Nagarhole Trip

Originally posted here on April 21st, 2008

The last time I went for a safari was in Bandipur and it would be fair to say it wasn’t exactly a success. Not that it was bad, but after going around a jungle for 45 minutes, if all you get to see are deer and monkeys, it isn’t terribly exciting. So when we were waiting for the safari to start in Nagarhole, I wasn’t expecting to see too many exciting things. To make matters worse, one of the persons who had just returned from the safari said they only got to see some herds of reindeer. Anyway, we got on board the bus and the safari started. Five minutes into the safari and we came across a herd of reindeer. The bus stopped and people clicked some pics. Ahead there were more reindeers and closer to us. The driver waited till everyone had taken pictures and started again. We had moved for hardly five minutes when suddenly a herd of running reindeers crossed the road right in front of our van. The vehicle stopped and people started shouting, “Tiger, tiger”!! Tiger?? In a safari?? No way, I thought. You don’t see a tiger in a safari. We can’t be that lucky. Just a week or two back Rahul Gandhi was here and even he didn’t get to see any wild animal. How could we? But people were still shouting, so it was for real and it seemed I was the only person who still hadn’t seen the tiger. In my desperation to catch sight of it before it disappeared, I looked here and there but could hardly see anything before Rao pointed out the beast lurking near some bushes. There it was! A real tiger, prowling in the forest, maybe waiting for us to leave so that it could carry on with its unfinished business. But we were hardly in any mood to leave, so after waiting for some time, the tiger had to disappear in the forest.

We had started for our two day trip early in the morning on Saturday, the 12^th of April. It was almost 7 I think, by the time we managed to pick everyone up (around 12 of us) and started from Bangalore. We reached Kutta, where we had booked our home stay (or was it Irpu?? Not sure……I’m bad at remembering places, distances, time etc) by early afternoon. The house was a beautiful little place surrounded by greenery all around. The kind of place you want to go to escape from the rush and madness of city life. We took some rest, got fresh and reached the Nagarhole National Park in time for the 4’o clock safari. After the safari, we went to Irpu falls. The waterfall was not very big and at the bottom there was only place for 4-5 persons to stand under it. Nevertheless, it was fun. Waterfalls always are, even though I didn’t get wet. There was still one more day to go and I didn’t want to go to bed with a headache. Or maybe I was just plain lazy to change clothes. Whatever! We spent some time there posing for pics, climbing whatever rocks we could, playing with water and having fun till it was dark and we had to start back for our home stay. At the home stay, we had planned to have a camp fire before dinner.

With the camp fire ready, we decided to play Dumb Charade and divided ourselves into two teams. Sunny hadn’t played DC before so we quickly explained the rules and got started. Generally, we were able to guess whatever the other team gave us. I got two relatively easy ones, Paycheck and Chameli. But what took the cake was Shubhra’s enacting of Hatim Tai. Before we started playing, we remembered Jalaj trying to enact Aar ya Paar while playing DC during our trip to Pandavapura and had a big laugh over it. But if someone thought that would be our funniest memory of DC, they were clearly wrong. Shubhra beat him by a mile. Sad, we don’t have a pic of her trying to fly ala Hatim Tai. But all credit to Sunny for guessing it in an instant. With star performers like her and Jalaj in our team, what chance did the other team have? Though Syed did try to hand over the advantage to the other team by just standing there and doing his best impersonation of the “I’m not going to do anything, let me see how you guess the movie…….ha ha ha” man. Finally, we beat the other team by a point, even though Sandeep somehow managed to guess the movie “Is Raat ki Subah Nahin” from just the word Raat. How, we were left wondering!! By the way, during the game, we did come to know that Umakanth thinks Sridevi is ‘mast’. :))

To be continued........

(When I had written this blog, I had intended to write about the second day of the trip too but after some time I just lost interest.)