In Search of Tigers

Last weekend, Snubnose and I did a short road trip to celebrate her birthday. We went with some of my office friends and even though Snubnose was the only child around, she had a blast.

We headed south down Mysore Road stopping at Ranganthittu for a little bird-watching. My camera was malfunctioning there and I was unfortunately unable to take pictures of the lovely birds and slumbering crocodiles that we spotted there during our boat-ride.

One of the most beautiful birds we saw was the painted stork that I was itching to photo but couldn’t do much with my dinky iPhone camera.

Here’s a shot of the two of us desperately trying to capture something!

After Ranganthittu, we headed to the beautiful Mysore Palace and wandered around there. It was a nice experience for Snubnose and me, although it was extremely hot and tiring. Again, my iPhone camera or rather my photography just couldn’t do justice to this place, and so a stock Wiki photo will have to do.

Also, the place was very crowded, so it is much pleasanter to share this photo than share my own pics that are full of random people crowding the place.

After Mysore, we just headed on over to Nagarhole National Park where we saw tons of animals – hordes of deer, lots of elephants and bison, but unfortunately no tiger.

We spent the night in a lovely home-stay in Kutta called Spice Garden. Highly recommend this place for the wonderful little cottage that we got, the awesome cooking by the hostess – excellent veg and non-veg food, and the lovely hospitality of the host who shared his wine and showed us all around his coffee estate.

It’s a wonderful place and I definitely plan on staying here again the next time I visit the area.

Here’s the Snubnose posing in the tree house just outside our cottage.

Early next morning, we headed out to Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary, which was just a few kilometers south of our home-stay hoping that tigers would be more enterprising early in the morning.

Unfortunately apart from spotting some tiger paw prints and an old skull of a bison that a tiger had supposedly killed, we didn’t spot anything exciting.

The morning light was wonderful however and I still took a lot of great shots, one of which was this blue jay which I like a lot.

Unlike Nagarhole, the Wayanad forest is denser and spookier. Some places really gave me the heebie-jeebies, but I still loved the open jeep ride, and although we didn’t spot many animals, this jeep ride was one of my favorite experiences of this trip.

But of course, we still hadn’t seen any tigers. We decided to remedy that by visiting the Mysore Zoo on our way back. I couldn’t possibly disappoint the Snubnose, and I am so glad that we did make the stop.

Snubnose loved Mysore Zoo best of all, and there were so many tigers and tons of other animals, that we were all satisfied to our heart’s content.

We also did a quick stop over at Karanji lake to see the birds there.

Again, a very nice place to hang out in.

Then it was a long drive back home with a happy and content Snubnose. It was such a fun weekend for all of us.