Kaziranga NP

May 16, 2011

Hello,

I have been sleeping late practically every night after completing all the daily admin work. I slept at 03:00 hrs this morning. Though I had set the alarm for 07:30 hrs I could not get up at that time.

As usual Phadke Ajoba was ready quite early. By the time I woke, Raka & Raju had had their bath. Everybody had breakfast and we were on our way at 10:55 hrs. We had planned to reach Jorhat and then, time permitting, even up to Tinsukhiya by late evening. But the first target was to reach Jorhat and then take a call from there about the further journey.

The road from Guwahati to Shillong, Meghalaya, takes a diversion at Jorbat to go to Jorhat, Tinsukhia and Tezu which is a border town and district HQ in Arunachal Pradesh.

As I have mentioned in my earlier blogs, lot of road construction work is going on across the whole of North East. The roads being built are double carriage way concrete roads. But since the work is still not complete, there are rough patches and diversions at regular intervals. This reduced the overall average speed to just over 40km / hr after accounting for all the breaks.

The road to Jorhat is lined with trees with Pink, Violet, and Yellow flowers, beyond which there is forest. As one travels along and passes through small villages and towns one comes across huge plots of land with coconut, beetle nut, mango, banana, and palm trees. This reminded us of Konkan region of Maharashtra. As a matter of fact we found this kind of vegetation right across the eastern coast line and in to the heart of North East. The scene is exactly like that in Konkan.

One does not see much of industrialization here. There are just a few factories producing cement and paper. At the same time one does not see the utilization of local renewable natural resources as an engine of development. However in this remote under developed states of the country, double carriage way concrete roads are being constructed while in the highly industrialized and developed state of Maharashtra the NH17 which connects Mumbai to the southern coastal states of the country is still a single carriage way narrow road and we want to call it a highway! The commonality between the western cost of Maharashtra and this part of the country is extreme development deficit. Is it nature or is it the people?

It is worth noting that throughout our journey so far we encountered very heavy traffic of heavy commercial vehicles, if that could be considered to be an indicator of growth and development.

At 13:00 hrs we stopped to have some coconut water. Each tender coconut cost us Rs. 15, which perhaps was not very much cheaper than in Mumbai.

After some time we took another break for tea. Here we met a small group of young people, Mrudul Gayan, Bhupen, and Rajeev. They were very happy to meet us and spoke to us with lot of enthusiasm. They gave us information about Kaziranga NP, and Majoli. We ate some roshogullas here which I found to be better than those we had eaten in W Bengal.

After a few kilometers we entered the Kaziranga NP. The creation of this national park was proposed in 1904 by Lord Curzon, the then Viceroy of India at the instance of his wife Mary Victoria Leiter Curzon. It formally became a reserved forest in 1908.The area of the NP is 232 sq. km. There are five major species in this forest – Rhinoceros, Elephants, Asiatic wild Buffalo, Tigers and Swamp Deer.

Actually the highway passes through the NP. I drove very slowly in hope of citing the famous single horned Indian Rhino. Raka was not very hopeful about this. As we drove on Phadke Ajoba suddenly shouted and asked us to stop the car since he had spotted a Rhino far out in the grass land. I immediately stopped the car and all of us rushed out of the car with our cameras and tripods to see and photograph the rhino in its natural habitat. There were three of them grazing in the grass land, quite far from the road. We did some video shooting and took some still photographs using the zoom. We drove a little ahead and again cited another rhino a little closer to the road. Again we took some pictures and did some video shooting.

We moved on and reached a village called Kohora. Here there is the Kaziranga Tourist Complex. It was around 17:30 hrs and we decided to halt here for the night. We checked in to the Assam Tourism Development Authority’s guest house, Jupuri Garh. This is a beautiful property in the lap of nature. There are small cottages complete with all facilities.

We had dinner at 21:00 hrs. Raju, Phadke Ajoba, and Raka are already fast asleep and I too will sleep as soon as I am done with posting this blog.

Good night and see you tomorrow at the same place. Bye!