Kaziranga National Park

Over Thanksgiving holidays we took advantage of a four day weekend to visit another new part of India. This one felt so very different from the India we experience every day, and we are so glad that we went!  

Kaziranga National Park is a state park in Assam, India and it is known as one of the few places where you can still see the endangered one horn Indian rhino. 

http://www.kaziranganationalpark-india.com/

Assam is in the far north eastern part of India, the part that is closer to Bangladesh and Bhutan than to the rest of India, and it was definitely a departure from the Delhi desert environment. We flew into Guwahati, and then had about a 5 hour drive through rural Assam before we arrived at our resort.

The night we arrived we decided to take a walk just before sunset to the gates of the park. Although usually you can only enter the park with an official guide, the guards at the gate let us walk in just a bit beyond the boundary.  This gave us a chance to see where the elephants that work at the park spend their evenings.  

 This man rode the elephant like this as it walked straight into the river...

 ... where it joined a few others that were being bathed.

 Mothers and babies alike were eating and playing by the side of the river.

The park is huge, and it is divided into three main touring areas. We were able to take two jeep safaris, one of which was a morning safari that was in the area of the park with the most diversity in bird species. We also took an elephant safari where we rode on the back of an elephant as it ambled through swamps and high grass, even walking directly up to the rhinos. That experience was something truly new, and while you don't go as far as you can on a jeep safari, ambling along at the elephant's pace, it was quiet and serene and we felt much more a part of the park than we did in the back of a jeep. The animals weren't startled by us, and we even got to follow a mother and baby rhino for a while through the brush.

See that rhino over there?

 Yup, that one...

 Let's just walk right up to it and see what it's eating!

Mama and baby rhino out for a stroll.

 A herd of wild elephants... we saw loads of them.

 More elephants!

 The sunset was spectacular.

Out on our last jeep safari, we stopped by the Brahmaputra river which is the northern boundary for the park. The river is very wide here, with lots of islands, some of which have permanent animal populations on them. Here is Ryan spotting more wild elephants living out on an island on the river. 

Enjoying the views over the flood planes of the Brahmaputra river.