Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part three: 2013-2014

[Chlidonias]

Good to hear that all is well on your end. Your clothes fit like mine: one size too big.

I know why my clothes are too big -- what's your excuse?

Losing weight and wearing the same size clothes makes one look even skinnier I see, because the clothes just hang there like on a coat-hanger instead of fitting around the body.

 

[Chlidonias]

Kaziranga National Park -- getting there.

After two days in Kolkata I set off for the real part of the Indian trip, Assam. Totally unexpectedly, there was no WIFI available anywhere along my route so there has been a slight pause in postings. There was WIFI occasionally present in the areas, just not where-ever I was specifically staying. Most of the time my network connection signal remained blank. Perhaps this shouldn't have been a surprise – I flew into Guwahati and went straight to Kaziranga National Park, then to Nameri National Park and then Manas National Park. The only city I actually stayed at along the route was Guwahati for a few days at the very end (and there were a few WIFI signals there but my laptop wouldn't connect with any of them).

First stop in Assam was Kaziranga National Park. At the Travel Inn where I had been staying in Kolkata I had asked the night before my flight if I needed to book a taxi for the next morning at 6am or if it would be easy to get one at the time. “In the morning, no problem,” they told me. The next morning however it changed to “no taxis in the morning, it is too early, you will need to pay 500 rupees.” It had only cost me half that to get here from the airport – at the same time in the morning no less – which really ticked me off, but I had to pay it because I had to go catch my flight.

On the way to the airport I realised what it was about Indian cities (or at least this Indian city) which made them that bit different to other Asian cities. Ironically I had missed what it was because it was so in my face and obvious. In southeast Asia and China the towns and cities may be dirty with streets made of sand and with household rubbish just dumped alongside, but they are still towns and cities which look like habitable places where people are living their lives. Kolkata in contrast looks like one massive continuous slum in which people are just barely surviving. I could quite happily live in most of southeast Asia, but there's no way in hell I would ever live in Kolkata. I'd rather watch the movie Daredevil than live in Kolkata! Whichever part of the city I travelled through it was just endless filth, with people scavenging through piles of refuse alongside the crows and starving dogs, men squatting in the gutters washing themselves next to people using those same gutters as urinals, and strings of corrugated iron shacks along even the main roads. It's like there was once this great and wonderful city and then something cataclysmic happened and all the residents were suddenly reduced to living like rats in the street amongst the mouldy decaying buildings of the past. Everywhere that is except the airport, where the terminal is like a huge gleaming glass spaceship, as if you've been suddenly transported to Singapore.

The airline regulations are really strict in India. At the airport you need to show a printed-out ticket and your passport to even enter the building (I also found this to be the case in some other places like China). Oddly, when checking in you also need to show them your credit card if you booked the ticket online – if you can't show them the same credit card the ticket was booked with then you can't get on the plane! Check-in bags are x-rayed and stickered before you can go to the check-in counter. When they x-rayed my bag they asked if I had anything made of stone inside. “No...” I said, a little confused, “stone as in rock?” They showed me the x-ray image where the field guide to the birds of India showed up as a thick dark slab. I had to take it out of the bag to show them, and then they x-rayed the book! I've never had that happen before. After I had checked in I went through the next security check-point where the hand luggage is x-rayed and everybody is swept with metal detectors. Again there was a problem with my bag, because I had all my torch batteries in there. The reason they were in there instead of my check-in bag was because when I flew with Air Asia they said I wasn't allowed batteries in my check-in, I had to carry them in my hand-luggage. With Spicejet I'm not allowed them in my hand-luggage, they have to be in my check-in! These are just regular rechargeable D batteries, nothing explosive or anything. It makes a bit of a mockery of certain “security risks” if different airlines have exactly opposite policies! Anyway I had to take the batteries back to the first check-point and get them parceled up and stickered, and then re-check myself in and put the little box of batteries through as check-in luggage. (I didn't even need them in the end because, as I found out, none of the parks allow entry at night so I couldn't do any spotlighting anyway).

Spicejet seats are the smallest I have ever seen on a plane, which is weird because generally speaking Indians aren't little people like in Thailand or Indonesia. And there were mosquitoes on the plane! It was a bit scary taking off in an Indian plane. I don't really like to fly, it is just something I have to do, and despite the advertising billboards I had seen for a plywood company which said “India Loves Quality”, India certainly does not love quality. I half expected the wings to fall off or something. However the plane arrived safely in Assam, in the city of Guwahati, where it was still raining! Fortunately by the time I arrived at Kaziranga National Park the rain had disappeared and stayed away for my whole stay there.

At Kaziranga I would be staying at a place called Wild Grass Lodge. This is the same place that Jon Hall from Mammalwatching stayed at when he went there. I don't normally stay where he stays because he spends far too much money, but I had emailed Wild Grass and they had a cottage for 650 rupees per night (about NZ$12.50) which was alright by me. It was a good choice because the owner Manju was incredibly helpful and sent me all sorts of information about the other places I would be going in Assam, and also booked me into the forestry department accommodation at the Hollongapar Gibbon Wildlife Sanctuary. To avoid tourists getting lost between Guwahati and Kaziranga, Wild Grass also offer a meet-at-the-airport which I took them up on because I figured it would cost about the same as trying to organise a taxi to the bus station and save on being scammed by the taxi drivers. So I was met at the airport by a little wee guy who only came up to my chest, and he put me into a taxi and told them where to take me. The plane had arrived at 9.20am, and I sat in the taxi until 10am while the driver disappeared to round up more passengers. I got to the bus station at 11am where I was met by another very helpful chap called Deepak (everyone in India is very helpful it seems!) who got me onto the right bus, which left at noon. This bus went to the main bus station an hour away where I changed to another bus (and yes, both buses had mosquitoes in them), and then finally I was properly on my way to Kaziranga.

I don't know how big the city of Guwahati is but it must be pretty substantial given that it took an hour from the airport to the first bus station and then another hour to the next bus station. As a city it is still Indian in appearance but without the air of decrepitude that Kolkata has. Once outside the city the country was all open and brown with scattered huts and rambling villages. It reminded me very much of Indonesia, especially West Timor, and I felt right at home again. I had heard a lot about the terrifying traffic of India but from what I've seen it is no scarier than anywhere else in Asia. For myself, having travelled quite a bit in southeast and eastern Asia, I would describe it as “normal” rather than “scary”. In fact I'd say the driving in Indonesia is far worse. Interesting signage along the roads included “Do Not Drink Wine While Driving” which was obviously aimed at the more sophisticated of drivers. There was also a billboard advertising some local brand of beer where the slogan was “same taste, more dum”. And I passed the Nisha Restaurant.

It's about five and a half hours from Guwahati to the village of Kohora where the main entrance to Kaziranga is. Kohora seems to be composed almost entirely of guesthouses and restaurants; the numbers of them is just staggering. It was already dark when I arrived (it gets dark at around 5.30pm here), but I was met by someone from Wild Grass who drove me the remaining 5km.

The next post will be about the national park.....

 

[Chlidonias]

Kaziranga National Park: 18-21 February

Kaziranga National Park is fantastic! I just thought I'd get that out of the way first. I saw ninety species of birds just on my first day there. At one point I was standing in a watch-tower and there were thirty-five Indian rhinos in one view; I had been hoping I would see a rhino while at the park, and I ended up seeing between 60 and 70 on the first day alone.

