but otherwise zip, zilch, nada. No rhinos, no tigers, no leopards, no otters, not even a shagging monkey which are otherwise all over Nepal (including downtown Kathmandu). Probably the fact that the chain smoking Slovakians continued to do so on the Elephant didn't help. Not to mention the fact that the idiots threw their butts onto the ground.

The rocking & rolling in the elephant seat continued and towards the end we managed to see a crocodile lying with his mouth open, head out of the water, but about half a mile away. We trundled back to deboard the elephant and walked down with them to the river where we were allowed wash them, which to be honest made up for the lack of animal magic. Applying a nice pumice stone to behind an elephant's ear while he is lying blissfully in the water is something special.