Heather on her travels

My daughter’s elephant safari in Chitwan, Nepal

Posted: 20 Aug 2011 01:05 AM PDT

My 16 year old daughter recently returned from a school trip during which the group of teenagers did some treking in Nepal, spent time on a community project at a local school in the mountains and finally visited the Chitwan region where the group went crocodile spotting by canoe and got close to a rhino and her baby on an elephant safari. Here’s Sophie-Anne’s story…

To end our journey in Nepal we headed down near the Indian border to the Chitwan region. Chitwan is very tourist friendly, and as we personally discovered, there are lot of nice hotels there to cater for the tourist demand. The first settlers in the region were the Tarau people and within the village we were welcomed to look inside their traditional mud huts with straw roofs.

Canoe trip in Chitwan, Nepal

Like all cultures, the Tarau have traditions such as dancing or their distinctive tattoos and have managed to preserve this successfully. In Chitwan there is lots on offer to do, and we managed to fit in quite enough to exhaust any teenager, child or adult! We started our day in the canoe on the river, spotting crocodiles amongst other wildlife. It is exactly how I imagine Pocahontus' (from the Disney film) daily life feeling like!

Elephants in the river in Chitwan, Nepal

After we had battled with the canoe in the quest to get out without falling in (trickier than you'd imagine) we began to trek through the jungle. Unfortunately our familiar friend the rain cloud had appeared and what was supposedly jungle felt more like a swamp.

Elephant safari in Chitwan, Nepal

Finally we emerged sodden out of the jungle to find ourseleves now at an elephant breeding ground. I suppose you can imagine how excited a group of girl teenagers were at the sight of baby elephant, but in our defence they are very very very cute. There was also a visitors centre filled with lots of interesting information about the elephants working lives, how they were trained and so on.

Elephant safari in Chitwan, Nepal

There was also a visitors center filled with lots of interesting information about the elephants working lifes, how they were trained and so on. After lunch, we finally got to ride the elephants! Four people were allocated to each elephant and we sat in a basket type area on the elephant’s back. During the safari we saw a rhino and her baby, deer and lots of other interesting creatures.

Rhino with baby in Chitwan, Nepal

I hate to admit it but I must confess despite it being an amazing choice of travel for the Nepalese it is not the smoothest. It is almost like being swayed side to side very slowly whilst trying to dodge branches up ahead!