Up at 06:00 hrs. with a fond farewell to the pigsty and off to the Bhimsen Tower to catch a bus of dubious destination (do you feel lucky, punk?). At last the conductor confirmed that the bus was intending to call at Tádí Bazár and we leapt aboard.
The journey was rough despite a rare lack of overcrowding and by the time we reached Tádí Bazár we were both feeling sick. A stop at Mugling did little to help our stomachs and we fed most of the crappy food that we bought to a lucky haggard dog.
Our companions on the bus did little to discourage our malady, a gay Australian knob-jockey, a scruffy junkie and a pair of exceedingly ugly kraut birds. At Tádí Bazár we took to Shank’s Pony (walked) for the 6.3-kilometre track to Sauraha where the gateway to Chitwan National Park was situated.
As soon as we left the main road, we appeared to have entered Africa. Dusky natives tended cattle on the banks of a sluggish river in which fishermen cast nets with poetic flourishes. Women watched from thatched huts among the palm groves as we stitched up the canoe ferry wallah by declining his services and walked on amongst the hordes of leaping frogs.
We found a welcome haven in the Cristobel Huts where 15 Nepalese Rupees secured us for a double room. The clean airy thatched hut was a welcome change after the squalor of Kathmandu accommodation. We settled down to a vegetable curry as a pleasant Kiwi (New Zealand) girl gave us a run down on the national park.
Chitwan National Park is the first national park in Nepal. It was established in 1973 and granted the status of a World Heritage Site in 1984. It covers an area of 952.63 km2 (367.81 sq mi) and is located in the subtropical Inner Terai lowlands of south-central Nepal in the districts of Nawalpur, Parsa, Chitwan and Makwanpur. In altitude it ranges from about 100 m (330 ft) in the river valleys to 815 m (2,674 ft) in the Churia Hills.
Since the end of the 19th century Chitwan (Heart of the Jungle) used to be a favourite hunting ground for Nepal's ruling class during the cool winter seasons. Until the 1950s, the journey from Kathmandu to Nepal's south was arduous as the area could only be reached by foot and took several weeks. Comfortable camps were set up for the feudal big game hunters and their entourage, where they stayed for a couple of months shooting hundreds of tigers, rhinoceroses, leopards and sloth bears.
After lunch we retired for an afternoon siesta and when we awoke it was dark. I settled in to sweet and sour vegetables with rice, but George’s stomach was in turmoil and he returned to bed after reading his book for a short while. I went for a walk around the locality and found the park entrance. The moon was nearly full and the area was well lit, the air vibrant with insect noises.
I returned to Crisobel’s central communal hut to read “A Walk in the Sun” by Harry Brown by lamplight. The book was published in 1945 when the author, Harry Brown, was just out of the service, and went immediately to Hollywood, where it became a successful film. Brown himself never saw action in WWII--he was a columnist for Yank magazine--but he captures the flavour and language of troops in action with brilliant accuracy.
When I turned in for the night George was retching and shitting like a good’un. Sickness, far from being “an alien feeling” was becoming an all too unwelcome visitor to his camp. I dozed on and off through a cold night as George vomited into the wicker waste bin and made several toilet trips behind our hut, number 101.
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