My hotel was situated RIGHT on the Rapti River, I suspect they will do quite well for themselves when they get going. At night I went down to the river to watch the sun set.
I woke up the next day for a 6:30am elephant safari. The bumpy jeep ride took me to a community forest attached to the national park. There were seven of us going for the hour and a half safari. They put the three guys on one elephant and the four girls on another.
It is fantastically uncomfortable, but incredibly cool at the same time. It was also very difficult to take photos. With the elephants tipping around everywhere in the dark jungle, clear photographs were hard to come by. We saw a few spotted deer, some monkeys, and a pond where crocodiles supposedly live sometimes. Not a huge amount of wildlife, but a cool experience nonetheless. According to my Bangladeshi elephant platform partner, the mahouts in Nepal are quite good to the elephants compared to safari areas in Sri Lanka and India.
After coming back, I just sat in my room under a fan because during the monsoon season in the lower hills it is somewhere around a million degrees (centigrade) with three hundred percent humidity. Outside my room I heard elephants trumpeting and splashing. It was elephant bathing time.
They also (for a donation) let you sit on top and get splashed.
It felt SOOOO good. My mahout also had the elephant tip over, splashing you into the water. The feeling of being on top of the elephant was also great. After watching at the elephant safari I could get the elephant to turn different ways with my feet, but could never get her to go forward...
After the elephant washing, I met up with a worker from WWF in Saurha and he took me by motorbike to a small village where the WWF was running a biogas project. Of the 82 homes, 75 had biogas digesters. They work by putting the buffalo, goat, and human waste into a large underground dome with a fair bit of water. The mixture gives off a mix of gases with the most important being methane. The combustible gas is then piped inside to a gas burner where the family can cook their food. One buffalo and a family's waste can sustain enough for a family of 6 or 7. We went into the village elder's house to look at the set up. I could tell it wasn't pure gas coming out, but definitely good enough to cook on. A full set up costs around 300 USD, which for this town the WWF was covering $100 and a grant from the government covered another $100. Families would either have to come up with 7000 rupees to cover the rest or get a micro-finance loan (which most of them did). A very cool project indeed.
At 1:30pm which was all too hot for me, I went on a canoe trip down the river and for a jungle walk back to town. My guide, the hotel manager, lead me through the jungle with another assistant guide behind me at all times, both with sticks that they would beat against the ground to scare away any dangerous animals. We started out canoeing down the river in the dugout canoes from the first picture. Along the way we saw a pair of twin baby elephants that had been born a few years ago in the elephant breeding center. They were looked after by a mahout and what my guide thought was their mother.
Lots of fisherman lined the banks as well, hoping to grab some dinner.
We finally got off the canoe and started walking through the jungle. I got the quick and dirty "how to not get killed by animals" talk from my guide. For rhinos, climb or get behind a big tree or run in zig zags if there are no trees. For sloth bears, get in a group and be loud, hope for the best. For tigers, say "Namaste" nicely and savor the view, they normally don't attack, but if they do... good luck.
Since it was so hot out the animals were wisely not exerting themselves, not many to view. We say a huge lizard scamper off and a few Macao monkeys chilling in the trees. In the fields the grass was around 15 ft tall as the locals had yet to cut it to use it for their roofs. Not much to see. After about hour two I was getting a bit tired, hot, and dehydrated, but we pressed on through a field. I heard some rustling in the grass and looked back and saw right down the single horn of a rhino looking down at the three of us. Oh shit. It started running towards us and the three of us just start taking off down the trail. Luckily it was a bluff charge, but it certainly got our hearts going. We then snuck back towards the pair of rhinos (yeah it sounds stupid now, but seemed like a good idea at the time). I was able to just catch a glimpse of them as they sauntered away.
We pressed on, examining recent tiger tracks and bear poop, but no sightings sadly. Almost as we reached the shore across from the village we saw a pack of maybe 40 spotted deer munching away on the grass.
We then caught the canoe to the other side and that was all for my day.
Later I was drinking some cool mineral water at the small shop next to my hotel when a man from the UK came up to buy some beer and chips. After talking for a bit he invited me to come have a beer on the "beach" and watch the sun set. So I met up with James, a university student from London, Johanna, a opera singer from France, and Marine, another girl from France. We grabbed a bit to eat for dinner at their hotel and watched the sun set.
All of us were leaving the next day, them for Kathmandu and I for Pokhara we had to say good bye the next morning. It turns out though that they were staying at the same hotel I was, so we would see each other again. I got a motorbike ride to the bus stop and met up with the beautiful couple again as they were going on to Pokhara as well. We got on the "tourist bus", but since it wasn't full, it would stop to pick up locals as a local bus would. Many hours later we arrived in Pokhara, but that will be another blog post as this is already long enough.
