Gaur This coffee-brown ox is roughly the size of a Mini Cooper - give or take a pound or two.

Nilgai This antelope, also known as a blue bull, appears to be half horse, half deer. It turns out that there are even a few in Texas. Who knew? WE ARE SCHEDULED for our first game drive in the afternoon with our naturalist, Kartikeya. We go over some of the distinct differences between African and Indian safaris. For one, national parks in India are public - there are no private game reserves - and therefo re are open to anyone and everyone. For another, the local guides, whom everyone entering the park must hire, do not carry weapons. (The local guides should not be confused with the naturalists, who are trained and educated by CC Africa but who still cannot enter the park without a local guide.)

As far as landscapes go, Africa is known for its vast, open savannas and grasslands, while India's parks are more jungly. (Though the word jungle actually derives from Hindi, a jungle is really more of a forest than what we normally think of as a lush jungle. But Rudyard Kipling's famous The Jungle Book was partly based here, so who am I to argue?) It's the last major difference, though, that strikes us as the most surprising: There are no fences along the park's boundaries.

Okay, I'll bite. "So how do you keep the tigers in the park?" I inquire, thinking of the nearby villages our driver left in a trail of dust only minutes before. Kartikeya smiles. "We don't," he says. He tells us that just last month, two local cattle herders were killed by a tiger. With that, we enter the park.