Safaris in India

I am a wildlife enthusiast and photographer. Want to visit the Safari trails of India. Not sure how many I can cover with the 15 days I have at hand. Open to recommendations!

Hi,

This time last year I went to the North East Indian states of Assam and Nagaland on a wildlife-focussed tour. It was a brilliant trip largely thanks to a superb guide who had an amazing knowledge of birds and other wildlife.

Starting at Manas NP for 3 nights ( highlights included a Black Panther (!), crab-eating mongooses and a family of otters together with Elephants and Great One-horned Rhinos), Nameri NP for 2 nights and Kaziranga NP for 3 nights ( highlight was a brief sighting of a Bengal Tiger). After a morning spent at the Gibbon Wildlife Sanctuary near Jorhat we moved on to Nagaland to witness the amazing congregation of migrating Amur Falcons. Travelling back into Assam we moved on to Dibru-Saikhowa NP ( for the Maguri Beel) and later Dehing-Patkai Wildlife Reserve. The last two were predominantly bird oriented and I was more than satisfied with my eventual list of 290 species seen over the 17 days.

I'd strongly recommend the first 3 national parks that I visited. They each had a different character owing to a range of different habitats. My accommodation at each was perfect. I'd describe them as 3 star and all had running water, lockable doors, mosquito netting and the food was fantastic. I flew into Guwahati and left from Dibrugarh. I did not travel in a group; it was just myself, the guide and our driver but I have seen group tours to this part of Assam.

I think you can see I enjoyed the trip. In fact from mid January 2018 I'm meeting up with the same guide for a tour round southern India visiting the Kerala backwaters, Western Ghats and up into Karnataka. I'm really looking forward to my return visit.

Hope these recommendations have been helpful.

What time of year are you planning to visit?
I visited Periyar in November 15 years ago.
The only time you stood any chance of seeing one of the 77 tigers in the 777 square miles of park was very early or very late when the had to come out of the treeline down to the water, but in November the water is so high that they don't show themselves as I found out at the time...
One of the staff had worked at the place for 20 years and never seen more than a few deer/elephants

I do think Assam is probably your best bet but I'd do a lot of research about who to use and when to go, which is probably best found out on Indian Wildlife and/or photography forums.

[ Edit: Edited on 01-Dec-2017, at 17:59 by Andrew Mack ]

We have just come back from an Indian safari: 3 nights in Kanha, 2 nights in Pench and 3 nights in Tadoba. (we had 2 nights in Delhi to start with, making a total of 10 nights).

Our favourite of the three was Kanha, where we saw a tiger on three out of four game drives. Pench is a little difficult to spot tigers, and we didn't see any, but we did experience a pack of dhole (wild dogs) chasing a large herd of deer; which in my opinion more than made up for it.

Tadoba was also good, and we saw two tigers there, but I found the tarmaced road running through the park a little bit of a turn-off as it somehow detracted from the wilderness experience.

You should be able to combine Bandavgarh with the three parks above if you have 15 days.

We have previously visitied Ranthambore and Sariska (on two different trips), and saw a tiger in each of them.

We visited Ranthambore a couple of years ago and saw tigers on two out of three game drives - one in the distance on our first drive, none on the second (but lots of different bird species, deer etc) and two on the third drive, very close to our vehicle. I found the park itself very pretty but it was too crowded for my liking and when tigers were spotted the large number of vehicles that converged on them somewhat detracted from the experience.

We also stayed a couple of nights in Narlai, where we went on a leopard-spotting drive. This can't really be called a safari but we found it a great experience and we did see a leopard with two cubs. I also loved the hotel there and the overall atmosphere of the unspoiled village.

Earlier this year we were in Kerala and spent a couple of days in Periyar. Having read mixed reviews I wasn't expecting much, certainly of the boat trip there, but we actually rather liked it. We got good sightings of elephants plus wild bison, Sambar deer, Nilgiri and common langurs, and loads of different birds.