October 18th, 2019
Last night we once again got completely eaten up by mosquitos even though we had a mosquito net and I was in my bug repellant sleeping bag liner. I think it has lost all of its bug repelling properties as all night mosquitos were just biting me right through it. We got up early to have breakfast before our jungle trek. I thought this was an expensive activity for both our budget and compared to what other things cost in Nepal. However, there are really only two places in the world you can see the Greater One-Horned Rhino and they are Nepal and India. I thought since we are all the way here, we should at least try to see this endangered species. The cost was $50 per person and it included your entrance ticket to the park (which is $20) and two guides. It is required to have two guides with you while you are in the park. One in front leading the way and one behind you. In my mind a rhino is the closest animal we have to a dinosaur in this day and age, so I thought it would be pretty cool to get to see one. Of course, when you go on a trek like this, you cannot be guaranteed to see anything. They told us to just go with the expectation of a nature walk and we might get lucky with some animals. I thought $100 would be an awfully expensive nature walk so I really had my fingers crossed.
There are also Bengal tigers in this area but I really had zero expectation to see one of those. I thought that would be extremely rare for a tiger to let us see it in the wild. It was super-hot and muggy. Within five minutes of our trek we were drenched in sweat. Back to that old familiar feeling of the sticky mixture of sweat, bug spray and sunscreen. There were a ton of bugs and leeches! I wore long pants and sleeves but all day we were pulling leeches off, and I was swatting at bugs buzzing my ears. Although this park has a 100,000 visitors a year, it really felt like we were hacking our way through raw jungle as most of the time was spent going through grass that was much taller than us, and we had to power through all the trees, branches, and shrubs that wrapped around us as we walked. We also saw very few other trekkers considering how many people visit here.
After I saw the first leech on me, my focus for the rest of the day switched from looking for animals to trying to keep the bugs and leeches off of me. It felt like it had been a really long time of jungle trekking and I was thinking it must be close to the end of the day, or at least time to have a really late lunch and I looked at my phone to see it was only 9:51am. This was a really long day… I was once again reminded that I am not really a jungle person. It is just too sticky with too many bugs.
The day went by extremely slow and the only things we saw were just ordinary run of the mill animals like deer and birds and a peacock. Before lunch we saw some wild buffalos and some elephants living in captivity that were owned by the Nepali government. I guess the government uses them to ride around on and do park surveillance. I thought riding around on an elephant in the jungle is a pretty interesting government job to have.
We finally stopped for lunch and ate what our hotel had packed for us which was veggie fried rice and two hard boiled eggs (I just had the rice). After lunch we continued to trek through the jungle for several more hours. I started feeling very pessimistic about seeing a rhino, and if anyone would have mentioned just going back to the hotel during any of these afternoon hours… I totally would have been down. I started thinking even if we did spot a rhino it was probably going to be super far away and really anti-climactic. We saw rhino poop, we saw rhino tracks and at two different points we even HEARD a rhino, but no luck on seeing one. We also saw some tiger tracks and that was kind of cool.
After nine hours of trekking without seeing anything notable, I was pretty much over it. I just wanted to go back to the hotel and get a Coke, and a Kit Kat and cut our losses. I could tell our guides really wanted us to see something though as I am sure he felt bad. It seemed like the longer we went without seeing something, the harder he tried. We kept going to more spots and after a while he just had us sit down to rest while he went looking a little further. I was literally about to tell him “it’s okay, don’t worry about it because I am ready to go back now” when he ran up and told us to quickly and quietly follow him. He whispered to us “we go see rhino now”. We followed him through more of the bush before he stopped and pointed. There it was. A big ole’ rhino munching away on trees. We slowly got closer until we were as close as the guide deemed safe. We watched the rhino eat the trees and plants for 15 minutes. It was pretty darn cool.
Definitely a better ending to our day than not seeing one at all. After we watched and took lots of pictures, we started to head back with big smiles on our faces. Then all the sudden we saw a second rhino lounging in the river where we had been sitting right before we saw the first rhino. This guy was also super close and we got some great pictures.
Then our guide pointed out a THIRD rhino way in the distance across a big field. He asked if we wanted to walk further and go see the third one but we declined because we felt happy with the first two we had gotten as close to as possible.
We had a happy ending to our long day and like most things that seem difficult or uncomfortable in the moment, I look back and am happy I did it. In the end we both felt like it was worth the money and the long, hot walk with all the bugs. On our way back to the hotel, we walked by where all the government elephants are kept and they were all chained up. A couple of the big, beautiful males were using their trunks to try and get the chains off from around their feet and it just broke my heart.
This park is obviously hugely dedicated to protecting the rhinos with their conservation efforts but I don’t understand why they don’t also treat the elephants with the same respect. Seems so cruel to keep such a big, intelligent animal chained at the feet. When we visited the elephant sanctuary in Thailand all of the elephants could just roam freely.
We made it back to the hotel and had dinner. I took Benadryl before bed hoping it would help with all my itching from mosquito bites and allow me to get some sleep.