Day 11
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Day 11: Monday 9th December

Hotel Yeti to Chitwan; Jungle Walks & rhinos.

It was a bad night for Alex - I snored. Maybe I shouldn't drink...

The bus leaves at 9am - green grass, trees, tarmac road, checkpoints, neat front gardens, thousands of schoolkids looking at us. The roads are fairly empty, and horns are pipped rather than held blaring. The backdrop to the flat road is a wall of Himalayas ahead - the underpant and vest hoardings so common in India give way to the Happy Condom.

Toilet stop at the side of the tree-lined road (men on one side, ladies on the other) - all but Lady Sniffles (Carolyn) and Nursey (Alison) get out and walk for a bit.

Eventually, at a bend in the road, the road becomes more dirt-track and we stop for transfer to jeeps. Here waits a lone white man - Jamie, Scottish/Glaswegian, waiting for us. Clare's "entertainment", we ask? No, another Explore organiser doing a reckkie for an ad-hoc 29th Dec departure from Delhi - he hasn't yet witnessed the Chitwan section.

Checkpoints for today: 9 stops and 1 actual check.

Kirby rides "Lord of India" style beside the luggage mountain on his jeep to our resting place, The Green Mansions [p2, p3, p4].

We all get keys from 'reception' (a roundhouse in the middle of the lawn), find our native-style bedrooms (with brass washbasins), and eat lunch in the restaurant.

At 2:30pm there's a meeting in the reception roundhouse about the "Jungle Walk" (also known as 'looking for rhinos'); Clare points out how scary it can be and we ultimately end up in 3 teams of 5 - although Alison initially wavers, I think she eventually joins in, but Lynn chooses not to get mauled.

And the instructions: if you meet a Great One-Horned Indian Rhino, and you're upwind from it, you'll smell particularly unpleasant to it, and it will charge. Advice: run, up a tree preferably, and in a zig-zag if not (until you can get out of its way). Wild bears, on the other hand, hate to be ignored, and will scratch your face - the best thing is to curl up (protecting your face) and play dead. Tigers aren't even discussed - just too unlikely; no mention of sloths or leopards either.

We enter the park by crossing the river (it takes two trips to transport everyone, and the boat's barely above the water in ours!). The teams are me, Andy, Graham, Kirby and Frances; Jamie, Carolyn, Jo, Sally, Alison(?); Susan, Caro, Alex, Gill, Chris. Initially we all hang around together, then we split, hanging back to see the wildlife either side of the river. In undergrowth, beside a tree, we hear heavy rustling... our guide goes ahead... we wait... a large rustle and a load of the Susan's group come running out of the bushes - our guide signals 'run' and we split back - I shin up a tree!! Everything goes quiet, and we all laugh.

Our guide takes us off to another area, through undergrowth, to a clearing, leading to a watering hole... more rustling and a rhino comes out to drink. We stay well back in the clearing and take photos - there's a rustling beside us, so we withdraw back into the track, stop, and I crouch off the track - another quick panic - nothing happens - and we give up and walk through.

Take a good walk through the thick undergrowth, pausing, until we reach a clearing and the edge of the river bed opens out to a vast flat landscape. Our guide describes poo (rhino's black, elephant's brown), gestation (12-16 months rhino, 22 elephant), and shows us all the wildlife as dusk falls. We meet a fisherman casting his nets beside the river - he's got a silver fish in his basket already - and he demos casting to us for the camera.

Darkness rolls in as we wait for the queue to get back across the river; there's buffalo being walked across the river just down from us and we thought of getting a lift, but no, we wait for the boat.

We're the last to arrive back at the Mansions. Dinner is served in the restaurant after tales of expeditions have been swapped; after dinner we move into the 'den' off the main restaurant and belt out some music before bed.