Went to Chitwan National Park the other day. I met a couple Finnish girls and a British couple on the bus on the way down, which was good because I ended up on an elephant with the Brit couple and in front of the Finnish girls later. The road to Kathmandu was blocked by a landslide that day, so the only people getting in were coming from Pokhara, like me, which was not very many of us. I met 3 Americans at my lodge who were stuck there for the day, not a bad place to be stuck, but I ended up with the place for myself for about a day between the Americans leaving in the morning and everybody else coming in from Kathmandu in the evening.
All the hotels are pretty similar. There is a mass of people at the bus standing there trying to get you to stay at their place, so I just picked the guy from the hotel that was the least aggressive. The taxi ride is free if you stay there, but I think I lucked out- I got a second story room overlooking the river like I wanted, even without the aid of a guidebook, since mine was in Kathmandu.
In the morning me and 2 other guides went on a canoe trip and then a jungle walk. We walked over to a watering hole and climbed into a tree and saw 3 rhinos. Even though we were fairly safe in the tree, I was pretty scared. Rhinos have been known to charge people, but my guide said that he had only been charged once in 18 years. It's also really hard to climb wet trees in hiking boots.
**note to women traveling alone** this kind of situation was where I was a little leery of being by myself, so I whipped out the old wedding ring and when the guide started asking me if I wanted to grab a coke by the river and hang out later, I said I didn't like coke (true) and when he asked if I was single, I pointed to my ring and said I was married (also technically still true). He left me pretty much alone after that, although I did hear stories from the Americans about this guide hitting on other single women. Fortunately I was prepared and I made sure I was never alone with the guy. This was also why I was leery of getting a guide for the whole Annapurna circuit, out of concern that something like that would happen and I'd be stuck with someone like that for 12+ days.
Other than that, it was a pretty good trip. I went down to see the elephants being bathed by their mahouts (drivers?) by the river, and went on an elephant ride. The elephant ride was kind of strange- we were all on a webbing platform with a railing on it and four people would sit on it, so I was actually sitting backwards the whole time. It's surprisingly hard to take pictures from the back of a moving elephant- a little bumpy. We had gone for almost an hour and a half and hadn't seen anything but a few deer, and started coming out to the edge of the forest, about 100 meters from a soccer game, where we saw 2 rhinos, an adult and a juvenile. Then we walked back into the forest and saw a mommy rhino and a cute little baby! Plus some wild boars. Not quite as cute. You can get pretty close to the rhinos on elephant-back since all the rhinos smell is elephant, not human. It's good for the rhinos that they are so defensive against humans, because of all the poaching, but not so good for tourists.
Got back to Kathmandu yesterday after a long bus ride and ran into a couple people from the trek, so I've been hanging out with them all day. Tomorrow is the big day of the Living Goddess festival, so that should be interesting.
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