I'll talk about costs first, for those people intending on going to India. Kaziranga isn't a cheap place to visit but I understand it is a lot cheaper than many other parks in the country like Corbett or Ranthambore. The accommodation itself isn't expensive – I got a cottage at the Wild Grass Lodge for 650 rupees (about NZ$12.50) which included breakfast, and the other meals are between 100 and 250 rupees each (about NZ$2 to $5) – but as soon as you start going into the park the costs begin mounting up. The daily park entry fee is 500 rupees (NZ$10), camera fee another 500 rupees, and then there's a road tax of 400 rupees, so you're out 1400 rupees before you've even got inside (those are foreigner prices – Indian prices are ten times cheaper). You are only allowed into the park in a jeep, and the cost per jeep depends on which part of the park you visit. The park is divided into various sections: central is 1500 rupees per jeep (NZ$29), western 1600 rupees, eastern 2000 rupees and Ghorkati 3000 rupees. Those are the prices for one jeep ride, either morning or afternoon (the park is closed in the middle of the day), and it is divided between however many people are in the jeep. If you're travelling solo you ideally need to try and team up with others to keep the amount of money you're spending to an acceptable level. The main problem with that is that there aren't a lot of other solo travellers around (but there are lots of tour groups), and a lot of the space inside the jeep is taken up with the driver, the armed guard and the guide, so there's only room for an extra person if the original group is at most three people. Obviously you also just have to take what you can get because you are joining on someone else's ride and thus you don't get to choose which part of the park to visit. I got lucky on my first day, teaming up with an Indian family (in the morning just the father and in the afternoon the others as well) who were really interested in all sorts of animals, not just elephants and rhinos, so we saw a lot; but on the second day I got stuck with a photographer who was only wanting to find spots to take photos of scenery and so I didn't see much at all. I was at the park for four full days though, so everything worked out all right overall.

The whole park is sort of a wooded-grassland which is largely flooded for part of the year. Some parts are more grass, some more forest, but it is really a bit of a patchwork. I visited west, central and east at least twice each, and tended to find the west was best for rhinos and the east for elephants, but really everything is everywhere. Apparently central is best for tigers. Everyone seemed to be seeing tigers, but always in a part of the park in which I was not! If I was in central then someone would see two tigers in the east; if I was in the west then they would be seen in central; and so on. In the National Parks of central India the tigers are completely blasé about people and walk along the roads amongst the cars like lions in Africa, but in Assam they are much more shy so seeing one is just a matter of luck and if one is seen it is not for long. Birds were abundant everywhere but it is frustrating not being allowed out of the jeeps to just walk along the roads in the forest sections. There were loads of birds in the grounds of the Wild Grass Lodge too. Right by the restaurant and reception is a big red-flowered kapok (or silk-cotton) tree which was always full of chestnut-tailed starlings (called chestnut-bellied starlings by the guides here, which is a far better name!), pied starlings, Oriental white-eyes, golden-fronted leafbirds and blue-throated barbets. Just a few metres away is a big fruiting fig tree which was always full of yellow-footed green pigeons and bulbuls. Pied and great hornbills visit that tree as well, but never when I was there to see them. There are also hoary-bellied squirrels in the gardens which at first I thought were a new species for me, but it turned out that they are the same as the Irrawaddy squirrel in Burma (Callosciurus pygerythrus) although they look quite different, the Indian version being even more nondescript.

On my first morning I was supposed to be joining up with another single traveller for a jeep ride at 7am. At 7.45 I was still waiting, and eventually it turned out that the guy had just decided to stay in bed and not go. But there was another person looking for a jeep as well, so after he had his breakfast I finally got my first look at the park. We went into the central section for the morning which is mostly grassland with a few waterholes. Most of the big mammals turned out to be incredibly easy to see, although central doesn't appear to have as many rhinos or elephants as the other sections. Hog deer and barasingha (swamp deer) were everywhere in big herds. Sambar are either rare or just more retiring than their open-country cousins and I only saw a few. There are common muntjac here as well but I never saw any well enough to claim them. Wild water buffalo are really common – these are genuine wild buffalo, not feral domestic animals, and their horns are insanely huge! Wild pigs are pretty common, as are rhesus macaques. The macaques here are a weird orangey-golden sort of colour; several times I would spot them at a distance on the ground and think they were hog deer because of the colour of their fur. From a watch-tower overlooking a lake we spotted a pair of smooth-coated otters, very far away but still watchable through the binoculars. They started out spy-hopping (raising vertically out of the water to see further), then swam around for a bit with just the tops of their heads showing, and then came out on a small island and rolled around in the sand amongst the bar-headed geese. The birding was very good in between the mammaling too. The water bodies were full of waterfowl like hundreds of bar-headed geese and varying numbers of ruddy shelducks, mallards, spot-billed ducks, pintails, wigeon, gadwall, common teal and northern shovellers, as well as spot-billed pelicans, little and great cormorants, oriental darters, black-headed ibis, various herons and egrets, and storks (including openbill, black-necked and lesser adjutants). It's not the greatest trying to bird from a jeep because you miss lots of the little birds, but by the end of the morning I had seen about seventy species amongst which were red junglefowl and kalij pheasants. There are lots of birds of prey here also, including (the ones I saw) Pallas' fish-eagle, grey-headed fish-eagle, crested serpent-eagle, changeable hawk-eagle, Indian spotted eagle, pied harrier and osprey. In the afternoon we went to the western section of the park, and that's where I was on the watch-tower where I could see 35 rhinos at once (not to mention the ten or so along the track leading to the tower). With the rhinos were herds of barasingha, hog deer and buffalo. In the water in front of the tower huge clown knifefish kept splashing up to the surface (they are called chital here, like the axis deer, because of their spots). Around the tower area something had died and there were dozens of slender-billed and Himalayan griffon vultures collecting in the trees. Elsewhere a marshy area provided feeding for various waders such as little ringed plover, common greenshank, common redshank, green sandpiper, wood sandpiper and common snipe. By the end of the day I had seen exactly ninety species of birds (not including another dozen or so which the guide ID'd by call or by brief fly-bys, which wasn't good enough for me to count). Only thirteen of the ninety were lifers for me though: the birdlife in Assam is very “southeast Asian” so I was seeing a lot of birds that are common further east where I've done most of my travelling. However out of nine mammal species seen that day, five of them were lifers which is a much better percentage!

The next day was not so productive because there were no morning jeeps with which I could join up. I only ended up with 48 birds for the whole day. Some of those were obtained in the tea plantations just near the lodge. Tea plantations are a bit odd-looking. The tea leaves are the new shoots plucked from the tops of the bushes and the result of this constant pruning is whole fields of flat-topped bushes less than waist-high, like acres of finely-attended topiary. I have seen tea plantations before but the ones in Assam have something a little different in that they are grown in combination with pepper trees. I never knew pepper came from trees! I had never really thought about it at all, it is true, but if I had I would have assumed some sort of vine rather than trees. The pepper trees turn the tea plantations into very open woodland which is supposed to be good for birds not otherwise found inside the park, but it was too late in the morning before I got there and the birds had all gone for siesta. I tend to find that open-country and wetland birds don't seem to care about the time of day, but woodland and forest birds just disappear as soon as the sun starts heating up. The afternoon wasn't much better because the only jeep I could join with had a photographer who wasn't interested in stopping for birds. However I did see pied kingfisher and woolly-necked stork which were both lifers, as well as four species of Psittacula parakeets. I was surprised there were four species all living here together – Indian ringnecks, Alexandrines, moustached parakeets, and blossom-headed parakeets – but by the end of my stay I could even identify the four unseen, just by the different sounds of their screeches (which is quite something for me because I can't usually tell most bird calls apart).

