Operation Jungle Storm, Pt. 1

Forgive the lateness of my posting. It is uncommon to find broadband internet and wild tigers in the same location. For the few of you who couldn't guess, my last excursion was to the village of Thakurdwara on the outskirts of Bardia National Park in the remote southwestern jungles of Nepal. That's right: Ghostface Buddha left India. My journey to this isolated spot was a three-day affair by train, bus, bicycle, rickshaw, foot, and jeep.

The story begins, as so many of mine do, with an Indian train that was approximately six hours late to a destination supposedly less than six hours away. Passing through the massive state of Uttar Pradesh, the train became an embodiment of the territory it crossed: outrageously and uncomfortably crowded, constantly patrolled by beggars and clueless hawkers ("Why, yes, we all did just get on a 5-hour train to shop for wallets! What? What do you mean you haven't sold a damn thing?"), and reeking of man and machine. The pair seated across from me were a near-miraculous couple of elderly peasants, whose one gift in life appeared to be the mastery of constant belching. The wife, at about 15-second intervals for most of the trip, would summon a croak-like belch which would be followed by a few seconds of wheezing as her tongue hung out of her dessicated mouth, and concluded each performance with a burp of a slightly different timbre. Her husband was more restrained, as he was usually asleep, but every half-hour or so he would awake and produce a series of sounds reminiscent of a dragon ingesting a heard of distressed buffalo deep within the Earth. There was something biologically wrong with these people, and I wouldn't have been the least bit surprised to hear that their families had married them off to each other at a young age for the sake of the village.

After a night in the surprisingly un-awful Uttar Pradesh city of Bareilly, I boarded a public bus to the small border town of Banbaasa. Needless to say, it was late. My surroundings grew continually more rustic, ramshackle Indian towns giving way to listless villages with crumbling Sikh gurudwaras until we entered the edge of the Tarai, the strip of jungle that has separated India and Nepal for centuries. I got off the bus and hiked down a half-paved road. A man pulled up on a bicycle and demanded I hop on. I balanced my backpack across the grocery rack and straddled it as my lift pedaled on out of town and into the woods, cutting through fern-lined dirt tracks until finally we emerged at a canal, followed it to the river, and he deposited me at an Indian police checkpoint. The road to Nepal was across a one-lane bridge atop an open dam ("barrage"? I'm no engineer). I joined the flow of Nepalis crossing the river on foot, completed the necessary formalities at Indian Immigration, and walked the remaining three kilometers across no-man's-land to Nepali Immigration, from where I hired a cycle-rickshaw to carry me the last seven kilometers to the Nepali border town of Mahendra Nagar. All told it was a bit of a performance.

The contrasts between the Indian and Nepali sides were evident immediately. Replacing the junk-strewn concrete villages of India, alongside the Nepali road were mud-walled huts and thatched roofs. I had difficulty speaking to some of the Nepalis, because they had soft voices and didn't like to bother you. In Mahendra Nagar I had boiled eggs for dinner, and was tossing the shells into the dirt. A Nepali man chastised me. "The shell is natural, but does not look so nice to throw trash on the street." Holy shit. We're not in Uttar Pradesh any more, Toto.

Another night in a crappy hotel. In the morning, a bus to Ambaasa, a random little intersection near my final destination. Though the bus was zippy, going was slow. We constantly stopped for passengers and Nepali Army checkpoints. Armed soldiers boarded the bus and gave everybody the once-over. They were looking for Maoists, who were suspected of smuggling arms through these parts. They found none on our bus. Perhaps they should have looked more closely at the convoy coming in the other direction: five cargo trucks full to bursting with cheering Nepalis waving red flags adorned with the hammer and sickle. That might be a good place to look for Maoists.

Until recently, Nepal had been in the throes of a latter-day communist revolution, with large swathes of rural Nepal being controlled by the Maoist guerrilla army. Now the Maoists are the largest party in parliament and peace has been restored but the army is clearly still wary of the rebels stocking munitions. As we drove along, we saw each town with its Indian-style symbolic town-gate. But rather than being adorned with elephants, Hindu gods, and frumpy-looking local politicians, the towns around were were painted with the hammer-and-sickle and communist slogans in Nepali and English. Across the lintel would be portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, with the Nepali Maoist leader Prachanda discreetly in the corner. After some five hours we came to the Karnali bridge, an epic new suspension bridge across the gorge where the Himalayan foothills spew forth a river onto the lowlands. It's been less than ten years since the entire part of the country West of the Karnali river has even had a reliable connection to the rest of Nepal. No wonder there's so many Maoists.

The bus stopped here for a chai break and I was invited to sit and drink with the locals. "What is your job?" one of them asked.
"I'm a journalist." I said. (Close enough)
"You're a journalist?" he replied, "Great, you're a journalist, I'm a socialist!"

There was much laughter. When it died down he repeated "OK, you be journalist, I be socialist."
"Can't I be both?" I asked ingenuously.
"You're a socialist?"
"Yeah, sure" I answered.
"What kind of socialist?" he asked, putting my knowledge of left-wing ideology to the test.
He probably would have been surprised by my knowledge on the subject, but instead I cheekily raised my glass to my lips and answered "A tea-sipping communist." The crowd could hardly contain themselves, and chai was on the house.

