Month: February 2020

Report from Kaziranga

Map of Assam, India. See small map of India, upper left, with circle showing where Assam is. The dark blue line is the Brahmaputra River, which dumps into the sea at Calcutta (Kolkota according to new spelling). The museum guide’s pinky is where were are.

Monday we saw many rhinos, some up pretty close, and some elephants. We also saw a family of elephants cross in front of us on Tuesday afternoon. Here are the movies.

See the three elephants cross the road in front of us. Very cool.
A quick look at the bulky vegetarian.
Enjoying lunch!
A hog deer looks us over. Their bodies really do have a hog shape!
A larger elephant group. This was in a different part of the park. We had an armed guard. At one point I really wondered where we were going. But we arrived

Rhinos in Assam

Back in India, I am doing something different. I’m in Assam. That’s part of the little bit of India that sticks out to the east, running along the north of Bangladesh. I flew from Grand Rapids to Guwahati on a single ticket. It was a long ride. The week before I left, an Indian friend told me he had just come back from Guwahati. (Pronounciation: The u isn’t exactly silent, but it’s exceedingly short. It’s a long u sound, so you have to round your lips like you are going to make a long u as in food, but don’t say it. Just go on to the “wahati” part!) And that his sister in law lives there. And that she would invite us to visit. Which we did.

After visiting the handicrafts museum, which sells a camera pass for 100 Rupees, but then won’t let you take photos inside the museum, and won’t sell you postcards of the artifacts either, many of which were pretty cool, but too bad, I guess they don’t want free advertising in all the places their visitors come from, so you only get these two outside photos.

Shona in front of a giant Assam style hat
Traditional style of hat, made for an exhibit of Assamese traditional arts from a few years back. The museum apparently doesn’t care for visitors as they won’t allow any photos to be taken inside!
This looks like a bird goddess, a representation of perhaps the original concept of the mother of the cosmos, used in religions that appear to possibly go back at least 30,000 years. The baby is very cute.

Assam is off the beaten past for tourists in India, even though it is a beautiful area and the people who go generally loved the visit. I was really surprised to find such a mess of horrible traffic ALMOST similar to Delhi, in Guwahati. But there are, I am told, 12 million people in the area of the city. BUT CORRECTION- Wikipedia says around 1 million. So maybe the bottom line is that this city was never designed for so many cars! We left at 6:30 in the evening to visit my friend’s sister-in-law, as it was only 4.6 km away. It took us an HOUR to get there! But she, like me, grows a lot of her own vegetables, and she is a retired physician, and unlike the rest of the country, uses very little salt. It may well have been the best meal I have ever had in India. And the company was very charming!

The next morning, we set off on our adventure to Kaziranga National Park. The tour agency sent us a different driver from the one they had said was coming, but he arrived early and we were ready, so we set off in high spirits. 15 minutes away from the hotel we stayed at the night before, we had a flat tire. Luckily, we had a flat tire fairly close to a tire fixing store. That’s a fixing store. They don’t have new tires. Twenty minutes later we were on our way. But we didn’t find a tire sale shop, so we kept going on the bad tire, which was also almost completely bald, which was also the condition of two of the other tires. In the mean time, two older Indian women pulled up behind us for some reason, being conveyed in the exact same type of tourist taxi with the exact same type of bald tires. So it was nothing personal to give the gringo bald tires. No. And I should have remembered all the bald tires my sister took pictures of on our family trip in 2008.

Half an hour later, our fixed tire blew out, and, the driver decided to put the spare on. We made it the rest of the way….. Hoping against hope that two flat tire events and a wild goose chase for the River Boat Cruise meant that we had used up all of our bad luck for the rest of the trip!

Yes, we did make it the rest of the way, including a two hour detour to Tezpur, where we were supposed to have a cruise on the Brahmaputra River, but only found a sad looking beach…after making our way past the mental hospital, and the city jail, which happened to be right next door to a Montessori school. Huh! That would not go over well in the good old USA.

Sad looking beach with nothing resembling a cruise boat.

The tour operator finally returned our calls, but we had given up, having found out it was our driver’s first day of work for this tour company, although he had worked for other local tour companies, and we have since decided he knows what he’s about. He even got us a NEW USED tire to replace the spare that had a busted sidewall.

And finally, here at the Kaziranga National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, I found myself in paradise. Sitting on my balcony in a nice hotel room with all functioning items (there could be a few more electrical outlets, and the bed is, as all beds in Asia, exceedingly hard), listening to the night sounds in February, that I hear at home only in August, watching Jupiter, and a beautiful golden sunset….

Birds chirping, as heard from the balcony of my room at the Infinity Resort near Kaziranga National Park in Assam, India.
The birds got pretty excited sounding later, or maybe these sounds were made by some other animal.

Monday am we (I and my tourguide friend Dharmendra, who I asked to come as regular Indian tourguides are reliably mediocre….and he basically considers me family…) got up to have breakfast at 7, so we could be off in the jeep to see the Unicorn White Rhinoceri!!!!!! The moment I had been planning for since March of last year had finally arrived!

Our Jeep Driver said these trees are called “Himalo.” They are gorgeous. Orange flowers before any leaves, and they are everywhere we’ve been in Assam. They are really stately and majestically tall as well.
The bottom of the flower is a fairly large hard shell. The entire thing looks like a badminton shuttlecock. I watched one fall from the tree and it dropped straight down, spinning like a helicopter rotor. Later, I saw some more fall, which were not as fresh, and they didn’t spin. It was a gift to see the one fall that way.

Well, it’s late. Tomorrow we’re going to the tea garden, so I am going to wrap this up with a photo.

Two Unicorn White Rhinos, along with much other wildlife.