I returned to the tea plantations at sun-rise the following morning, which is about 5.30am here. It's quite good having the plantation just up the road (literally less than ten minutes walk away) because you can get there and find some birds before breakfast and then go to the park in a jeep afterwards when they start running for the day. There actually weren't many birds around this morning, but a blue whistling thrush and grey-headed woodpecker were good, and even better were three different Asian barred owlets being very showy. My plan for the rest of the morning was in fact not for a jeep into the park but instead a boat to look for Gangetic dolphins in the Brahmaputra River. This is not a good time of year to look for dolphins because the river levels are too low, but it is obviously still something I wanted to have a go at. When I booked at the Wild Grass Lodge, the owner Manju was incredibly helpful, sending me all sorts of information in emails. However when I arrived at the lodge I regrettably found out that the general manager Dilip was as good as useless. I had asked him on my first night about the dolphins and he told me the cost of the boat (1900 rupees) and the cost of the return trip to where the boat left from (1200 rupees). I had also asked him to book me into the forestry department lodge at Manas National Park which he said he would do. At the end of the next day I checked with him about the Manas accommodation and he said “yes, I am doing that now, I will let you know” – it never got done. For the dolphins, I asked him the night before to arrange the boat and jeep (I was just going to pay for it all myself because there was no-one else to join in with me) and he told me to be at reception at 8am to meet the jeep and I would get to the boat at 9am. After I had been round the tea plantation and then had breakfast I went to reception at 8am. Nobody knew anything about the boat or the dolphins, because it had not been arranged at all. I never did get to go look for the dolphins while at Wild Grass. With that not happening I got a jeep for myself to the eastern section of the park. I had been to the central part once and the western part twice, and it had been looking like I wasn't ever going to get to the eastern part unless I went by myself, so I did. [I should make it clear that I fully recommend staying at Wild Grass Lodge – it's a great place, Manju is brilliant, most of the staff are good....it's just trying to get the general manager to actually do stuff which is aggravating]

The eastern part of Kaziranga has more wetlands than the other parts so it is better for birds. Generally the jeeps come equipped with a guide who points out the animals and identifies them, but on this trip I just had a driver so had to do all the work myself (which is how I prefer it really). Most of the 73 species I saw today were repeats of the other days of course, including two more barred owlets, but new ones were a distant greater adjutant (the only lifer of the morning) and the first brown fish-owl I've seen for years. The numbers of pelicans and other waterbirds were much higher than in the other sections as well. In the afternoon I managed to score a jeep with two Indian birders (casual birders, not hard-core birders) to the central section where I saw a couple more woolly-necked storks, two swamp francolins (the only lifer of the afternoon), and a Bengal monitor basking outside its burrow. The monitor was seen from one of the watch-towers and this was also where two tigers had been seen just that very morning while I was off in the eastern part. At the end of the afternoon we stopped by the tower just in case. The guide scanned the far side of the clearing and suddenly went “Tiger!” “Where, where?!” “On the corner,” he said, pointing across at the forest. Probably most people reading this have been out birding or been in some similar situation at a zoo with someone who sees a bird/other animal and is telling you something like “it's just there, past that branch” and you cannot tell where they are seeing this animal which to them is so obvious. It is much worse when it is a tiger! Especially when the person says it is “on the corner”! The corner of what?!? I got onto it just in time as it walked across the edge of the forest – about a kilometre away for about five seconds, and then it went back inside the forest! It paused just inside and I could see it glowing orange in the sun, and then it was gone. It was not a great sighting – far from it – and if it had been a first sighting of something like a barasingha I wouldn't have counted it, but it's a tiger! I am counting it!!

Three days down, one to go. The final day at Kaziranga went very well. I had joined up with a Canadian lady and her Indian friend who were both proper animal-watchers like me. We went in the morning to the eastern end. We saw a spotted owlet and several Asian barred owlets, but unfortunately no brown fish-owl to make a three owl day. The greater adjutant I had seen the day before was still present but on the near side of the lake rather than the far side so I got to see him much better. A pair of hill mynahs was unexpected, and we found a tree full of spot-winged starlings which were great. In amongst the haul of regular mammals (rhinos, elephants, etc) was a Himalayan striped squirrel and a whole family of smooth-coated otters, including pups, which unlike the pair from my first day were actually close enough to get some photographs of (albeit needing cropping to be able to see them properly!). Even more unexpected for me than anything else, on the drive back to the lodge for lunch we found some capped langurs just sitting in a tree beside a field. I was hoping to see these later at Nameri National Park but was totally not expecting to see them here in the farmland. For the afternoon we went to the central area, looking for birds and hoping for tigers. Best birds were swamp francolins feeding out in the open, a flock of striated babblers, grey-capped pigmy woodpeckers, and a whole group of male kalij pheasants. The bird total for this final day was 78 species. There were also a couple more Bengal monitors and yet more otters! These otters were a pair and they looked very small to be smooth-coated, but the guide said that is the only species in the park (and even if small-clawed otters are found there they weren't close enough for me to have been sure either way). The last bit of excitement was that a tiger had been sighted by the same watch-tower as yesterday. By the time we got there, there was a whole cluster of jeeps sitting on the side of the road with everyone pointing binoculars off across the clearing. Apparently it had crossed the road and was somewhere in the elephant grass. I went up into the tower to see if I could see anything from the higher vantage point. I really wanted a good sighting of a tiger, but it was fairly obvious that with all the jeeps down there the tiger wasn't going anywhere. It was just going to lie low until everyone had gone before coming back out. Suddenly someone else in the tower cried out “I see it!” They directed the rest of us to where there was a tawny-coloured blob showing through the grass. “I don't think that's a tiger,” I said, trying to be tactful (for one thing tigers aren't tawny-coloured, and for another thing the object was a hog deer). “No, no that's the tiger – it's lying down, it must have been there the whole time. I can see its tail.” “Yes, I can see it moving.” “Oh wow, that's the tiger all right!” After everyone else had left the tower congratulating one another, one of the guides took a look and said simply “that's not a tiger, that's a hog deer”.



David Brown Shoe Fauna Update #2: a small cockroach fell out of my shoe on one of the mornings at Kaziranga. It was larger than the tiny spider at Shwesettaw in Burma so things are progressing well. Soon I shall be shaking Ganges dolphins out of my shoes.



FBBIRD PHEASANT TALLY:
(The lifers are in bold)

1) Ring-necked Pheasant
2) Blood Pheasant
3) Koklass Pheasant
4) White Eared Pheasant
5) Golden Pheasant
6) Temminck's Tragopan
7) Elliot's Pheasant
8) Red Junglefowl
9) Siamese Fireback
10) Kalij Pheasant

 

[Pertinax]

Aha, it all takes me back. I told you that you would see a lot of Rhinos... and your Tiger sighting sounds rather like one of mine too, very distant but 'glowing in the sun' as mine did.