Directly across the bridge we passed through the edge of the national park until I hopped off at Ambaasa, which turned out to be two chai stalls, some houses, and a police checkpoint by the turnoff for a dirt road. There I sat for several hours, talking to a dude named Santoosh over a campfire and waiting for his jeep to show up and take us to the lodge. Under darkness again now, Santoosh and I were joined by his colleague Santosh and a pair of Brits. The jeep took us down the dirt track through the woods, splashing through streams and catching an assortment of deer and buffalo in its headlights. We arrived at the lodge late at night and I began planning my next day. I was to go on a full-day jungle walk with the lodge's expert guide, a fellow with a fiendishly difficult name who introduced himself by his surname, Gautam.

It was too good. "Gautam?" I asked.
He began to answer "Yes, you know, like..."
"People call me Buddha."

The next day, Gautam and Buddha hiked off into the forest together. The entire day we didn't run into a single other visitor. Even in the high season, this park is so out of the way for most tourist that it is visited by an average of ten people a day, including Nepalis. In the middle of winter, we literally had an entire national park to ourselves. We tromped along a riverbed and crossed into a dense jungle on the other side. Almost immediately we began running into tiger prints, and we both got very excited. Shortly thereafter, we heard a rustling in the bushes. We stopped, silent as rocks, and Gautam crept forward through the undergrowth. I could just see his hand waving for me to come. I slinked on between the branches, holding my breath, and emerged to find myself in a small clearing mere yards from...a giant, floppy wall of rhino ass. Rhinos are practically blind so we got even closer. I caught a few glimpses of its face, but it wouldn't turn around. It seemed unaware of us, which was good, but to entice it to turn and show its face would have required making sudden noises near a rhinoceros over open ground. Discretion being the greater part of valor, we chose instead to spend some time admiring the flaps of leathery armor on its big, gray butt.

As the morning went on we saw an innumerable variety of birds, as well as three species of deer: the spotted deer, the hog deer (a strange, dark, portly creature with antlers), and even the vanishingly rare swamp deer. Gautam taught me the basics of animal tracking in the jungle, but wisely insisted on doing the actual tracking himself. Walking along another riverbed I said "Look! Elephant tracks!" And indeed, they were elephant tracks. Locating where a herd of elephants has walked in soft mud is, I must tell you, a subtle and delicate art that I am proud to have mastered. We set off quickly in pursuit of the elephants, hoping we would find them lingering around a nearby bend. Cutting through the woods, we heard splashing, and ran to the riverbank, where we were disappointed not to see wild elephants, but a group of local elephant-drivers taking their mounts for a washing out in nature.

We tromped about the jungle and the grasslands for the entire day in search of more animals, hoping to find wild elephants or even the elusive royal Bengal tiger. At one point we found more tiger prints surrounded by a mayhem of deer tracks and a very clear trail of drag marks leading off into the bushes. Some deer wasn't coming home tonight. We pressed further up the river to a good tiger-waiting spot, and waited, and waited. After a few hours identifying birds with the binoculars we heard noise coming from the distant trees. A pack of monkeys was making a clacking noise, which Gautam told me was the warning of a tiger patrolling below. A group of deer crept out from the long grass and stood frightened in the open ground, looking in every direction but especially towards where the monkeys were yelling. The tiger was almost certainly in the stand of trees, not more than 100 yards from our position. We lay in complete silence and watched the scene unfold. The clacking began to subside, and through the binoculars we could see monkeys cautiously hopping between trees in our direction. The tiger had gone to the other fork of the stream, and though it was still close by there would be no way for us to approach it undetected. We concluded the day with no tiger sighting. Gautam apologized, and took some time to explain how rare it is to see a tiger in the wild, but I fully understood and wasn't disappointed at all by our close brush with the tiger. Gautam seemed sad too to have missed it.

We left the park at dusk. The lodge was on the far side of Thakurdwara village. At the park gate I heard a lot of giggling, and was soon invited to the fireside by a pair of attractive young park Rangers from the village. They told me that the Maggi festival of the local Tharu people was coming up in two days and they insisted that a nice boy like me stay for the festivities. Why the hell not, I figured, how many chances would I get to see an authentic rural festival here? I said I'd think about it.

On the way back to the lodge we passed through the edge of the village. I was invited into a longhouse to sample some of the local brews: "roxi", a hard alcohol made from rice that tasted a bit like kahlua, and "chaang" or "rice beer", a urine-yellow concoction that tasted like a bargain white wine with rice floating in it. After politely consuming two large bowls of this stuff, I discovered that it was not only closer to wine than beer in its taste, but also in its potency, and I was quite drunk. Gautam and I merrily hiked the remaining way through the fog as a silly drunken smile crept on my face, getting sillier and sillier. I tried and failed to read a book, then had dinner. At about this time, Santoosh walked in and asked me if I had happened to meet some park Ranger girls. I said that I had, and Santoosh told me that apparently I had become the talk of the Ranger force, which was largely composed of 18-to-22 year old Tharu girls, and that those who had not met me were most eager to, while those who already had spoke very highly of me.

Santoosh and Gautam asked if I would be staying to see the Maggi festival. With quite a bit of chaang floating in my system, and more than a little bit of an ego merrily bloated by the reports from the Ranger base, I agreed to stay. What would the next days bring? Only time would tell...