Nepal | JOURNEYS
My eyes are fixed on the rhythmic movement of a long tail swishing in front of me on the banks of a misty backwater of the Narayani River. My guide, Sam Mahato, from Tiger Tops Tharu Lodge in Nepal's Chitwan National Park, has told me to walk six feet behind the elephant padding along a grassy track. And I do exactly that as we enter a dripping jungle, dark with rhododendrons, ferns and lofty blackberry trees where I am not top of the food chain. Sam stops. Pointing to a kapok tree bleeding with long, garish claw marks, he whispers: “A tiger was here last night.” A rustle makes me jump. A sambar deer vanishes. I creep a little closer to the elephant, Chun Chun Kali. She and her best friend Gulab Kali walking behind me are my only protection from the 135 Royal Bengal tigers and 600 rare Asian one-horned rhinos coated in plated armour roaming 1000 square kilometres of jungle.
Sixty-year-old Gulab and I go back a long way, to 1986 when I visited the original Tiger Tops, a long stilt house with open windows lit by kerosene lamps and founded in 1971 by the legendary conservationist Jim Edwards, who pioneered tourism in Nepal. Swapping guns for cameras, his jungle lodge became a mecca for well-heeled adventurers including King Charles, Henry Kissinger, Hilary Clinton and Mick Jagger. Back then, Gulab carried us on a strapped to her back and guests were woken in the night by a bell if a tiger took