I stayed at Wildgrass too. I think Manju was the owner's son- I remember he was very clued up on birds, or maybe Manju was the father, I can't remember.

Did an old man light a fire in the courtyard each evening?

 

[Chlidonias]

hi guys, just in an internet cafe now in Guwahati. Hasn't been any WIFI available anywhere in Assam [.....] I'm expecting about 700 unread emails in my inbox after three weeks unchecked!

I was close: 523 unread emails plus another 79 in the spam box! Took a while to get through them all!

 

[Chlidonias]

Aha, it all takes me back. I told you that you would see a lot of Rhinos... and your Tiger sighting sounds rather like one of mine too, very distant but 'glowing in the sun' as mine did.

I stayed at Wildgrass too. I think Manju was the owner's son- I remember he was very clued up on birds, or maybe Manju was the father, I can't remember.

Did an old man light a fire in the courtyard each evening?

I thought you'd like it

Manju seems pretty old -- maybe in his seventies -- so he would be the father. No fires were lit while I was there though.

 

[Pertinax]

Manju seems pretty old -- maybe in his seventies -- so he would be the father.

With a beard? The son would have been the bird expert then. I can't remember his name- he wore spectacles.

Your stories of jeeps not turning up etc is exactly what we experienced too. And the tea gardens, I'd forgotten about them.

 

[Chlidonias]

With a beard? The son would have been the bird expert then. I can't remember his name- he wore spectacles.

Your stories of jeeps not turning up etc is exactly what we experienced too. And the tea gardens, I'd forgotten about them.

with a big beard! The son wasn't called Maan was he?

 

[Chlidonias]

Hollongapar Gibbon Wildlife Sanctuary, 22-23 February

My next location after Kaziranga National Park was the Hollongapar Gibbon Wildlife Sanctuary which is a small patch of remnant forest east of Kaziranga. The name has various spellings. I had been using Hoollongopar but at the sanctuary they use Hollongapar so that's what I'll stick with from now on. The area has been protected since 1881, originally as the Hollongapar Reserved Forest, mainly so the British colonialists could hunt leopards and elephants there. In 1997 it was re-designated as a Wildlife Sanctuary. Nowadays the forest only covers an area of 21 square kilometres and is hemmed in by tea plantations and farmland so there are no longer any dispersal routes in or out for most of the species inside. There are seven species of primates in the reserve, the main one people want to see being the western hoolock gibbon. Few visitors stay in the forestry department accommodation there because it only takes about two and a half hours to drive from Kaziranga, but one of the seven primates is the slow loris which is nocturnal and I wanted to try and find one. However once again my attempts at loris searches were stymied, because it turned out that it is forbidden to enter the forest at night even if staying at the accommodation there (although they obviously used to allow this, because Mammalwatching guy Jon Hall was doing spotlighting there in 2008). Indian parks are extremely strict with rules and they are often pretty ridiculous. In Assam it gets light at 5.30am or so but most of the parks don't open until after 7am, they are closed in the middle of the day, and at the end of the day they close up the gates as early as 4.30 or 5pm. Few (none?) of the Assamese parks allow night visits any more. At most (all?) you need guides and/or armed guards whenever you enter, and some parks like Kaziranga don't allow entry on foot at all. At Hollongapar you are on foot but accompanied by armed guards and the length of the “tours” are only an hour or two. If I was to return to Assam I wouldn't bother staying at Hollongapar, I would just do what everyone else does and make it a morning trip from Kaziranga. The gibbons seem pretty easy to see on short visits – there was a huge noisy school-group there when I arrived and even they had seen gibbons.

To get from Kaziranga to Hollongapar I had been going to take a bus from Kohora to Jorhat, and then another bus to Mariani, and then a three-wheeler to the sanctuary, all of which would probably have taken most of the day, but as luck would have it there were some Wild Grass guests needing a pick-up at the Jorhat airport so I got a ride in the car all the way to the sanctuary and only had to pay 400 rupees (about NZ$8) in total, and so I arrived about 11am. The accommodation at the sanctuary is 600 rupees per night, and you have to take your own food but there is someone there to cook it for you (I just took noodles and fruit because I'm cheap like that). You've got the same daily entry and camera fees as at Kaziranga (500 rupees for each) but the guard fees are only 200 rupees so the actual time spent in the forest is cheap. Surprisingly there isn't a great deal of English spoken by anyone up that way; it's sort of the way an American might know enough words in Spanish to have very basic communication in Mexico but that's about all. None of the school-kids who were there when I arrived spoke any English beyond a halting “what is your name?”. I was the centre of attention for them and they all wanted my autograph and to get a photo with me. English is very widely spoken throughout India because the number of indigenous languages and dialects make communication otherwise impossible, but I guess Assam is just that little bit too far away from India proper.

I went out into the forest at about 1.30pm with two guards. There are elephants in the forest, and wild elephants can be dangerous of course, but the precautions taken in Indian parks are really over the top! In places with jeeps like Kaziranga they often don't even allow you to get off the jeep and stand next to it on a road in open grassland where you can see for a kilometre in every direction. At Hollongapar they barely let you walk more than ten metres ahead or behind in case an elephant springs suddenly out of its burrow and drags you down to your death. At one point on the second day, the guard in front of me turned round and asked “Are you afraid? You don't need to be, we are here.” I just said “no, I'm fine,” but what I was thinking was “what in anything I have done over the last two days has given the impression I was afraid?!” The reason I had been given for why they don't allow entry at night is because “the elephants are too dangerous” – but it is hardly going to be any more dangerous at night than in the day-time. Actually they even tried to tell me that sambar are really dangerous! Unfortunately even if a guard was happy to take you in at night everything is under the control of one person and the decision is his (and that decision is always “no”). The way I see it, if you go to wild places you take the risks associated with it. I just want to go into the forest when the sun comes up and wander round for as long as I want looking for animals. All the rules and regulations are just a pain for me.

The seven primate species at Hollongapar are the western hoolock gibbon (the only ape found in India), the capped langur, the slow loris, and four species of macaques (rhesus, northern pig-tailed, stump-tailed and Assamese). The sanctuary has the highest number of primate species of any protected area in India. I'm not really sure how four similar macaque species manage to co-exist in the same area, especially when the area isn't particularly large, but they obviously do. I had seen a group of female and young capped langurs at Kaziranga but otherwise the only species of those seven which I had seen anywhere before were the rhesus and pig-tailed macaques. The first of them which I got to see at Hollongapar were the stump-tailed macaques, a whole troop of them foraging about in the forest. At Hollongapar the guards take you along a fairly wide dirt road through the forest and when they hear or see something you head onto narrow trails to get closer. The stump-tails didn't seem too keen on us interrupting their feeding but after following them through the forest for a while they settled down and ignored us. They are weird-looking monkeys! The body is very robust, almost like a little bear, and the face is all rumpled up and bright scarlet like a very sunburnt old man. When you see photos of them, or see them in a zoo, they are the ugliest things imaginable, but seen in the wild in the forest they look completely right (much as I had found with the Yunnan snub-nosed monkeys in China – in photos and zoos they are just plain weird, but in the wild they are beautiful). Next up were the northern pig-tailed macaques, of which there were just a few feeding high up in the trees. I've seen quite a lot of pig-tailed macaques before, but the ones here look different somehow .... longer fur maybe? ….. I'm not quite sure what it is. The last primate for the afternoon I found for myself rather than the guards pointing it out, so I felt like I was pulling my weight. It was a male hoolock gibbon, all black with white eyebrows (females are brown with white eyebrows), and in a nearby tree was a bicoloured giant squirrel. The gibbons and the giant squirrels are both pretty difficult (often impossible) to photograph successfully because they are always up in the canopy and hence usually backlit against the sky.

