On Tuesday we left Agra behind and headed to the National Park at Ranthambore, a tiger preserve. We made a stop to your Fatehpur Sikri, a city built by Emporer Akbar and later abandoned(lack of water). The Emporer kept a harem of about 5000 women here and played parcheesi using the women as life size board pieces. As our guide said: divide that by 365.

It was a 6 plus hour drive from Agra to Ranthambore. These drives are tough because of the state of the highway system which is that there is no highway system. Many roads are a paving patchwork, reduce to one lane in places and sometimes are just rutted dirt or gravel. Traffic is a mixture of cars, overloaded trucks and buses, bikes and motorcycles, camel carts, sheep herders and an occasional elephant. Here a man on a motorcycle can transport his entire family- including kids.

I mentioned the infrastructure before. India seems to have a lot of incompleted projects. Big highway overpasses with rebar hanging out the end. Many “houses” under construction but not completed- rooms open to the elements with people already moved in. There are piles of rubble everywhere – if something caves in, no need to move the rubble. Similarly, there are many stacks of new brick laying around. One day we drove over a bridge, maybe a quarter of a mile long, with the rickety- est guard rails you could imagine. Imagine multi- lanes of traffic careening over this bridge in both directions. That called for a few Hail Mary’s.

Anyway, back to Ranthambore. We stayed at a ridiculously over the top hotel that looked like a white palace floating on the plain. The rooms were nice, all meals were included, but there was only one reason to be there- tigers. We had 4 safaris available. Missed the first because of late arrival (there was never a chance we could have made it by the 230 start time). Yesterday we went on two 3 hour safari trips and this morning on our third. The morning safaris, in open jeeps (the Suzuki version), leave at 630. It was freezing!! The afternoon safari yesterday was more comfortable temperature-wise. But no tigers! This morning we did see a big cat print- maybe you can make it out in the photo. I don’t think the Disney people put it there.

Well, it was a bit of a bust- long drive followed by 9 hours in a jeep; but I felt a bit like Hemingway adventuring to such an exotic place for a safari.

Today was another travel day – to Jaipur. Tomorrow an elephant ride to the Amber Fort.