Day two in the Jungle

This day starts early at 5:30 am. We get coffee then hop into the jeep with a family of 4 who are visiting the lodge. This morning is bird watching. Now Rick and I aren't much into bird watching but its an outing so we go along. We see a lot of eagles, king fishers and a rhino in the distance.

At a few points during the drive we have to cross security check points and I noticed that the driver handed big branches of lychee fruits to the security guards. We had noticed that there are quite a few fruit trees on the lodge property—lychees, mango and pomelos. The mangos and pomelos are still green but the lychee fruit are just starting to ripen and we asked about them, we were told to help ourselves to any of the the fruit that we wanted to. I guess the fruit are popular with security guards too.

We get back to have breakfast then we're drive back to the sunset point to see the elephants getting their daily baths. We're invited to get on the elephants (if we want) and to get into the water a scrub their backs. I woman is walking around with a bunch of bananas in her hand. She's selling the entire bunch for 100 rupees, a bit costly, but I buy them from her to feed the elephants. That starts a run on banana selling and the woman gets a couple of kids involved in running banana bunches for her to keep her in stock.

I'm sure that the elephants could smell the bananas cause the closest ones started walking towards us. They take them one by one in their trunk and move them to their mouths.

After lunch we head to a Tharu Cultural museum which contains many old tools and clothing. It also explains that the Tharu are the oldest culture to exist in Chitwan today. Through generations of living in the jungle, they have developed a natural immunity to malaria. Due to some issues (not sure what) the government removed them from their land and then re-assigned them a place to live. This caused many Tharu to change their way of living form fishing to farming and many became impoverished or did not survive.