There was a very odd situation that first afternoon where after we had seen the pig-tailed macaques we carried on along the road until we reached a bit of a waterhole off to the side. “Now you go to the toilet,” said the guard who spoke some English. “No, that's alright, I don't need to go to the toilet,” I said. “Yes, you go to the toilet.” “I don't need to go to the toilet.” “You go to the toilet now!” I have no idea what was going on but if I'd been a woman I would have been getting very scared right then!! I half expected him to point his shotgun at me and tell me to go to the toilet or die. After a bit of a stand-off, they decided I really didn't want to go to the toilet and we carried on to find the gibbon. Obviously it was the result of some sort of language difficulty but still really really weird!

The next morning we set off at 7.30am. I had tried some birding around the camp area earlier but there wasn't much there. I did see another giant squirrel and a red-bellied (Pallas') squirrel though. On the dirt road through the forest one of the guards pointed out fresh leopard droppings, which was a tad frustrating! It wasn't long before we found a family of hoolocks – father, mother and baby – followed by the stump-tailed macaque troop still waking up in the tops of a couple of trees – perhaps the leopard was still around somewhere and they didn't want to come down yet. No sign of yesterday's pig-tailed macaques, nor any Assamese macaques which I wanted to see. On the return to the HQ we walked along the railway track which runs right past the accommodation building (and is very noisy at night!). There was lots of elephant dung along the line. I wondered if the trains and elephants ever collide. I spotted a gibbon off in the forest and when we went in we found another family group of male, female and baby, and I managed to get some photos of the female which weren't too terrible. Back on the track a train went past and we stood off to the side. When we continued walking we found a large Indian rock python cut in three by the train, the head end still writhing in its death-throes. It was one of the saddest things I have seen in my travels, and I was really annoyed with myself because I thought if I had just looked up the track through my binoculars earlier I would have seen the python crossing the line and been able to get it out of the way before the train killed it.

The afternoon walk was for capped langurs. I had seen the group of females and young at Kaziranga but I wanted to see a male which are quite brightly coloured and remind me of red colobus. That mission was accomplished successfully with a very large troop crashing through the tree canopies. Very difficult to photograph because of where they were, but I managed a couple of “all-right” shots. I'm hoping to be able to get better photos at Nameri National Park where apparently they are easily seen in the grounds of the Eco-Camp, but you always take the chances when they arise just in case you never get another one. There was another giant squirrel seen as well (the third for the day) and a few birds. Because of the short time you're in the forest there's not really any time for birding if you want to find the primates, but amongst the few I saw were three lifers (white-throated bulbul, maroon oriole and sapphire flycatcher) as well as a red-headed trogon.

I had now seen pig-tailed and stump-tailed macaques, capped langurs and hoolocks. Slow loris was out for now (but I had a plan for that night involving sneaking), rhesus macaques I had seen plenty of at Kaziranga, and the last one was the Assamese macaque. I knew these were difficult to find because there was only one troop in the reserve, comprised of between 40 and 50 individuals. After the langurs had been found and watched and photographed, one of the guards said we would now go look for the Assamese macaques. We headed off across to the other side of the forest, along the edge of a tea plantation. After a while he stopped and said “that is my house over there. We will go there to drink tea.” A bit of a coincidence that he lives right by where the macaques were supposed to be, but we went over there. I sat on the sofa with a cup of tea, they turned on the tv, and then both the guards disappeared to eat. His daughter and son sat there smiling and nodding at me because they spoke no English and I spoke no Assamese. I tried to be patient because you don't want to annoy the people guiding you, and if they speak little English then there's no point getting antsy anyway because they don't really understand what you are saying or why you are annoyed. But after almost an hour had passed I was sick of my time being wasted and “suggested” we go look for the macaques. So we went back across the tea field to where there was a trail into the forest and one of the guards went inside. The other one said something along the lines of Assamese macaques are difficult because they only live where the wild elephants are and wild elephants are really dangerous. After maybe twenty seconds the first guard comes back out of the trail and I'm told that there are elephants there so we can't go look for the macaques. What a load of bollocks! Not much I could do about it though, so we went back to the HQ.

Over the course of that second day we had travelled around a few trails and along the railway line a couple of times so I now had a pretty good idea of where everything was and where I could get to trails in the dark without being seen, so my plan for the night was to go along the railway line and then into the forest on one of the trails which ran off it, and that way I wouldn't have to pass any of the guardposts. I hadn't tried this on the first night, partly because I didn't know the lay of the land properly and partly because I didn't want to get kicked out of the reserve if caught. Slow loris was once again within my grasp. Unfortunately though, even this sneaky loris plan got foiled! Late in the day I found out quite by accident (from an Indian photographer who had arrived to stay that day) that there was a two-day strike proposed to be happening tomorrow. To me a strike is some people in one industry stopping work but otherwise life goes on as normal. In Assam, in contrast, a strike apparently means that all the roads get shut down, the entire region grinds to a halt, it is impossible to get anywhere or do anything, and cars and buses that do try to go places get stoned! I had been going to leave Hollongapar the next day, bus to the city of Tezpur where there was said to be a good site for dolphins on the river, and then the day after that head to Nameri National Park, but this guy said that if the strike went ahead then I wouldn't be going anywhere, I would be stuck in Hollongapar for the duration with no food, and so if I could I should get out that night to somewhere safe. He had some friends arriving the next day and they were seriously scared about the travel, even though he was desperately arranging to get them there in the morning before light. Political strife doesn't normally bother me – like the lame stuff in Bangkok – but this sounded pretty full-on and I thought I better take his advice and get somewhere safe! Back to Wild Grass at Kaziranga seemed like a good bet because if I was going to be stuck somewhere, then somewhere with birds was preferable to the inside of a hotel room in some city. Also it wasn't too far away so I could get there that night. The really annoying thing was the money side of it because I had already paid for that night at Hollongapar (and the office was closed up so I couldn't try and get a refund), I would have to pay for the same night at Wild Grass too, and the car to Kaziranga set me back 3200 rupees (about NZ$62).

 

[zooboy28]

Wow Chlidonias, 70 rhinos is amazing! I didn't realise they were anything like that social or numerous!

What were the giant squirrels doing, I had assumed they were nocturnal, but were they active like the smaller species?

 

[DavidBrown]

Chlidonias, how many wild ape species have you seen now besides orangutans and Hoolock's gibbons?

 

[Pertinax]

Wow Chlidonias, 70 rhinos is amazing! I didn't realise they were anything like that social or numerous!

They aren't really social, but certainly very numerous!

 

[Pertinax]

there aren't a lot of other solo travellers around (but there are lots of tour groups)

From a watch-tower overlooking a lake we spotted a pair of smooth-coated otters, very far away but still watchable through the binoculars.

Have enjoyed re-reading your trip.

