Jump­ing a little around from the planned films up-coming, I couldn’t res­ist mak­ing this short about our Tiger Safari in Bandhavgarh.

We saw 9 tigers in 4 safari’s, includ­ing one mak­ing a kill and one that got very very close indeed (Cesca admit­ted to being scared it might attack since we were in a totally open jeep on meters away!).  Our time at the Tiger’s Den resort was won­der­ful.  Only slightly marred by my get­ting food pois­on­ing again (Mild this time).  The safari’s were organ­ised two each day and each jeep had a driver and nat­ur­al­ist on board.  The qual­ity of these posts was mixed to say the least, but we did have some excel­lent guides.

The morn­ing safari was man­aged very tightly and we had to fol­low a cer­tain path through the park.  This made a morn­ing dis­cov­ery of a tiger all the more private and the kill we saw was just for us.

Even­ing safari are a free for all and the tigers were tracked and basic­ally sur­roun­ded by jeeps.  Cesca remarked that such dan­ger­ous activ­ity would not be allowed in Africa, but then TII (This Is India).  The tigers them­selves are totally wild and allowed to roam as will.  They are not tagged nor fed by the park and the Rangers were very tough on people break­ing the rules.  One of our jeeps struggled to make it back out of the park in time and raced us to the gate; the pun­ish­ment? Up to a weeks ban, which would ser­i­ously affect the drivers income.

All in all I like the park and thought it quite well run, I felt the tigers were very happy and basic­ally ignored the humans in their white steel elephants!

As well as tigers, we saw all kinds of won­der­ful anim­als includ­ing boar, jack­als, deer and mon­keys.  We also saw some amaz­ing Indian Rollers, which are one the most beau­ti­ful birds I have ever encountered.

Here is the first of our pic­tures, taken (of all things) by my camcorder!

I had a lot of fun mak­ing this film.  The first two clips of music music are, of course, from one of my favour­ite movies of all time: Pred­ator, which seemed appro­pri­ate for the theme.  The sound effects and quotes are from same.  If you haven’t seen the movie, it is a fam­ously bloody jungle action film star­ing Arnie the Gov­ernator.  The big guy and his team of ulti­mate badasses are being hunted in the jungle by an alien pred­ator who picks them off one by one.  Even if you are not a fan of gory movies, this one is worth catch­ing on TV as the on-air ver­sion is well cut to remove the more bloody parts.  Any­way, the film spawned a mil­lion quotes and most of my friends would be able to rattle off the entire script without trying!

A lar­ger review of the park will come with the article,

Regards,

Basho

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