So, we’re four blogs in with the fifth down below. We’ve achieved a lot! Quick recap: beach, backwaters, city, mountains. There’s only so many more varieties of environment we can realistically achieve, but next we’re heading to the forest in the hope of seeing a tiger.

This is a quick one, as we only spent a night at Nagarhole Tiger Reserve. However, to compensate we have another special video; this one is my Western Ghats Special – combining footage from Wayanad and the safari for the ultimate in-land Southern India visual experience.

Day 17 & 18 – Nagarhole Tiger Reserve

Nagarhole Tiger Reserve is pretty massive, and offers some of the best chances as anywhere of seeing tigers and leopards. Indeed, once we’d crossed the border into Karnataka and arrived at our quite fancy safari resort, we encountered a whiteboard displaying what this week’s safaris had encountered.

As you can see, every single day a tiger and often a leopard were spotted. We had two safaris, one in the evening and one in the morning. Easy, we thought. No problem. Guaranteed.

Well, it was not the case. We saw neither tiger nor leopard. Was the board a lie? Were we just really unlucky? We’ll never know, and perhaps that’s what hurts the most.

I won’t act like too much of a spoiled brat though; we saw some lovely wildlife including ELEPHANTS and the forest was beautiful both at sunset and sunrise. It was a very worthwhile experience. I can’t say I’m thrilled with the pics, but here are some highlights:

Oh and need I say that Billie was, yet again, a master wildlife spotter? She spotted the Serpent Eagle and the Giant Malabar Red Squirrel, both of which we would have blithely driven past and we only saw one of each – significantly increasing the number of different types of animals we spotted. I felt our fellow safari’ers should have been tipping her rather than the driver…

We left Nagarhole in a gruelling 4 hour taxi ride with our most dangerous driver yet. It was not particularly fun, and after the previous 8 hours of being thrown around in a jeep, we arrived in Kannur with sore backs and bums and were more than happy to decide that our plan for the next few days was to simply chill the Capital F out.

What I did not expect to experience was an actual God embodying someone, sitting directly on the embers or a massive fire at 3 in the morning. More on that next time. Byeeee!