I remember some of the jeeps absolutely bristling with hordes of grinning local tourists. They are very excitable aren't they? (It was exactly the same in the Gir Forest I remember too). I remember there was also a large group of American tourists staying at Wildgrass- they went out in several jeeps- one day at the Park entrance one of them stood up just as they were driving in and smacked his head on the overhead metal barrier above- lucky he wasn't killed- he came back after a trip to hospital.

Did you get chased by any Rhinos?

I remember very clearly the Watch tower in the central zone, overlooking the 'Jheel'. Concrete with stairs leading up to the upper level?

The watchtower in the Western(?) area was the one I saw a tiger from. the other (close) tiger was in the forested section at the 'back' of the Central zone.

You mention Otters but not the Asian short-clawed(?), we saw these in large groups of a dozen or more at a time.

 

[baboon]

Seventy rhinos and families of smooth-coated otters are spectacular, so do the capped langurs and hoolock gibbons. Among the birds you see in this two parks, maroon oriole is my favorite

 

[Chlidonias]

Wow Chlidonias, 70 rhinos is amazing! I didn't realise they were anything like that social or numerous!

What were the giant squirrels doing, I had assumed they were nocturnal, but were they active like the smaller species?

I was absolutely astounded by the numbers of rhinos there. As Pertinax says they aren't actually social but they tolerate each other very well. The 35 at once were spread over a large area but could all be counted without moving from the spot in the watchtower. Also in the same scene were numerous hog deer, barasingha, water buffalo, wild pigs and many species of water birds. Others saw otters there as well on other days.

For the giant squirrels, all the "normal" squirrels are diurnal, and all the flying squirrels nocturnal. The giant squirrels are great. They were mostly sort of just sitting up in the branches feeding. When they move around they sort of look like cats -- if you imagine the way a domestic cat moves through branches in a tree, then sort of like that, sort of half-walking and half-jumping but being precise in targeting branches which will take its weight.

I didn't see any flying squirrels this trip but I've seen a few of the giant species on other trips. They are weird when climbing. Because of the gliding membranes they have a sort of combination tree kangaroo-caterpillar movement when going up tree trunks; really hard to describe.

 

[Chlidonias]

Chlidonias, how many wild ape species have you seen now besides orangutans and Hoolock's gibbons?

Bornean orangutan
Sumatran orangutan
Siamang (both Sumatran and Malaysian subspecies)
Western hoolock
White-handed gibbon
Mueller's (Bornean) gibbon

 

[Chlidonias]

Seventy rhinos and families of smooth-coated otters are spectacular, so do the capped langurs and hoolock gibbons. Among the birds you see in this two parks, maroon oriole is my favorite

yes, it was a good haul for Assam! The maroon oriole at Hollongapar was a female but I saw more (males and females) later in the trip as well.

 

[Chlidonias]

Have enjoyed re-reading your trip.

I remember some of the jeeps absolutely bristling with hordes of grinning local tourists. They are very excitable aren't they? (It was exactly the same in the Gir Forest I remember too). I remember there was also a large group of American tourists staying at Wildgrass- they went out in several jeeps- one day at the Park entrance one of them stood up just as they were driving in and smacked his head on the overhead metal barrier above- lucky he wasn't killed- he came back after a trip to hospital.

Did you get chased by any Rhinos?

I remember very clearly the Watch tower in the central zone, overlooking the 'Jheel'. Concrete with stairs leading up to the upper level?

The watchtower in the Western(?) area was the one I saw a tiger from. the other (close) tiger was in the forested section at the 'back' of the Central zone.

You mention Otters but not the Asian short-clawed(?), we saw these in large groups of a dozen or more at a time.

apparently Gir is an absolute mad-house now with tourists! It gets worse every year. I haven't been to that or other parks of course (places like Corbett or Ranthambore) but the impression I get is that they are very full!

The watchtowers are kind of scary. They are made entirely of concrete -- concrete steps, concrete support poles, concrete slabs for floors -- and yet when there are more than a few people on them you can feel them swaying! I'm sure concrete-supported structures shouldn't do that!!

I didn't get chased by any rhinos but there was another jeep while I was staying which had a herd of elephants with babies come onto the road right in front of them and the females got very angry with the jeep being there. When the jeep went to reverse, a rhino walked onto the road behind them and stopped, so they were stuck between angry elephants and a rhino! They chose the rhino and roared towards it which scared it away and they escaped the elephants.

Re otters, I saw a pair of otters which looked too small to be smooth-coated and my impression was small-clawed but when I asked the guide which species are in the park he said only smooth-coated. They weren't close enough for me to say "yes they were small-clawed", but I suspected they were and what you say makes me think it even more. However they will remain off the list because I can't be certain.

 

[Chlidonias]

Nameri National Park: 24 February - 2 March

With a potential Assam-stopping strike in the air, I returned abruptly to Kaziranga. Better safe than sorry. If the strike went ahead I could stay at Kaziranga for a few days until it cleared, if it didn't happen I could go straight from there to Nameri National Park and arrive on the day I had planned to (I just had to miss out the dolphin search at Tezpur). In the morning I had another walk through the tea plantation. It can be a bit difficult birding in there because a lot of the birds tend to be down amongst the tea plants where it is impossible to see them. This morning I had some good luck with a whole flock of about twenty rufous-necked laughing thrushes bursting up out of the tea into a tree where I could see them. They were really beautiful birds. All laughing thrushes are beautiful, even the duller-coloured ones, but this species has really clean markings with none of the speckling and smudging of some, so they look even nicer. Totally worth googling a photo of to see what they look like.

After breakfast I found out some more about the strike. It was, according to the first version I heard, all to do with some political figure coming to Assam whom the locals did not approve of. Or perhaps it was to do with a guy who set himself on fire over a land protest, which was the second version I heard. You can imagine the sort of trouble which might brew when even the locals are confused about the reason for the strike. To avoid trouble it was the government shutting down all the roads, although I didn't really understand the connection between the government shutting the roads but the locals attacking the cars who did try to get around – it seemed a bit opposite. Anyway, what happens is that a strike is announced out of the blue, the roads are shut down, and because the Assamese still have a tribal feudal sort of mind-set it is easy for flash-mobs to form and disperse. In such situations it doesn't matter who you are or what colour your skin. Apparently it wasn't unknown for cars to even be set on fire with the occupants trapped inside. Definitely not the sort of time to risk travelling! The Indian tourists who had planes to catch at any time in the next few days were all packing up and leaving because they knew what the deal was. I found out that the strike was actually set for tomorrow, not today, and would be for two days (the 25th and 26th). I could stay at Kaziranga where the accommodation was cheaper but if I wanted to go into the park the costs were high, or do a quick run to Nameri where the accommodation was more expensive but the park costs were much much cheaper (because you are on foot and hence not paying all the jeep fees). Nameri made the most sense because I was going there next anyway and it would keep me more or less on schedule. Before leaving I made sure some other foreign tourists there knew what was happening, in case they had flights. One German couple had a flight on the 26th and I said they should probably go now to whichever city their flight was from, but the general manager at the lodge said “No problem, it will be fine to go on that day” and so they laughed it off. I had nowhere I needed to be – I could be at either Kaziranga or Nameri, it didn't really matter – but if I had needed to be somewhere on a specific date for a flight and something came up like this, I would make sure I got there! Especially if I was travelling with someone else – you don't want anything happening to that person if your car is stopped by a mob. I prefer to listen to the vibe of a place rather than a hotel worker saying “nah, no problem”, and the vibe here was saying “don't travel on those dates”!

