Our fascination for Kanha Tiger Reserve/National Park made us to make our third visit(in 2007) to Kanha in Dec 2007. This time around too we had family and friends with us.
Instead of going to the standard and more popular gate i.e. Kisli we decided to venture to the Mukki side which is closer to Chattisgarh. Our drive from Nagpur through Seoni, Baraghat, Balaghat and finally Mukki was a beautiful one through some lovely ghat and forested areas. As we started approaching Mukki, temperatures started to fall. We had an incident with the Seoni police at Baraghat(You can read about that in my previous blog on Seoni Police). Wereached pretty late andchecked in the Kanha Safari Lodge of the MP Tourism department. The resort is very neat and clean, good service and most beautiful part is that the river Banjar runs along this making it a good place for trekking and enjoying nature.
Our trips to the park were enjoyable and as usual the tiger eluded us all along. Some of the things that the Govt should seriously think for considering are as follows:
1. Management at the Gate for entry and other stuff - too chaotic, the process is slow and as is famous in our country one who could pull the strings will get the things done faster. On the first day it took us 45 mins to gain entrance. Our love for foreigners is eternal and all folks around go out of the way to lay the red carpet - not out of hospitality rather the money element.
2. Guides - the guides in the Kisli sidewere experienced, here we landed with inexperienced folks whose only interest was tiger - many didnot know names of birds. I am told that the Director and his colleagues do conduct training program - however we didnot find consistency.
However we have to laud the guides for one thing - they donot allow you to litter the park area at all.
3. Movement of Vehicles- It was a Sunday and we were told that around 150-190 vehicles will be in the part at any point of time. Yes, its good for tourism - who bothers about the animals. There is a spot called Shravan Tal in the Kanha range where a tiger pair was spotted the day before. As we were passing through that range(we didnot have permit to stay there as routes were defined) we found almost 80+ vehicles along with very anxious tourists waiting and watching. All were talking lets wait for the tigers - they were seen yesterday maybe today they will come out.
It is a shame that for our pleasure and revenue we are already destroy the fragile envirnment - the noise, dust, vibration from all these vehicles will affect the animals.
I would raise a toast to the management of the Corbettt National park that they have restricted the max no. of vehicles to only Thirty(30) at any point of time - Read it in the Sanctuary Asia magazine.
The Kanha management should not loose focus of protecting the flora and fauna in the whole humdrum of generating money.
Having said all of these, I still feel its a very nice place to visit - we felt invigorated, energized and cultivated a whole new sense of connecting with nature.
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