The road to Tala from the sleepy train staion
town of Umaria winds 30km over ever more forested hills dipping occasionally to
cross wide sandy river beds whose shallow waters glisten in the early morning
sun. As I lifted gently from my deep
sleep (courtesy of Indian railways being availed of everything but a first class
ticket) I noticed that the stilted shelters which stipple the paddy fields of
India were taller here, in fact they were six feet taller
...Not ony that, but thorny bushes marked
compound boundaries surrounding tightly clustered dwellings and cattle pens of
even thicker thorn thatch started to proliferate. I began to wonder if I had found the part of
India where both livestock and humans craved some privacy but in my next breath
I counted six men having a morning dump on one patch of open ground so this
theory did not hold true.
As we entered
Bandavgarh national park, the paddy fields slipped away and the jungle clung to
our tarmac strip occasionally yielding to thickets of bamboo or tall grassy
meadows where almost immediately I spotted a small antelope cautiously raise
its head from the grass ...and cautious every living thing should be here; for
my latest destination has the highest population density of tigers in the whole
of India!
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