Nepal 2024 – Part 3 – The Nepal that you don’t expect – Chitwan

This part of Project Nepal is about something we were not expecting and, thanks to Saroj and his Travel agency, we had a pleasant surprise. We travelled to Chitwan, in the south of Nepal, at the border with India. The Tharu people inhabit this region and the government of Nepal supports their activities and the maintenance of their communities. We found peaceful people there, deeply connected whit the environment and very open to those turists who wanted a deep dive immersion in the nature. The atmosphere is completely different from Kathmandu, we barely percieved the religious aspects that permeate and shape our days so far, since our arrival in Kathmandu.

This Tharu girl is heading one of her family’s water buffalos -those docile and gentle giants are very common in Chitawan, but, it takes more guts than the picture tells and when Marta and I got scanned by one of them, we finished doing what we were doing and moved out of its range in a split of second.

Now, rhinos are a different story: no herding is recommended and the pictures above were taken with the longest zoom I had: 200mm f2.8 and teleconverter 1.4 – I should have hired a longer lens, good lesson for the future and good excuse to buy a new lens as soon as we go back home! In the last picture of the serie the female gives tender kisses to the male. I don’t know if that was a show of love or just an action connected to the food or something, anyway, the scene, as our guide commented it to us, was not very common and we like to think that it was TRUE LOVE, oh yeah!

Chitwan is heavily engaged in a program to repopulate the jungle with elephants, a few years ago close to the extinction in that specific area. They started an ambitious and clever program where the dominant males are left in the wild and the females and the younger males are protected in the center. This enables the protection of the calves and favours the reproduction. As a side activity, some elephants are domesticated and trained – Marta had a face to face encounter and she even ended up getting a gift in exchange for a photo!

After living 4 years a few meter from the gators of the Armand Bayou in Houston, these gavialis crocodiles have not caused too much adrenaline to rush in our blood, still – they ended up being photogenic models for my Sony, don’t you think?!

It took me more than 5 minutes to convince Marta to join the canooing down the crocodile infested river (the real nasty guys, not the bread-stick mouth pictured above). But in the end, that was one of the most rewarding experience – drifiting down the river, in silence, listening just to the sound of the wild animals and the canoes cutting through the river. A kingfisher and another bird, the name of which I did not record, are just two of the dozens that we met in less than half an hour: the sun is going down and we return to the lodge where we’ll spend the night.

We woke up at 4.30 on our last day in Chitwan to follow our local guide in a ‘walk around the corner’ through the village of the Tharus, for some bird watching which turned out to be more engaging that what we expected… And now, hop in the car for the last part of our trip – soon in Part 4!

Click on any picture to see the Gallery!