[pramod]

Originally Posted by jacs

Slightly OT.

Last day's Deccan Herald reported the death of 5 big cats in Bennarghatta National Park. It included 2 aged Lions, 2 aged tigers and a young tigress. And also a sloth bear.

Three tigers, two lions, sloth bear dead in 24 hours!

The Bannerghatta Park is not a natural wildlife environment. The animals are kept in cages and it left out into the fenced area, one family at a time.
More over, they are suspecting some infection through supply of food or water.

And anyways, we did lose tigers, at the end of the day, which is very sad.

[fatboyslim]

Thanks everyone for your comments and sorry for the delay in contributing as I travelling. I will upload more pictures and write the travelogue this weekend. Each of our travelogues would be quite different as we congregated from different parts of India and I am sure would be an interesting read as well.

Fazalsaab nice to hear from you. I have heard lots about you from Dr. Ghosh and I do hope and wish I could accompany you and Dr.Ghosh on one of your visits.

Regards

Originally Posted by fazalaliadil

Dr. Ghosh, There you go again. Remember the theme music of 'Come September' ? Well since the month has almost gone by,,,be ready for Come October, that is when I will be coming to you. Whatever meet you name it, it sure will be a memorable one like the earlier one. Great pics but the best ones are yet to come on this thread is my intuition. Regards,

[raamki]

Originally Posted by pramod

The Bannerghatta Park is not a natural wildlife environment. The animals are kept in cages and it left out into the fenced area, one family at a time.
More over, they are suspecting some infection through supply of food or water.

And anyways, we did lose tigers, at the end of the day, which is very sad.

terrible news! the vets claim the meat fed to these animals was infected. they should have a system in place to check the quality of meat being fed to these poor animals.

[chethan.ram]

Whatever happened in Bannerghatta was really sad. At least now they should make sure these things wont happen again and take extra care about it.

[hridayjyoti]

Thanks everyone for all kind responses! We wish this TL to be little different from tiger logs, Dr. Abheek and Fazal sir and fellow BHPians already put a lots amazing capture of the big cats.

Flashback..Journey from Nagpur to Tadoba:

It will be unfair if we don’t write about the beautiful scenic road from Nagpur to Tadoba.

We started our journey from Nagpur at around 9:30am. Bijay and me were already stationed at Nagpur on Friday night. Projjal aka “fatboyslim” joined us from Raipur with his fiesta and Doc, mama, Bijay and me were on Doc’s gypsy.

Doc with his gypsy, "fatboyslim"'s white fiesta...


NH7 was an awesome ride and Projjal can’t resist himself from pressing the gas hard and left us behind for a while. But, fun of riding a open gypsy beats all.





We stopped for tea at Jamb and detoured from NH7 and took SH243. The road start showing bad patch now, and our gypsy flattened ‘em all, leaving fiesta behind this time around.

It was Ganesh Chaturthi eve. Idol of Ganesh ji, got some creativity here. As far as my knowledge goes, Mouse is known as the ride of Ganesh ji. But, we saw his majesty riding cows, even taking the hot seat of Lord Vishnu “Ananta Sheesha”.





We took a left diversion 14kms before Warora for Shegaon. This road is good with some occasional craters.







Gypsy was doing around 60kmph and hats off to driving of Projjal, fiesta was following quite us quite closely behind.



All of a sudden we saw a big crater (around 1-2m of radius), no chance of putting brake, Doc decided to hold on and the monster quite easily flew through it.



From Shegaon we took few left and right to Chandankhera to Mudholi to our final destination at Moharli.

We stopped for a quick photo session;



Photographers at work!



Offroading Fiesta!



Road laying off...



We put into a nice accommodation in the village.We removed the soft top of Gypsy and headed for evening safari…

Muds! No problem at all, gypsy hand sown for it. Doc is trying to get in!



A view from our room...



Cheers!

[hridayjyoti]

Route we took. I tried to plot in google map from Nagpur to Tadoba but it can't find a path. So, I taced upto to Shegaon and then hand drawn from Shegaon to Moharli.



Cheers!

[TaureanBull]

Nice pics of the journey.

Is that an Army purchased Gypsy? It has the army colour.

How did the fiesta behave?

[fatboyslim]

@ Taureanbull: I will leave Dr. Ghosh to respond to the gypsy. The fiesta handled like a dream but one needs to be a bit careful. In this trip there wasn't we had not encountered any under-body scrapping.

@Hridayjyoti: Thansk very much for keeping the thread up and running and looking forward to meet you guys again

@everyone, thanks for your comments and patience.


The Beginning: I had read several accounts of Dr.Ghosh's travels in the wild. The Tadoba threads earlier and the Melghat thread really triggered off the desire to visit the wild with Dr. Ghosh. His passion for wildlife a was quite evident from the threads he has written at team-bhp.

The second most important driver I would say was the fact that TATR was open during the monsoons. Now that was not a fact I was aware of as most of the tiger reserves I have been fortunate to visit remained closed during these months and allow tourists from the the month of Oct.

My better half who is also an avid traveler as I and a wild life enthusiast to boot, concurred that we should go and visit Tadoba on the weekend of 22nd September. I was a bit sceptic about the park as I had only heard of it recently and I dare say the fame associated with this park was lesser than its other siblings in central India-Kanha, Pench, Bahandavgarh-Boy was I wrong!!!

