9. Trust me I'm a naturalist

Tuesday February 3, 2009 (day 11 in India) With my newly cemented tooth in place and our tourist duties in Jaipur satisfied, we head out the next morning for Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. On the way we want to stop at the Keoladeo Ghana National Park, a migratory bird sanctuary about 50 miles outside of Agra. Peter and I have visions of a nice quiet walk in the woods away from traffic noise and peddlers but that dissipates as we reach the entrance and are besieged by men who want to be our guides and a confusing array of charges to enter the park. Not really a national park by U.S. standards, Keoladeo Ghana is about the size of a county park in Minnesota and was a Maharajah’s hunting ground, which has had water diverted from a nearby irrigation canal to create lakes. Migrating birds from Nepal, Russia and China nest there during the winter and we did see many different species of birds that we wouldn’t see here.

We are told that we must have a guide and our “Naturalist” is a pleasant fellow named Sharma (pictured) who shows us his official guide card (they all have them) and we head off on foot after insisting that we don’t want a rickshaw to transport us. We are so looking forward to actually walking rather than sitting in a car for endless hours! Peter takes pictures of birds, deer and monkeys and I listen as our guide points out the birds (memorized from the brochure in his hand with a few variations such as calling parrots “green pigeons”) as we walk along the narrow paths between the marshes. Peter runs through two battery packs taking pictures and we still haven’t seen the pythons, which we are told sunbathe outside of their dens in the winter.

We head to the far end of the park with a dead camera anyway because when else are we going to see pythons in the wild? …or for that matter ever want to? Our guide and a park ranger direct us to a sandy area off the road and we walk past sun-bleached bones of deer and other unfortunate beasts who were python dinner and then regurgitated. About six feet in front of us, the guide points to a bush and we can see a coiled up, very, very large snake. We are in luck as it decides at that moment to uncoil and slither back into its den underground. All 15 feet of him… good thing it wasn’t hungry!