India

It’s been a while since I’ve had time to sit down - alright, true, I’m already sitting - to write a longer article so I thought I’d share with you some of the magic of the trip to India we did back in March. I’m still processing it in my head as everything was a bit of a whirl after that - the Iran War was in full flow so I had to fly up from Nagpur to Delhi and on to Riyadh to cover the war, first from the Saudi capital and then from Qatar. So pleasant memories of our India trip are still coming floating back, unbidden but very welcome.

We landed in Mumbai where the airport seemed green and lush but once we got to Nagpur - the self-proclaimed capital of tiger country - the scenery was dry, brown and brittle.

Our accommodation, a couple of hours south of Nagpur at Tadoba, was a collection of comfortable villas with a central dining hall. Butterflies and dragonflies were everywhere, especially the wonderful Lime Swallowtails.

In the morning our guide and I got up at dawn to birdwatch beside the road where the tries were alive with warblers, shrikes, babblers and bee-eaters. In India the heat can be intense but the early morning and late afternoon light is such a pleasure for photography.

But the birds were something of a bonus. We had come to see wildlife, specifically Royal Bengal Tigers, a species that India has successfully rescued from a catastrophic decline in numbers so that now there are dozens of reserves spread across this vast country. It’s important to mention that the Tadoba reserve where we were is not a ‘zoo’. The tigers in its forests are completely wild and could stroll into the nearest village if they chose.

We drove to the entrance of the reserve, transferred to a high, open-topped jeep and handed over our mobiles as instructed. There had been some unfortunate incidents, we were told, where everyone had started live-streaming selfies just as a tiger appeared so it was decided to ban mobiles altogether. This was quite a relief.

Our first mammals were the langur monkeys, whose cries of alarm can often give away the presence of a tiger lurking nearby, deep in the undergrowth.

But then we witnessed a rare sight: an entire family of sloth bears crossing the road. Riding on its mother’s back, one of the cubs was very keen to go off and climb a tree and had to be barked at by its parent.

There are people, we were told, who come to India and visit a whole string of tiger reserves yet never actually see one. We were lucky.

On our very first afternoon we were blessed with the most thrilling spectacle: a mother and her cubs drinking from a stream, oblivious to us and others watching in awe from a safe distance. The sheer power contained in those massive shoulders was clearly on display.

During the week that we were in India we did not see tigers every day. Sometimes they eluded us, having gone to ground deep in the forest where no one can disturb them.

But when we did see them it was absolutely mesmeric. The one instance I will never forget is when a tigress suddenly emerged from the shadows of the trees to stand right beside our jeep. She curled her lip in a snarl and then leapt gracefully away, leaving us silent and speechless.