In a previous post here on the Buzzyblog, I mentioned the William Blake Tiger poem. It made me think of a side trip that Buzzy and I made when we toured India.
As part of our overall tour of northern India, we visited the Ranthambore National Park which is famous for being a Bengal tiger sanctuary. However, to see the tigers you had to sign up for an optional excursion which ran about $40 each. Buzzy’s rule of thumb for tour travelling was generally to do no excursions. “We’ve paid enough money to get here, I’m not spending anymore just to see ____ ” was his fall back response to any excursion tour offers.
Usually, I didn’t mind passing on the excursions and hanging with him since there was always enough to do wherever we were. However, this particular time we were in the middle of India, out in the boonies somewhere and were staying in some stuffy old lodge where there wasn’t much going on. The morning of the excursion, I talked Buzzy into going on it. We then spent 3 hours of riding around the woods in a jeep looking for a tiger either moving, sleeping or doing whatever tigers do. And guess what? We saw nothing.
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| Angie and Buzzy Taking a Break From Tiger Searching |
On the way back to the lodge our guides apologized for not being able to show us a tiger and explained that the tigers usually sleep in the morning and don’t really start moving around until midday. When the tour guide said “You have better luck seeing a tiger on the afternoon tours,” Buzzy replied back to him “Sounds like you should have told us that before we wasted 3 hours out here this morning bouncing around in the back of this crummy jeep.” The guide apologized and said “Because you did not see the tiger I will take you back out this afternoon for only $20.” Buzzy said “You got me once; you’re not going to get me twice. I’m not wasting any more money on this.”
Back at the lodge we had lunch and talked with the other tourists. It seemed to be about 50/50 between those who actually did see a tiger and those who did not. A single lady from Oklahoma City named Angie who had been in the jeep with Buzzy and me asked if we were going back out in the afternoon. Buzzy said “No way. You got to be crazy. That’s like throwing good money after bad.” Angie said she wanted to go but didn’t want to go by herself. So breaking Buzzy’s rule of fool-me-once-my-fault etc. I offered to go with Angie for another look see.
After lunch, Angie and I went back out with a different set of guides. They bad mouthed our morning set of guides with “They don’t know what they are doing. They never can find the tigers, we always do.” (I made a mental note to add India tiger guides to the category of those occupations, along with carpenters and mechanics who never have a good word to say about their fellow tradesmen.)
As we had done in the morning session, we bounced around the sanctuary for about an hour or so and I was beginning to think that I should have listened to Buzzy. Suddenly our guides became excited and stopped the jeep to point out a tiger moving in the brush just off the road we were driving along.
They stopped the jeep and as they did so the tiger sauntered onto the road and began strolling our way. I took several pictures of him as he made his way down the road.
After the excursion, back at the lodge Buzzy asked me if we had seen a tiger. I played it down by telling him we saw one out in the bushes.
Several tiger songs to chose from but this video has a great photo of a tiger: