Never has nationhood seemed more irrelevant than at the Nepalganj border crossing between India and Nepal. It is an early morning in January. The world is waking up, albeit reluctantly. The winter mist lazily curls off the tips of yellow mustard flowers. The rising sun slowly toasts chilled bodies into daytime. Shawl-clad men languorously stretch their hands and mouths with their first cup of tea.
The border crossing has fast-forwarded to a different time zone. It feels like we are in the middle of some giant conglomeration of human beings. Like the Kumbh Mela. Every mode of transport on earth seems to be here, shrilly announcing its presence — from horse-drawn tongas and cycle rickshaws to roadhogs and SUVs. So does every human: limping, walking, cycling, riding, driving seamlessly across the border. The best part is it’s all so casual, so everyday, as if national boundaries don’t matter. No identity card is ever checked, except when a wide-eyed Westerner traipses through or a villager crosses over with sacks — only because there’s a ban on importing sugar from Nepal to India. This is just the daily clack of life in a market town. So what if it’s the border?
We are on our way to Bardia National Park in the lowlands of Nepal — a wildlife sanctuary, which, like its better-known cousin Chitwan, was formerly known as Royal Bardia National Park. Bardia was the royal hunting reserve of Nepal’s rulers for a century; it became a wildlife sanctuary in the seventies, a national park in the eighties and home to Maoists in the nineties. Till last year, Bardia was more or less off bounds for travellers with headlines like “Maoist cadres raid rice stocks in 32 homes in Bardia”, “Rhinos and tigers in Bardia National Park are declining at an alarming rate”, and so on. Two years back, when Nepal’s monarchy left the government, Maoists started leaving the sanctuary and Royal Bardia re-emerged as Bardia National Park.
After a decade of isolation, Bardia is coming back with the same wild feel and rugged sense of adventure that Chitwan had 20 years back. Both sanctuaries share similar grasslands and sal forests, and are roughly the same size. What Bardia still doesn’t have is the stamp of tourism. Electric poles punctuate our drive from Nepalganj to the park headquarters, but there’s no electricity 16 hours a day. Tractors and bicycles ferry day labourers from one point to another. Army checkpoints remain in place. On our three-hour drive to Ambassa, the turn-off for the sanctuary, we don’t pass a single car.
One of the biggest charms of Nepal’s wildlife sanctuaries is that you can walk inside them, instead of driving in an open-topped jeep or riding an elephant. You can do these too, but the fragile thrill of seeing animals on an equal footing is something else. In the early 1990s, I had followed rhinos on foot in Chitwan with a jungle tracker who advised me to run zigzag if attacked by one — since rhinos only run in straight lines. Almost two decades later, my friend and I get exactly the same advice as we embark on our first daylong walk, officially called a Walking Safari.
Brrrr. Fog. Mist. Chill. It’s the kind of morning you never want to get out of your razai. At 7AM, we set off with our guide, Gautam and his assistant, Santu, who is in training. Gautam, who comes from a family of impoverished Brahmins in the mountains of Nepal, left home long back to take his chances in the terai. Santu is a 22-year-old Tharu tribal who must drink a bottle of raxi, the local beer, each night. “No raxi, no happy,” explains Gautam. Santu is also the local swimming champion. Every summer, Santu migrates to Goa, where he dives to the seabed to dredge bucketfuls of sand. “It’s a way to see the world and make money,” he says.
It’s a stiff, bleary 30-minute march from our lodge, Forest Hideaway, to the sanctuary gate, then the full shock of waking up as we wade up to our knees across a freezing stream. Inside the park it’s pure magic. I’ve experienced the beauty of the jungle waking up many times; yet it never fails to get me. Silhouetted shapes slowly emerge as sal trees. Indistinct blurs turn into drongos, sunbirds and woodpeckers. Mists lift to reveal a chital shyly jumping away. You get the picture.
As the sun turns full strength, we retreat to Bagh Machan, one of the park’s best-known sighting towers. There are at least six or seven machans inside the park and there’s nothing quite like riding out high noon with a picnic lunch. Four picnic lunches are on offer at Forest Hideaway, each enough to sate an elephant: Tiger, Summer, Farmer and Bird. All of them have boiled eggs, bananas, oranges and Frooti; then it’s a toss-up between Tibetan bread and jam, tuna salad sandwiches, chapatti- tarkari, or fried rice. We try different combos each day.