Logistics and Travel: Raipur-Nagpur

A quick comment/request on the Melghat thread elicited a message from Dr. Ghosh to connect with him on his cell phone and a 30 minutes conversation with him assured that I was in good hands with the instant bonhomie that I had experienced. We decided to have the check list of everything that needs to be carried, the rendezvous point, the ETA at Nagpur, ETD from Nagpur towards Tadoba and a few pointers.

ETA in Nagpur: 9 AM, 11th Sept
ETD from Nagpur: 10 AM, 11 Sept

Distance between Nagpur and Raipur is ~300 KM, I never has the opportunity to drive through the complete stretch to Nagpur. Our visit to Nagzira in feb 2009, was the last time I had driven so far out on NH-6. Driving a Fiesta on really bad roads could be upsetting at times.

Two options:
a. Drive over night from NH-6 on a road connecting two of India's biggest trucking hubs

b. Start at 3 PM (My discussions with a few friends at Raipur , suggested travel time of 6-6.5 hours) just to reach in time and proceed onwards to Tadoba.


We decided on option b, with a sub-Plan. In the event we miss the team at Nagpur we drive down and rendezvous with the team at Tadoba.


3:00 AM, Raipur, 11th September

We missed the ETD from Raipur because of (Guess what?) my oversleeping. Got up with a sinking feeling that we will not make it in time. Anyways, started at 4:15 AM from Raipur.

Road conditions are reasonably well, from Raipur to Rajnandgaon~80KM and could maintain reasonable speed on account of fairly light traffic. The fiesta was behaving impeccably and landscapes were flying by quite nicely.

Post Rajnandgaon, the road deteriorated and the average speed dropped. The rather unpleasant drive continued till Maha border, wherein the roads improved and one could maintain 3-digit speeds continuously till Bhandara.

Bhandara-Nagpur is what I would term as strictly average but better than Rajnandgaon-Maha border stretch.

We call Dr. Ghosh when we are around 15 KM from Nagpur and we reach Nagpur at 8:30 AM; 30 minutes before ETA of 9:00 AM. Relieved I have a sumptuous breakfast waiting eagerly for the next phase of the adventure.

TATR, here we come!

Regards,

[fatboyslim]

@Hridayjyoti: Thanks dude for the photographs. Attached are some more photographs of the Nagpur-Tadoba leg.

Photo 1: Hridayjyoti
Photo 2: Lovely NH 7
Photo 3: Reverse Photography-Photograph of Hridayjyoti, atop Doc's gypsy while he was taking the photograph of my fiesta
Photo 4: Doc in rally mode. Fiesta is humbled by the Gypsy-Big time
Photo 5&6: An unknown scenic location & the love of my life
Photo 7: The tiger deity. This was found en-route, I think the villagers revere and worship the animal. There was a small earthen lamp in front of the idol which gave me the feeling that this could be a statue of a deity.

Do let us know of your feedback. Photos of the male tiger and the cubs coming up next.

Regards,
Fatboyslim

[fatboyslim]

Hello all:

I am overwhelmed by your response or lack of it. Guess my narration is not upto the standards you normally see in Tbhp.

Enjoy the pics and this is fatboyslim signing off from this thread, Over to Hridayjyoti and Dr. Ghosh. Part 2 of same will shortly follow.


Enjoy!
Projjal

[mallumowgli]

Your report is narration is very good fatboyslim, and who can resist a travelogue when there is a tiger in it? There are many people like me enjoying the combined report without responding. One liners are frowned upon by the mods and hence the response may be slow. Also I have a feeling most s/w guys read this during office hours and hence the slow polling during weekends, when they will be driving out

Keep it coming, all of you - waiting for more

[fatboyslim]

@mowli; Thanks very much for your understanding!

Hello All:

Please find the final tranche of photographs from Day 1. Please do excuse some photos which are out of focus as they were shot in rapidly fading light on an overcast evening. Please feel free to send your comments.

Wish you great week ahead!

Bye & regards,
Projjal

[Ketan]

Another wonderful triplog here! I'm going to be watching this for coming few days for sure.
I dont know whether I will be going such beautiful places are not, but for now its great to read thru the experiences of you guys and how you planned and executed the trip so beautifully.
@Prajjol, the stripes on the first page is a great picture
@Dr. I'm soon going to read other triplogs of yours (wasnt aware so far) and seems this one is taking off really well. you already have my rating

[gd1418]

@fatboyslim: There is no lack of response. We all are waiting for those amazing pictures of Stripes. The fourth one where the Tiger is emerging through the greens is poster material..

You guys have been singularly lucky to have Abheek as your companion & guide..

Originally Posted by fatboyslim

Hello all:

I am overwhelmed by your response or lack of it. Guess my narration is not upto the standards you normally see in Tbhp.

Enjoy the pics and this is fatboyslim signing off from this thread, Over to Hridayjyoti and Dr. Ghosh. Part 2 of same will shortly follow.


Enjoy!
Projjal

[Thad E Ginathom]

Fatboyslim, those are amazing photographs. It is a bit of a "what can I say?" thing! Can't really just post "amazing pics" as the mods will be after me (one-liners that don't say much not allowed under rules) but be assured that I, and now doubt many others, are subscribed to this thread and enjoying what all of you guys are writing and photos you are sharing.

The last pic in post #40: is that tiger in water?