Trip to Jim Corbett National Park - Day 1

4th April'2007

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must     carry it with us or we find it not.

                                                         - Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

Everybody ,one at other time ,feel the need to spend the time away from the daily monotonous life in the lap of nature, with nature to recharge his energy and emotions. We group of 10 friends also planned to visit Jim Corbett national park in Uttrakhand. It was awesome journey and greatest of the experience and lesson that we had learned in our life. After our mid semester exam, we began to wonder what to do, Life become so stagnant and insipid. So, we planned to visit a tourist place and finally one was selected after ruling out so many options. We thought that it will be the economical tour as it is not very far from Lucknow.

After searching the lot about that wild life sanctuary, we were sure that it will be going to be very wonderful journey full of adventures. Finally, after completing the packing and other important stuff, before the departing day, we watched a movie kaal as it was pictured there with name of the park changed to Orbit National park. We were very excited and began to imagine ourselves in place of actors.

Finally, on 4th April’07 at 7 am, Tata sumo came in our college and we began our journey after reciting Jai Mata Di. Although the task of waking early in the morning was very new and arduous for us people but, however, that day it becomes somehow easy.

 Our first destination was to reach Ramnagar, it was in the outskirts of Corbett park, to collect the passes. It was around 300 Km from the Lucknow. After enjoying the rustic scenery of the countryside and taking a lot of breaks, we reached in Ramagar at 6pm and came to know that today the counter was closed. So we had to waste our 1 night in Ramnagar. But after consulting the local people, we came to know there were some good places there to hang out and wild elephants, tigers have also been seen there many times .

We visited the famous temple which almost gave us the feel of the forest and after that began to explore the jungle area around it on foot. It was twilight time. After parking our car and without informing the driver, we have started exploring the area. It was against our imaginations. On our one side there was a dense forest and nothing beyond the trees was visible, on the other side there was a river around 20 ft. below us and between them was a broken road on which we were standing. It was a blood chilling experience. The area was beautiful but equally scary and as it was getting dark, we started feeling scary and somehow after covering around 1 Km, landed successfully on the road. Now, there were no networks on our mobile so the issue of informing the driver was puzzling us and the question of tracing back that path is irrelevant and We thought that temple was not from there and as were very tired so that out of 10, 3 will go back to temple through the road and bring the car to pick everybody. Now the question was which 3 people will go, we played some ancient game to filter 3 and I was one of the unlucky people.

On the main road, there were hardly any lights, and the different sounds of animals were very horrible in a silent jungle. We all 3 were sweating very hard and thought that our end is very near. One of my friend started to imagine tiger there on the hill top, It is the mystery till today whether there was a tiger or he was trying to make us more scary or he began to imagine such things out of fear. Finally ,after walking for half an hour ,we saw the truck coming, we stand in front of it until it stopped, asked him to help us ,he agreed to drop us to the temple. He is very angry and rebuked us for our cool attitude towards the jungle and told us we were lucky to be alive. It was against the rules to walk in that area. Finally we arrived at temple, it was all closed and the driver was waiting for us very anxiously. Then it was his turn, he also reproached us and told us that the local people asked him to go back to Lucknow as one who had lost in jungle at this time rarely made a comeback. Finally, we pick our friend, had a sigh of relief and went back to Ramnagar to enjoy our rest of the stay and to make the plan for tomorrow. Finally, not much was left for discussion and we all slept after setting an alarm for the next day

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Posts compilation on Jim Corbett park:

Tiger Spotting/Trip to Jim Corbett National Park - Pictorial prose 

Trip to Jim Corbett National Park - Day 1

Trip to Jim Corbett National Park - Day 2 

Tiger Spotting/Trip to Jim Corbett National Park - Day 3