Machans are part of the fabric of rural life in the region; we see makeshift ones in fields outside the reserve, rickety platforms on which villagers spend fitful nights guarding their crops from wild elephants. Bagh Machan looks out over a sandy semi-dry riverbed, the kind of terrain where it is easy to picture a tiger, if not see one. We don’t see one, but we do see deer and boar coming to drink water, and we hear a herd of elephants trumpeting in a thicket across the river. It is exciting enough. Later that afternoon, we walk through the hot sandy riverbed criss-crossed with deer tracks, pug marks and elephant droppings. By now, Gautam feels pressured to show us one of the Big Three — tiger, rhino and elephant. We squat on the riverbed while Santu shimmies up a tree as lookout.
After a 12-hour day in the sanctuary, I am ready for a Thai foot massage. My aching limbs get a break as we spend the whole next day lazily rafting down the Karnali River, which forms the western edge of the sanctuary. Until it reaches the lowlands, the Karnali is a wild mountain beast with powerful Grade V whitewater rapids. But around Bardia, it is a gentle shadow of its turbulent mountain self, flowing contentedly past villages, fields and forests. Our trip begins at Chisapani, a small hill town flanked by a dramatic suspension bridge — a startling sight in an area where no other ‘development’ is visible. It ends eight hours later at Hatisar, where there is a stable for lost and abandoned elephants.
It’s a good day on the river, especially for birding. Every water bird — duck, stork, cormorant, lapwing and heron — is out sunning itself, while martins, swallows and swifts dart around us. We see the rare stork-billed kingfisher, which I’ve never seen before. By the end of the day, we’ve seen more than 75 of the 250 bird species that are known to exist in Bardia, including new ones like the osprey, the changeable hawk-eagle and the flame-backed woodpecker.
We consistently hit high notes: eyeballing a crested serpent eagle sitting silently on a fallen tree trunk; getting off the raft at intervals to take long walks into the sanctuary; picnicking on the sands; spotting pythons and gharials basking in the warmth of the sun; wafting downstream past Tiger Tops’ tented camp, perched on a riverside cliff within the sanctuary and part of the pioneering wildlife lodge. There’s something about seeing wildlife from a raft that gives it an extra twist.
The highest note is hit late afternoon. Like Chitwan, Bardia is known more for its rhinos and elephants than for its tigers, and we’ve been scanning the shrubbery and treetops for swaying greys. As we flow past a sandy river stretch, we see an elephant retreating into the foliage. Lone, huge and stunning. Everything indicates that he is a single male, and single males can turn roguish when they are in musth. But he’s irresistible and we must meet him on his own terrain. We hobble across the pebbly riverbed and perch on a fallen tree trunk. We soon spot leaves shaking, a dead giveaway. The trunk snakes upwards, grey ears flap, the giant head emerges, hears our stifled gasps, and then slowly turns in our direction. It is enough to send us scurrying back to the safety of the raft.
Trading big game tales is an essential part of the jungle experience — often over a bonfire and some warming elixir — and we throw in our trophy tale of the elephant. But real bragging rights belong to Forest Hideaway’s staff — the lodge was one of the few to remain open during the Maoist occupation, and there are anecdotes of chitals being decimated for food, of tourists hiding inside the lodge while there is firing right outside and later being ferried away to Nepalganj on bicycles. Santosh, one of the guides, used to run a bicycle repair shop — he made a fortune then, since every soldier wanted a smartly turned-out bike.
The next morning, I am itching to walk in the jungle again. My feet have recovered after a day in the raft but I decide to balance it out with a long stint in a machan. Ever since I read Jim Corbett, I’ve always wanted to spend a full day in a machan with a good book and binoculars. I spend half a day in a different machan at Baghora Phanta in the middle of tall savannah grasslands. The beauty of a machan is that it’s a fixture in the forest — so animals are used to it. Which means they come and go past it on their daily routes. In my first hour, I hear a scratching below — a wild boar, then a chital, then barking deer. Same animals, seen from a different vantage point.
By now reality has fully receded and I feel like I am part of the jungle. My stack of books is left untouched. Cell phones don’t work here, so I am mercifully spared the mundanity of this daily intrusion. Our charming lodge, Forest Hideaway, built in the style of Tharu tribal huts, has an internet connection, but who wants to check email?
All we do is walk, eat, read, sleep, talk — and see birds and animals. It is not a grand vacation; it is a holiday of rare moments and small pleasures. It is not a sightseeing extravaganza. It’s not the kind of holiday that makes your friends envy you. No, it is none of that. But if a holiday is supposed to take you away from your everyday selves and familiars so that you may spring back refreshed, rested, renewed, then Bardia is just what the doctor ordered. A week later, when my cell phone rang in Mumbai, I was ready to take the call.