I had met an Indian birder called Rocky Singh last time I was at Kaziranga (before I went to Hollongapar) and he was leaving that day to get to Guwahati while the roads were still open, so I caught a ride with him to the junction which leads off towards Nameri. Rocky is pretty well-known in India because when not birding hard-out he is a famous tv personality. When at Kaziranga I had kept seeing all the Indian tourists coming to introduce themselves and wanting autographs and such. I would have preferred to have met Amrita Rao but Rocky was a genuinely nice guy – actually one of the nicest guys I've met over this whole trip, and I've met a lot of nice people. If I had got a car all the way from Kaziranga to Nameri it would have cost me almost 3000 rupees; instead I got a free ride about half the way, then a bus to a four-way junction near the city of Tezpur for 20 rupees, then a shared taxi from there for another 20 rupees to the little town of Balipara where Binod from the Jia Borhelli Wild Resort at Nameri met me.

The forest at Nameri was first protected in 1878 as the Nameri Reserve. A lot of the parks in India have a long history of protection thanks to the British and their hunting lust. In 1985 the area became the Nameri Sanctuary, in 1998 the Nameri National Park, and then in 2000 it was designated as a Tiger Reserve, so now the full name is the Nameri National Park And Tiger Reserve. There are said to be almost 40 tigers in the forest, as well as elephants, gaur and all sorts of cats (clouded leopard, golden cat, jungle cat, etc) – not that you're likely to see most of those because you're not allowed in at night. Unlike Kaziranga however you are allowed to walk around in the forest on foot, in the accompaniment of an armed guard. (Kaziranga used to have foot safaris too, but in a complete over-reaction they were stopped after one tourist got killed by an elephant a few years ago). There are only two trails in Nameri (yes, just two trails) but the main one is quite long, about 3km or so, and goes through a variety of grassland and forest habitats. The combined entry-plus-guard fee is only 620 rupees per half-day (about NZ$12) plus a 50 rupee camera fee. The national park camera fees are just a scam really because there's no reason in the world to have a fee for non-professional photography, so it is good that at Nameri it is only 50 rupees (instead of 500 like at Kaziranga). If you go into the park twice a day you pay twice a day, but I found that it was too hot for the birds in the afternoon anyway, so I just did morning trips. There are only a few places to stay at Nameri, the most expensive being the Wild Mahseer (just for rich people), and then there's the Nameri Eco-Camp and the Jia Borhelli Wild Resort which are better for normal visitors, and which are right next door to one another. Most people stay at the Eco-Camp but I chose Jia Borhelli because it was much quieter and more peaceful (from what I'd read the Eco-Camp often had a bit of a “party” atmosphere and was also pretty run-down), and the owner Binod seemed more in tune with nature watchers. I was very impressed with the place and would highly recommend it. I think it is cheaper than the Eco-Camp as well.

The last part of the road from Balipara to Nameri is one of those horrible pot-holed dirt roads. It is a bit strange, but it seems like almost every national park I go to in Asia has an access road fit more for mule treks than tourist vehicles; even if all the other roads in the region are perfect, the ones into the national parks are almost always awful. From Jia Borhelli and the Eco-Camp there is a walk of about 1.5km along the final stretch of this dirt road until you reach a river which is the boundary of the park. Once ferried across the river there is a walk of just under another kilometre to the guard-post where your permit is checked. This second part is more like a trudge because it is across deep soft river sand the whole way; it isn't so bad in the morning but on the return it feels like you are lost in the Sahara because the sand is white and all the light and heat from the noon-day sun is reflecting straight up at you from the ground. The sand is always covered in the footprints of animals from the night before: birds, wild cats, dhole, buffalo, gaur and elephants. The elephant footprints are interesting: they are huge of course, like dinner plates, but the entire surface of the print is covered in little ripples like a breeze-blown pond. I imagine they are caused by the rumblings going through the elephant's body, vibrating the sand as the foot is lifted. Live animals which can be seen on the riverbanks include sand larks and big flocks of small pratincoles.

At Nameri the animal-watching in the forest (largely for birds) is all done on foot. There are no jeeps and you are accompanied by one armed guard. The best guard is Minaram because he is also an excellent birder. I went in the forest on five days. Twice were with Minaram and those were the best visits; another guard did not know the birds which was fine with me because he was quite enthusiastic about participating; one other guard was just useless and spent most of the time slouching about and kicking the ground while I was looking at birds, exactly like a young kid being forced to go shopping for towels with his parents. The loop trail has a watch-tower on it, overlooking a patch of small muddy pools, and this is a good spot to spend some time. There were always dozens of green imperial pigeons here, as well as sometimes wedge-tailed and pin-tailed green pigeons (the latter has a long tapering tail with a sort of whip coming out the end – really odd-looking). On all three occasions I visited the tower I saw a pair of black-tailed crakes, a shy species I had seen only once previously, at Doi Inthanon in Thailand in 2006. On two of the visits there was a black stork fishing in one of the pools, and once a lesser adjutant. The trees directly around the tower often had bulbuls and woodpeckers and nuthatches and minivets in them. It's a nice spot. There are three species of hornbills in the park – great, wreathed and Oriental pied – and I saw all three. I love watching the big hornbills flying. They take just two or three wingbeats, which because they are so big carries them 30 or 40 feet, and then they just glide, wings out flat, looking like a model aeroplane, then a couple more wingbeats, then another glide, and so on. They sound like jet engines when they fly overhead because of the size of their wings. Another bird I enjoyed seeing was the vernal hanging parrot, of which I saw one large flock. I have seen blue-crowned hanging parrots in the wild in Malaysia, and both blue-crowned and vernal hanging parrots in zoos, but I've never seen them hanging before. They are so-called because they roost upside-down, hanging by their feet under the branches like bats. I had read about this and seen photos, and now I finally got to see it in real life.

The primary attraction in the forest for most birders is the white-winged wood duck, a highly endangered forest duck. It is a species which is spread over a wide part of south and southeast Asia, but the populations are now fragmented through hunting and habitat loss. I had seen the duck previously in Sumatra in 2009 but I always like to see animals again, no matter how many times I see them. Because of the limited number of trails (two) there are really only a couple of pools in the forest where you can try and see the ducks, although I was told there are an estimated sixty of them in the park. The main problem with seeing white-winged wood ducks is that they are incredibly shy. Here, whoever sees the ducks first in the morning scares them away simply by their presence, so you need to get there first! The first time I tried I got there too late (I had been told the park opens at 7am when in fact it opens at 6am) and a bird group from Finland had already been and seen them. The next day I got into the park as early as possible. When we came to the main pool where a pair lives we crept in along the approach trail as sneakily as we could, but the ducks were wise to us and both flew off immediately. However one of them happened to fly straight past us through the forest so we got a good look at it in flight. After more birding further up the main trail we returned to the pool, maybe an hour later, and one of the ducks was back, cruising around in the middle in the open. He didn't realise we were there so we got to watch him for a while before I decided to leave him be, and we snuck away again leaving him completely undisturbed.

