The Peninsula Drive Part 2 – Bandipur, Kabini, KGudi

Our drive to our final leg of the journey took us to through short stops at Guruvayur, Kozhikode, Wayanad into Karnataka’s famed forest reserves of Bandipur, Kabini and K Gudi.

A nonstop safari fest, 14 in total, over the next 7 days was great fun.

The forests are just sublime. Verdant, hilly in parts, dense vegetation in places and then around the corner is a grassy open plain, filled with deer.

Bandipur was all about the elephants and bears.

We were fortunate to see a day old elephant calf that could barely stand. With skin too large for its size, the calf was trying hard to stay up and suckle. Mama elephant was very protective and shielding the calf from our view, while helping it stay up with her trunk and feet. We had a fleeting glimpse of a tiger at dusk while it crossed our path.

We also had a Tusker and another female elephant charge at us, and we had to hightail it!

Then, there are very fascinating termite mounds- some of them are tall isolated mounds glowing in the sun, while others are just small stubs about a foot high but in a cluster like a residential colony.

Kabini is a beautiful forest! Winding roads, tall trees, grassy plains, Kabini river meandering within, and so many herds of deer!

I have never seen as many packs of wild dogs as we did this time. We saw at least six different packs. They were goofy and playful and we did not see any of the aggression of pack hunting!

There is an early morning mist and our leopard sighting was under these circumstances. The leopard walked ahead of our jeep and then crouched for a kill and later changed his mind.

There was some great tiger sighting and we spent a good amount of time as a tigress walked around roaring for her cubs!

The forest in K Gudi was the thickest of the three and it felt that any chance of an animal sighting would happen only if the animal stepped on the road or was just off it. As it happened, the lone tusker and the Indian Gaurs we saw were just off the road.