Bamboo Rafting in the Reserve

The next day had us engaging in an activity pitched as "Bamboo Rafting." Now when I think of rafting, I think of rivers and whitewater and physical activity. It ended up being a lazy wildlife watching day-cruise on scrap bamboo trunks roped together into small flotillas. But without the wildlife (seriously, the only animals we saw were humans digging for clams on the banks). We were escorted again by an armed escort and the guides/raftsmen.

It was on a lake made by the downstream damming of the Periyar River and so the lake was punctuated with gnarled, dead, half-submerged tree trunks. Had the weather been foul, dark, and stormy, it would have been the perfect setting for a horror movie. But in broad daylight it looked sort of silly. Kind of like, "Well, we have this lake now, what do we do? I know! Let's float tourists around on it!"

But that we spent like 6 hours on these boats and didn't see a single animal made it more or less ridiculous. Eventually, we parked our boats and began walking again. Our armed escort had left us when we boarded the rafts (water keeps us safe from the tigers?) but when we disembarked in a different spot, he was no longer with us. Now in all seriousness, walking along the known tourist trails has got to be pretty safe even without a guard - the tigers hardly frequent those places anyway. But because we saw NO wildlife whatsoever, our guides were going to try to give us some value-adds. They led us deeper into the sanctuary and into a tall-grass savannah-type plain. With grass taller than Mary and all around us, another member of our group made the astute observation that THIS is really where we need the armed guard. As the wind blew over the tops of the grasses making them undulate, it was altogether too easy to imagine being stalked by a tiger. It could have been 2 feet away in the grass and we never would have known. I felt like I was in the Jurassic Park scene where the scientists and badguys are running through the field and they're getting pulled down by velociraptors that you can't see. His observation was met with nervous laughs. Those laughs turned into anxious silence when it became clear that our "guides" had lost their way. Eventually they led us out to a vast open plain across which we could see elephants! In broken english they told us not to tell anyone what we were about to do, and we marched across the open plain to where the elephants were. About a 150m away, they got whiff of our arrival and started slowly lumbering away. We got a few snaps in before they disappeared around a bend.

We then hiked back to our starting point, had a snack, and our day ended as the sun began to set.