Today there were two main activities: a mid morning guided walking tour of Barauli Village & then a 4 hour jeep safari tour in Chitwan National Park.

Our tours were led by a local young man named “Tek” (pronounced Tic like ticket)

As we walked through the local village we stopped numerous times to gain insight & understanding of how the Tharu people of Nepal live & work in the community.

Farming is the main occupation with multiple crops grown including rice, corn, cauliflower & mustard. Tourism is helping to diversify the economy but it is still common for young people in each family to go outside the country for jobs so they can earn more money to support their extended families.

Just before lunch Tek gave a slideshow presentation about the park to our group & then after lunch we all boarded a jeep & headed off to Chitwan National Park to see some sights & see some wildlife.

The park is a protected nature preserve with many species of trees, flowering plants, birds, deer, wild boars, cheetahs, tigers, rhinos & crocodiles.

The Narayani River flows through the park & there are essentially three main terrains: the river, the floodplain & flatlands adjacent to the river & the forest/jungle. We travelled through each of these areas & Tek was excellent at spotting & pointing out unique plants & wildlife to us.

During our tour we saw many different different types of birds including a wild peacock. We also saw some deer & a wild boar and several beautiful butterflies- black and orange striped, yellow and light blue. But the real highlight for everyone was the rhino we encountered!

As soon as Tek spotted it he instructed our diver to stop the jeep & turn off the engine. He told us all to be very quiet & then began to make a series of soft whistles to attract the rhino’s attention.

The rhino started flapping it’s ears, came out of the bushes & began walking slowly towards the jeep. Gulp, hope he’s not PO’d with us intruding on his “patch”.

I took a bunch of photos as it approached & then shot a video of the rest of the encounter. I will post the video on YouTube as soon as I get a strong enough wifi signal.

Once the rhino had decided that he had seen enough of us he wandered back into the jungle – plowing through thick brush that would have stopped our jeep in its tracks. Tek confirmed it was a male rhino, one of the 600 rhinos in the park, 20-25 years old and weighing 2-1/2 tons. Mr. Rhino was off to knock over some acacia trees to get more to eat from the upper branches that he couldn’t reach. Simply amazing! There are only 2,000 of these incredible creatures left in the wild.

We enjoyed the rest of the tour with stops along the river to view more birds including geese that were migrating from Siberia and the Indian pond heron. We stopped to take in some views of the sun as it was headed towards the horizon.

Certainly a day to remember!

Cheers!