.airdeccan.com) offers one daily round-trip flight to Jabalpur.
Mahua Kothi Lodge (www.tajhotels.com) is located 118 miles from
Jabalpur's Dumna Airport and 142 miles from the Khajuraho airport.
Baghvan Lodge is located 55 miles from Nagpur and 119 miles from
Jabalpur. The staff at the lodges can arrange airport transfers for
an additional fee.
WE HEAD OUT the next morning for Pench
National Park, which is about an eight-hour drive to the southwest
and the site of the second Taj and CC
Africa lodge. Pench doesn't
have near the tiger population of Bandhavgarh, but it is home to a
healthy leopard population (name-change suggestion: Pench Leopard
Reserve), 350 species of birds, and a whole slew of other animals
that, again, none of us have ever heard of.
Pench differs from Bandhavgarh in that it is a teak forest (as
opposed to sol) and, overall, much more dense and far less crowded.
It's also
India's only interstate tiger reserve, as its collective
space crosses the border with the neighboring state of Maharashtra.
The lodge here, called Baghvan, is scheduled to open a few weeks
after our visit, so we stay at a nearby lodge, where we meet
Saruth, who is not only our naturalist but also the head naturalist
for all of CC Africa's Indian operations. We pick up our local
guide and hit the park. Again, there are chital. Lots of chital. We
tell Saruth not to bother, as we saw roughly 5,000 in Bandhavgarh.
Thus, the first spotting at Pench that shocks and awes us is of the
Indian roller, a gorgeous bird whose dynamic turquoise wingspan
looks Photoshopped - it's that vibrant. At this point, I begin to
see my future as a birder. It pains me to think about it, but I
assume that will ease with time. Next is our first spotting of the
aforementioned gaur, an endangered species that, as it turns out,
is the largest bovine in the world. Basically, it's a big, bad bull
that has an average weight of one ton. Seeing it is the highlight
of our morning drive, which otherwise leaves a lot to be desired
from a wildlife standpoint.