NEPAL 032712 Water and Elephants

Dear Friends

Today was a marvel of pleasant ways to watch nature.  We started with another dugout canoe trip on the Rapati River. Instead of walking left out of our hotel to catch the boat for the short ride that had so captured our imaginations, we met out boatman near the riverside cafes for a three-hour float into the realm of colorful Nepalese water birds.  In the silence of the boat we could hear the bird calls and see them at their level, a much different experience from looking down on them from a jeep, and I felt myself relaxing into the experience deeper and deeper as the distance between us and the resorts increased.  Donna sat in front with Gopal and they went through the bird book -- amazingly he knew which page to direct her to for most of the species we had seen -- and they estimated that we saw at least 65 different birds.  

We also entered the world of the people who live by the river.  We glided by a "Laundromat" where women dressed in various shades of red squatted by the bank with their washbasins and rocked back and forth as they pushed the dirt out of their clothes.  Along one bank a group of women carried massive loads of freshly harvested elephant grass on their backs using tumplines to support the weight.  They walked -- it must have been refreshing river as we passed by.  Later, when we saw a HUGE crocodile swim under our shallow draft canoe, we shivered to think of the peril these women put themselves in to feed their livestock fresh fodder.  As the river is not very deep, our boatman used a pole to propel us most of the time and switched to a canoe paddle to guide us in the small rapids.

We disembarked at a spot where we had just seen five elephants cross the river under our amazed and appreciative gazes, and we walked to an observation tower at the edge of a long, narrow lake for lunch.  Gopal had prepared a feast of rice, fried chicken pieces, mango juice, apples, and oranges. As we were eating, three men approached with two elephants that they hobbled and allowed to graze in the elephant grass surrounding the tower.  Gopal called to them -- he had prepared a lunch for them from our substantial leftovers -- and they joined us on a lower level of the tower. 

We enjoyed a refreshing breeze from our perch, and watched the birds and crocs that lived in and near the lake and fed the elephants our bananas and apples.  After their snack and grazing, the elephants found a wallow of mud and refreshed themselves buy rolling around in the moisture.  When their mahouts discovered their muddy elephants, they took them to the lake, urged them in, and gave them baths.  The picture below shows them leaving the lake to return to grazing.  What a delightful and surprising afternoon's entertainment for us :-)

Heading home after a refreshing wallow and rinse in the lake.

. . . and we also headed "home" as well via jeep and canoe across the river and a walk through "downtown" Sauraha back to the Parkside Hotel for showers and dinner  -- with potatoes.