After a night’s rest at a New Delhi Airport hotel, we fly to the city of Guwahati in the northeastern state of Assam and then drive for 6 hours to Kaziranga National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This really is close to the northeastern tip of India, with Bhutan to the northwest, Bangladesh to the south and Myanmar to the east. The forests of central India have now given way to true jungle.

But as numerous signs on the main road that skirts the park warn and inform us, Kaziranga’s “flagship” animal is the Indian One-horned Rhinoceros……Rhinoceros unicornis.....

......and even on the drive to our jungle lodge, we spot several.

We’re here for three nights and four safaris at the Diphlu River Lodge, just across the river from the park itself. Seemingly the best in the area, as the Lodge has previously welcomed a fairly well known couple (for once, not Bill & Hillary 😂) who spent a couple of nights here.

No record that I’m aware of of what wildlife they saw, but if their guide/naturalist was even half as good as Hrishi, our guide they might have seen the park’s “big five”as we did.

The Indian One-horned Rhino

The Wild Indian Elephant

The Wild Asian Buffalo

The Eastern Swamp Deer

And of course, the Bengal Tiger

We saw much more including the rarely sighted Hog Badger

And a difficult to see (as they stay mostly high up in dense foliage and rarely come to the ground) family of ……gibbons, a sub-species native to northeastern India and neighbouring countries

Sandra and I skip the final afternoon safari (and so miss the tiger sighting) so that we can visit a nearby small collective of silk and cotton weavers and a Mising village. The Mising are an Indo-Tibetan tribe numbering around 700 thousand, most of who live now in Assam. They are predominantly Hindu, some are Christians and they also practice a traditional religion……, particularly just before rice harvest time. At least in the area we’re in, the Mising are rice farmers, fishermen and weavers.

The endangered one-horned rhino aside (almost exclusively found in Assam), it’s tea that is synonymous with Assam and the state is one of the world’s major producers. We pass extensive tea plantations but at this time of year, outside the “plucking” season there isn’t much activity to spot.

So that brings our “Sari Safari” to a close. Spectacular would be an understatement given the number of tigers, leopards, rhinos, buffalo and elephants we’ve encountered at close range as well as much other wildlife (some of it endangered) and enormously varied habitats.

It’s now a six hour drive back to the airport in Guwahati, a three hour flight to Delhi and then a short hop to Jaipur…..but that’s a story for the final entry of this blog