Robert and Ann's Travel Adventures: Ranthambore National Park India Part 3 of our 10 day trip in India

Ranthambore National Park India Part 3 of our 10 day trip in India

This morning we set off to Ranthambore National Park for our tiger safari part which is a 6 hour car journey away, after about 1hr we stopped to visit Fatehpur Sikri a fortified ancient city and the rest of the journey was broken up with some stops along the way and also a lunch break.

Fatehpur Sikri was built by the Mughal Emperor Akbar and it was the short-lived capital of the Mughal empire between 1572 and 1585. It was intended to be the most beautiful city ever built, and for a while it was, until it was abandoned and the capital moved to Lahore in present day Pakistan.

Emperor Akbar’s was the greatest of the Mughal emperors of India, and within the city is the memorial to Emperor Akbar’s elephant, this elephant executed people that the emperor had found guilty by walking over their chests.

Factoid: The English spelling of the name is mogul which signifies a person of power, like a media mogul. Well, it originated from the word “Mughal” who were direct descendants of the fearsome Gengis Khan – powerful indeed.

Today's journey also took us along through many different villages, and it was interesting to notice that the different villages specifically do mainly one thing, some just grow a particular crop while others may sell mainly red sandstone. The road side street markets are bewildering as one stall will be welding a tractor and right next to it will be a fruit seller, then a café, then a motor bike repairer to be honest there are loads of motorbike repair places and puncture repair places. The motorbike numbers here are massive and it's quite common to witness up to a family of 5 on a motorbike.

We arrived at about 17:00 at our 2 night accommodation which is at The Shargarh Resort and tomorrow we have to meet at reception at 05:45am for the first of two tiger safaris.

Ranthambore National Park is one of the biggest national parks in Northern India, but before it was a national park it was a game sanctuary. In 1973, it was declared as one of the Project Tiger reserves in India, and on 1st November, 1980 it was declared a national park and now Ranthambore National Park is a major wildlife tourist attraction covering an area of approximately 400 sq km, and you can only enter into it by one of the various controlled gates around its perimeter which are called zones.

This morning we are up ready and excited for our two safari tours as we were being picked up at 05:45am for the first of our two safari tours today. Our transport this morning was a small 6 seater safari jeep, we did see larger capacity jeeps but for us a smaller one was perfect, as it was more personal, 6 tourists, the driver and a ranger.

The late afternoon tour was the same arrangement, we were picked up at 14:30 but this one was into a different zone and we did not leave the park until sunset.

Both our tours were not time orientated, they were unrushed and having the rangers on board giving us information made the whole experience extremely enjoyable.

As with all safari’s there’s no way of predicting what wildlife you will see. Unfortunately we didn’t see a tiger, but we did see a leopard, a very rare sloth bear (about 5ft in size) that was walking through the trees only about 10 metres away, two different types of deer, two types of Antelope and many types of birds.

Today we are on route to Jaipur

#robandann