We spent a couple of days in the Ranthambhore area. The main attraction was the Ranthambhore Tiger Preserve or National Park. The park was the former hunting preserve of the Maharajas of Jaipur. The park is bordered by two major rivers but also has many streams, creeks, and six man-made lakes. The park is over 500 square miles and has an incredible variety of vegetation and land formations. We saw large Savannah grassland areas, massive rock formations with steep rock escarpments, flat and rolling land areas and elevation changes that were probably around 1000 feet. The vegetation was also a wild mix. We saw dense forests, high grasslands, bush areas, and plants from palm trees to cactus to banyan and mango trees. Our time in the park was called game-viewing drives, but we saw very little variety of game, especially large game. We saw large numbers of birds though. The park also has the old Ranthambhore Fort which dates to the 10th century. It’s fallen on hard times but was still interesting to hike around and see. I bet there were plenty of big battles fought there and quite a social life back in the days.

The main focus on our game drives was to see a tiger, of which the park supposedly has about 35, and a leopard, of which the park has about 40. We never saw either one. We did, however, get stuck in the mud in an area where our guide said they knew a tiger and two tiger cubs lived. We had to get out of the truck and stand in the woods while the guides got the truck out of the mud. I wasn’t too worried as I figured that I wasn’t the oldest or the weakest of the group.

I will only include this one post from Ranthambhore Park. These are a few of the animal photos that I took in the park. The first one is a Sambar deer that is grazing in the shallow edge of a lake with lots of water weeds on the water and a stork on his back. The second photo is a Chital or spotted deer. The third photo is a Nilgai or Blue Bull antelope.