Ranthambore National Park

We headed to Ranthambore National Park to see if we could get lucky and see some Bengal tigers.

Sawai Madhopur

We decided to stay in town as friends of ours had told us that they stayed out of town and were stuck in their hotel for all their meals, etc. Unfortunately, we chose a hotel completely on the wrong side of town about a 40-minute walk away from the other hotels and the safari pick up and about a 20 – 30 minute walk away from the town center and restaurants. (The first photo below is the street our hotel was on).

This town had so many cows wandering around it! And wild boars – there seemed to be several families of these walking the streets.

Our hotel was also a bit strange. We ordered lunch the first day and ended up not actually getting a single thing that we ordered! (This one wasn’t available and this one would take too long, etc.). We were put in two different rooms on two separate floors so the first night we decided to take advantage of the backyard and sat at a table to play cards. At 9 pm they told us to be quiet and at 9:05 they shut off the lights so we couldn’t even see our cards! We were the only guests in the hotel! Unbelievable!

We also asked the manager to book us two safaris when we first arrived. One for the next afternoon and one for the following morning (there are only 2 safaris per day – morning or afternoon). When we woke up on our first morning, it turned out he didn’t book the safaris for us! So our trip was nearly all for naught. After R got angry and I tried to book online, the manager finally said that he would try again but that the hotels only have a 15 minute window to book safaris (yeah, right!). But, in the end, he managed to get us onto two safaris for the times we wanted.

Ranthambore Safaris

Ranthambore National Park is spread over nearly 400 square kilometres and is divided into 10 safari zones. Zones 1-5 are considered the core zones and the best ones to see tigers. We were allocated zone 5 for our afternoon safari and zone 4 for our morning safari. We saw more wildlife in zone 5, but the drive and scenery in zone 4 were nicer. Actually, we nearly missed our morning safari because the hotel manager booked us a tuk tuk for 5 am (pick up was at 5:30 on the other side of town) and the tuk tuk didn’t show up! 🙄 So R, went running into town (while the rest of us walked quickly) to find us another tuk tuk to take us.

We did see a tiger on our first afternoon safari, but it was too far away to get a photo on our phones. (Yes, the feature image on this post is fake). People with newer phones and telephoto lenses got good photos, but not us. However, there were a lot of other really cool animals and scenery to enjoy.

Our next stop was going to be Udaipur, but we realized it was a long ride, so we decided to break it into 2, and spend a couple of days exploring Bundi. The ‘Cow Count’ from Ranthambore to Bundi was 309 cows and 1 camel.