Ok so in a day of "jungle walking" (which actually involves mostly sitting in various locations waiting for animals to show up) we didn't see any tigers and it's a bit of a sore subject. But we
did see wild rhinoceros, herds of deer, a wild pig (that we thought was a
tiger coming crashing through the underbrush), and we saw tiger
footprints and heard it roar. And it was beautiful, and not at all what we expected to see in Nepal!
And the night before out jungle walk we went to an elephant breeding center and met a 4-month-old elephant!!! Aka my life might now be complete.
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Pouring pouring pouring. It's monsoon in Nepal and it hasn't stopped raining all morning. We slept in to rain, and awoke to more rain. We read in bed to drip-drop-drips on our tin roof, and breakfasted to the thunder of a downpour. We played Gin as the four paths leading to our umbrella'ed table island became cobble stone-bottomed canals, and read our books watching the water fill the four-squared garden to flooding.
The power here works maybe 20%of the time, which means that dinner is romantically candle- and headlamp-lit, despite the constant deluge outside our water inside doesn't run, and the advertised wi-fi hasn't produced a glimmer of activity since we arrived.
I'm not going stir-crazy yet, but we'll see how long I last on my 9-foot diameter circular island in the storm.
We couldn't leave Bardia today because some sort of election-related Maplst civil unrest is under way, closing the roads and scaring bus drivers from their routes (as a student of armed conflict, well-aware of nepal's recent 10-year civil war, this concerns me more than just a little bit). But our tickets are booked on the 5pm A/C overnight tourist bus (after our experience getting here, the "overnight" loses its bite when combined with "A/C" and "tourist"...let's hope the bus lives up to its promised splendor) to Kathmandu tomorrow, so hopefully the roads are open then!
