The Trip to Bandhavgarh

Bandhavgarh is the one of the best Tiger reservoir in the India. It is comparatively a small jungle. But density of tigers is more, so the chances of the sighting is phenomenal. We 7 people decided to go to some jungle this year. we do it every year. our group is really interested in to wildlife, birding and photography. We are the group of people from age 20 to age 39. It’s the amazing combination of youth, maturity, excitement. So even though I love solo travels, I just love to hang out with these people for such trips. So we planned this year for the Bandhavgarh. We booked our safaris over online portal of the Bandhavgarh official government site. You can use below link for the online booking for the safari. Always book you tickets online only. It is the best and safe way. Yes, there are some on the spot entries available but those rules get change frequently. While booking online you can get the idea that how much rush and busy the jungle is going to be. https://forest.mponline.gov.in/ There are 2 options

full vehicle (for 6 people maximum)

single seat booking.

you can make your bookings as per number of people. There are 3 core jungle zones in this jungle.

Magadhi

Tala

Khitauli

All gates are good. When you book tickets give preference to tala then Khitauli and then Magadhi. This time we saw more tigers in Khitauli but that was the pure luck. Then we booked our stay. There are many resorts. Tiger hill resort, Mogli resort and many more. We booked our stay with Mogli resort. Here are numbers for the resort. +91 9301201244 /+91 9525156245 /+91 9479754540 / +91 9993615832 Then we booked our tickets for train from Pune to Jabalpur. from Jabalpur its around 160 km via road. You can book a car at the Jabalpur Railway station or you can pre-book the car by discussing with your resort. The day came and Journey started on the 15th of Dec 2018. Train journey is always an amazing one, especially when you are travelling with your fun people. We booked the sleeper couch as it was a winter season. So there was no need to have Ac couch. But there is one issue with sleeper couch always as people disturb you as much as possible. the come and sleep in between your birth, so u have to be always alert from thief and such kind of stuff. So its better to book AC couch in terms of comfort and for little disturbance. We enjoyed the railway journey.

It was the 17 hours of the tiring journey. We reached to the Jabalpur on the 16th of December 2018 at 2:30 p.m. from there Bandhavgarh is around 160 km. We decided to hire a cab from the station itself. He took 5000 rupees for showing us bhedaghat and then take us to our destination at Bandhavgarh. Bhedaghat is 20 km from the Jabalpur. It is the awesome place where you can see the river Narmada in it’s amazing form.We didn’t have much time to explore more places over there. So we just visited the dhuadhar waterfall. Here is the picture of dhauladhar waterfall. We reached to the mogli resort in the Bandhavgarh at 10:30 p.m. on the 16th of December. Hospitality in the resort was really amazing. The climate was cold. There were two villas reserved for us. They were really good. Overall we were excited a lot because of the climate and the thoughts of next morning jungle safari. We wear seven people. According to the Safari rules maximum 6 people can sit into the one gypsy. That’s why while online booking the tickets, we had booked the single seat separately. Six people in one gypsy nd one person with another group. It was obviously not feeling good to divide the group. There is no other choice. So we decided turn-by-turn one of our friends group will go into the another gypsy. I went like this for two times. Where I was the single person with another group in another gypsy. I purposely book the single seat Safari into the another zone of the Jungle. Because it is good if a single group is viewing two different angles at the same time. And this idea really worked very nicely. Whenever the 6 people did not see the tiger, the single person from the another Safari sighted the tiger. And luckily it was me and Onkar. You really got good photos of tiger. Now I don’t want to talk much… Just look at the Jungle what we saw in those 3 days and 5 Safari. The first photo taken into the Jungle in the early morning. It was taken with mobile Google pixel 2 XL. #pixelteam by Manasi. The beautiful jungle in the morning Gautam are the oldest elephant of jungle who is 80 years old. He is so beautiful, so calm. The photo is taken with the canon 5D Mark III and canon 70-200 f2.8 lens. The beautiful male nd female peacocks in the early morning enjoying. Mangu the very rare dominant male tiger: I saw him when I was riding as a single sheet with another gypsy in another zone. We sighted him for just 30 to 40 seconds when he crossed the road. On our last Safari 19th of December morning… She showed up. A beautiful tigress. She was dancing and running around us for 40 to 45 minutes. In that short period of time even we saw her killing a new born baby of nilgai. It was really sad moment when we came to know that it’s a newborn baby she killed. But it was a very rare site as well for enthusiast and a photographer. You are awesome amazing photos of her. What an amazing citing it was isn’t it? You can check this video, you will enjoy it. How the monkeys behave when these big cats are around. https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2455970707758601&id=100000370884608 We were really happy because we got whatever we needed. Amazing time, amazing weather, amazing place to live. 19th December afternoon and evening we had nothing to do. So we decided to roam around the village. We met really amazing and exciting children over there. Our group members where really involved in them so much and everybody was playing the local game named as “Imli danda”. You can see the video of the pure happiness on the below link. https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2450666741622331&id=100000370884608 Here I clicked some moments of the beautiful sunset and our group. The mogli resort was really amazing. The food over there is good but the accommodation and the area of the resort is overwhelming for any nature lover and photographer. It has really a big area and a number of trees and even a small river flowing through the resort area. In the summer the resort must be full of different varieties of birds. Following are the photos taken with resort. We started the return journey on the 20th December in the morning. It was really very exciting as well as mind relaxing trip as we expected. For namo photograph you can visit my Instagram account. https://www.instagram.com/thelonewolfotography I should say thanks to all my group the way they made this trip memorable. They are amazing people. People with me like Chinmay , Atharva , Onkar are amazing artists and photographers. They are so good at spotting the animals and birds in the jungle that even guides gets astonished. They are just amazing. You can check their Instagram accounts here. You will be amazed once you check it out. Chinmay https://instagram.com/chinmay1nisal?utm_source=ig_profile_share&igshid=rwqm88uqgunv Atharva https://instagram.com/atharva_dharane?utm_source=ig_profile_share&igshid=n42s3ocjfd2a Onkar https://instagram.com/atharva_dharane?utm_source=ig_profile_share&igshid=n42s3ocjfd2a Deepti my cousin, Manasi and Divya my friends do enjoy nature. They don’t need cameras to enjoy the nature. They just need their eyes and binaculars. They thoroughly enjoy nature and motivate us all the time… Summary: as we calculated individually we spend 16000 rupees. We had amazing travel lavish stay and too good jungle safaris. In 16000 rupees it was really much more than what we expected. The lone wolf Mayur