Apart for walks in the forest, the other birding attraction at Nameri is the river-rafting trip. This isn't a white-knuckle spray-drenched rapid-riding trip, but a much more preferable sedate cruise in a rubber raft down a mostly-calm river. There are a few small rapid sections, but mostly it is for looking for ibisbills. In case you aren't aware the ibisbill is the world's most awesome wading bird. It breeds high up in the Himalayas and migrates to lower altitudes in winter, but it only lives along rocky fast-flowing rivers. There aren't many places where it is easy to see and so it is one of the world's most-wanted species for bird-watchers. Nameri is fairly reliable if you're there at the right time of year, and even more special is that I can't really think of anywhere else where you can potentially see both ibisbill and white-winged wood duck on the same day!! The rafting trip is 2700 rupees (about NZ$52), so quite expensive if you're alone, but I was fortunate in that I managed to join up with a group of five (non-birding) Indian tourists and so only had to pay a sixth of the cost. The ride was probably about an hour in length I guess – I didn't keep track – and for birds it was really good. There were a lot of ruddy shelducks and common mergansers (aka goosanders), and some mallards, common teal and pintails; four species of kingfishers (common, white-throated, pied and crested); river lapwings, small pratincoles and Indian river terns; and even a peregrine falcon sitting on stones in the middle of the river which the boatman said was a Pallas' fish-eagle (in Assam “Pallas' fish-eagle” is the fall-back call for any bird of prey seen). Two birds usually seen, but not on this trip, were long-billed plover (which I had already seen in China) and great thick-knee (which I haven't seen before). But did I see an ibisbill? Yes I did! And I even managed photos! I had looked for ibisbills in China whenever I was in suitable places but without any luck. Here I found three. Actually I only saw two but there was a third one behind the stones which the boatman could see but I couldn't. They are brilliant birds! They are called ibisbills because they have a long downcurved bill like an ibis, but they are much smaller than an ibis, maybe the size of a largish seagull I suppose but with longer legs and neck (basically imagine a pale grey ibis the size of a seagull). They are the same colour as the river rocks and when they are standing amongst them they can be quite difficult to see. I did the raft trip a second time a few days later with another guy that had turned up. Of course I had to pay half the full rate rather than a sixth like the first trip, but it was worth it to see the ibisbills again. This second trip I saw five ibisbills all together and mostly the same “regular” birds as the first trip – still minus the thick-knee and long-billed plover – but with the added bonus of a wild elephant on the bank.

Nameri National Park isn't really somewhere you go for mammals. There are lots of species there, including very exciting ones like clouded leopards and golden cats, but you can't do any spotlighting in the park and with only two trails you'd have to be lucky indeed to see anything major during the daytime. The only mammals I saw were all ones I had seen already: hoary-bellied squirrels and bicoloured giant squirrels (the only two squirrels in the park, or so I was told), rhesus macaques (but again I could not find any Assamese macaques), capped langurs (but no photos), a wild pig, a couple of common muntjac, and a bull elephant on the second rafting trip. There was also a “wild elephant” by the watch-tower one day, which I saw a couple of days later being ridden by two forest guards and I don't think they tamed it like Crocodile Dundee and his water buffalo! I saw some water buffalo too, come to that, but I don't really think they were any wilder. On one of the days a sambar turned up – on the end of a tether. It had been the pet of an army officer in Tezpur and was now being released at Nameri; I reckon it would have ended up as tiger food before more than a couple of days had passed. (And speaking of tigers there were fresh pug-marks on the trail one morning). I spent one whole morning just sitting in the watch-tower hoping for gaur because I was told they are common in the park and this was the best bet of where to possibly see them, but the only ungulate I saw was a muntjac. However there was one very special and exciting mammal I did see, just not inside the park.....

I have mentioned the Gangetic river dolphin already in other posts. It is a highly-endangered blind river-dwelling dolphin endemic to the Indian subcontinent. I had been led to believe it was going to be a bit of a long-shot trying to see a dolphin at this time of year because of the low river levels. There is a site east of Kaziranga which I never got to, there is the site on the river by Tezpur which I'd had to temporarily bypass due to the strike, and I had also found out that they can be seen from the main jetty on the river in Guwahati. Tezpur is the small city I passed by on the way to Nameri. I had been going to stop there overnight on the way to Nameri but couldn't, so my slight plan change was to stop there overnight when leaving Nameri. However it is only one or one-and-a-half hours from Nameri so I thought I could just as conveniently get there as a day-trip out of Nameri if it didn't cost too much. Binod (the owner of Jia Borhelli where I was staying) got hold of the boatman who does the dolphin trips – there is apparently only one person who does them, and it cost me 1500 rupees (about NZ$29) for the boat – and he was told that the dolphins are just as reliable now as they always are, which was excellent news. Just as excellently, Binod also arranged a free ride for me from Balipara to Tezpur on his friend's motorbike (so I got free transport and his friend got a free dolphin viewing, so it worked for both of us). The little carnival-coloured boat came puttering noisily up to the beach, black smoke belching from the motor, and we jumped on board. I checked my watch so that I could write here how much time passed before I saw a dolphin ...... and that length of time turned out to be three minutes!! I hadn't expected it to be that easy. I'm not sure how many dolphins there were; I saw a maximum of two at once but I think there must have been at least four or five total. They were even more difficult to photograph than the Irrawaddy dolphins in Burma. At least with those ones I could track ahead of one and sometimes get a photo when it came back up for air, or keep the camera on the spot where one went down because sometimes a second one would come up right after in the same spot. With the Gangetic dolphins they came up completely randomly and always singly, and they spent a long time underwater, so there was literally no way to anticipate it. The best – albeit terrible – technique was to just point the camera at any stretch of water and hope one came up in frame!! I got exactly one photo which was sort of worth looking at. On the other hand, the actual views were better than with the Irrawaddy dolphins, where I rarely saw more than the top of the head and the curve of the back as they arched up to breathe and ducked under again. With the Gangetic dolphins they mostly shot the whole head upwards out of the water followed by the body in a sort of half-leap – sometimes you could even see between the body and the water surface – and then splash back down. Fantastic animal, and the best wild mammal I have seen in India by far.

One more very special thing I did at Nameri was getting to see pigmy hogs. These, as the name might suggest, are a very tiny species of pig. They are endemic to Assam and now found solely in the grasslands of Manas National Park. There are a couple of captive breeding centres for them, one at Basistha near Guwahati where there are between 60 and 70 hogs, and a smaller newer one here at Nameri where there are twelve hogs. Some have also been released at Nameri, despite the park probably not being within the species' former range and not having suitable habitat; the released animals don't appear to have survived. I saw two pairs of pigmy hogs at the breeding centre as well as a juvenile. They are great wee animals. I have wanted to see a pigmy hog for years and seeing them in captivity is a good start (there are none anywhere in the world outside Assam) but in the wild would be even better. The main aim for going to my next destination of Manas National Park is to attempt this although the chances of success are not high. In fact they are pretty infintesimal. The pigmy hogs don't like coming out in the open and the grassland where they live is not short grass, it is elephant grass over head-height. But I don't let little things like impossibility dull my spirit! The only problem I anticipate is the one of getting anyone to actually help me look for them because they will just be like “it is impossible to see them” and not want to even try (and at Manas all the access in the park is by jeep only like at Kaziranga so I can't just wander round by myself).

I've already uploaded some photos of captive pigmy hogs from Nameri here, if you haven't seen them yet: India - Other Gallery

The photo attached below is the dolphin-watching boat.....

 

[Monty]

Are Gaur rare or just elusive? I thought they would have been more common and easier to see than Rinos.