When I got lucky!!!

The experience was extraordinary.

Have you ever seen a tiger in the wild? I saw one in this month. I was coming back from Uttarakhand, my home town. It is a hill state of India. We were traveling at night. We had hired a taxi to go home. It was all dark. You cannot see the mountains but the twinkling lights amassed here and there. The headlights of the taxi lighten the road. It was all quiet. I was in the front seat with the driver. We had just covered a few kilometers when the driver saw a leopard on his side of the road. The leopard was walking down the hill.

He wasn’t surprised because leopards are too common in Uttarakhand. You might see one whenever traveling at night in the hills. So it was very normal for the driver. He almost sees a leopard on his night trip. He told us about the leopard and we moved on. After 80 kilometers, there comes a buffer zone where you find the hills gradually losing their height and the roads being less curved. And that region is where the famous Jim Corbett National Park is situated.

It is very beautiful to travel in that region. As we were going, suddenly our driver slowed the car to zero and immediately asked us to look at the right side of the taxi to see a tiger in the woods. Everyone else was asleep but they quickly woke up. Since I was in the front seat with the driver, I was not sleeping and I immediately looked for the tiger. The way it was sitting was just phenomenal, sitting upright and watching consciously as if it was preparing to greet us. It would be hardly 10 meters away from us, sitting on the land, like a king does in his empire.

It was calm and was looking right at our car. It looked like we all were having an eye contact with it. Its face was visible. Its ears were pointed up. It knew that we were looking at him. It gave us a gaze and turned back and went into the dark. While it was turning we could see the black stripes on his body, and slowly it disappeared in the woods. It wasn’t a huge one. I don’t know about the other people in the taxi but I saw it and I was just amazed. It all happened in roughly ten to fifteen seconds.

I don’t know how our driver spotted the tiger. There were no lamp lights on the road, it was all dark, just his taxi headlights and yet he was able to spot a tiger in the woods. You need some eyesight for that. Later the driver said that we all were very lucky to see a tiger.

Tiger is a very rare animal to be seen in the wild. India is home to more than 75% of the global tiger population. And Jim Corbett Park is one with the highest number of tigers in a National Park. This means the chances of seeing a tiger will be highest in this park. The park receives a large number of domestic as well as international tourists to get a glance at the Great Indian Tiger. The Jungle Safari is famous all over the world. But the safari won’t guarantee you a tiger. Many people see the wild cat in their first Safari, but many don’t see one after repetitive safaris. It depends on your luck.

A Tiger lives in the core of the Jungle and so it becomes tough for the tourist guides to promise that you will get to see a tiger. The animal roams around the Jungle in the dark, during the night. Thanks to our driver, he spotted one on our way.