So after an epic 28 hour train journey from Kolcatta, a one night stop over in Jabalpur followed by a six hour bus journey we were finally in Khana National Park! Boy was it HOT! Melting, melting, melting! 
 
We had planned to stay for three full days and attempt to see some tigers. On our first morning we spoke to our hotel to book a safari to be told that there were no more tickets available until after we were due to leave. WHAT? We hadn't travelled all this way for nothing!! We didn't understand as the info we had suggested you could just book with your hotel and there was no need for any advance booking. It turned out that all the tickets had been taken by “VIPs” who were staying at hotels nearby. Great. 

Jeeps went into the park twice a day at 5:30am and 4:30pm and there were 153 jeeps allowed into the park at each of those times, with each being able to take five people a time. We had arrived with a nice couple from New Zealand, Fiona and Kieran and also made friends with a guy from Australia, Matt. We decided we'd hook up with them to try and get a jeep. We were told that our only chance was to go down to the ticket office and queue with our special form and just maybe we might be lucky enough to get one of the 3-4 jeep tickets that are only available by queueing in this way. We arrived at the ticket office and the way it worked was that you put your form at the bottom of the pile already there. Theoretically when the ticket office opened and they took the forms, working from top to bottom, if you were in the top half you were in with a chance. HOWEVER it was 9am in the morning, lots of other people were already hanging around the ticket office, carefully watching their form and making sure it remained in position in the “pile”. We couldn't just leave our form in the pile and come back later. No, no, no. Someone could shuffle the forms! So our only choice was to embark on a farcical seven and a half hours of shift work to watch our form in the pile. The temperature was approaching 46+ degrees during the hottest part of the day, in the shade, joy!! No way we could sit there all day, even in the shade so we gave ourselves an hour to an hour and a half each and then swapped over. Luckily the ticket office was five minutes from our hotel. We were not going to be beaten! It was so hot that you weren't even wet with sweat it just dried instantly. Crazy! 

After a full day of waiting, it reached the crucial point of 30 minutes before the ticket office was due to open. By this point we had all regrouped. People started crowding around the counter, jostling for position. No actual queueing of course. Tom and Kieran took up their positions near the front of the crowd. The curtain was pulled back to reveal a very stern faced chap in military uniform. He acknowledged no one, didn't even look up. He sat shuffling papers for a good half an hour whilst the jostling continued. Yeeeah he was going to make us wait. Why not? We were number four in the pile. It could go either way. He took the forms and very slowly processed each one. Agonising. Then finally got to us. YES! We were in luck, only seven jeep tickets available for the afternoon slot. PHEW! I have never known anything like it. So much effort to get a ticket. It was made even more frustrating as we could see the jeeps heading into the park some only containing one or two people when they could take five! Could they not have some kind of system that would enable each jeep to be filled and therefore allow more tickets to be available? Course not, that would be too easy! 

So finally we jumped into our jeep with a guide and headed into the park. We spent about three hours in the jeep. We saw lots of spotted deer, bison, macaques and lots of peacocks. Crucially about 45 mins in we reached a point in the road where a number of other jeeps had stopped. We pulled up and all stood up to straining to see what everyone was looking at. A tigress and her cub!! Yes! Very far away though in the distance. The cub was playing in a pond whilst its mother looked on lying on the bank. We could barely see them with the naked eye and had to use binoculars. A shame they were so very far away but we were still very lucky to see them in the first place. Very exciting! 
 
We decided to relax the following day after all the effort in getting our first ticket. We decided we wanted to try and get a morning ticket to see how different that was compared to the afternoon slot. This would involve Tom and I going down to the ticket office at 3am and beginning the watching of the “pile” again. We said we were happy to do the whole shift as it was cooler at that time and it wasn't like we'd sleep again if we went back to our hotel. We were sneaky though and put our form in the night before and wrote number “1” on it in the hope it would stay there until we arrived. This was also an important factor, numbering your form to ensure its position in the pile! We turned up at 3am and initially it looked as though no one was around. We inspected the pile and suddenly two guys jumped out from the shadows to check what we were doing and making sure we weren't moving their forms. Jeeeeez. Still unbelievably ludicrous that this is the process we have to go through. Our form had been moved to number two. Ok we could cope with that. These guys had technically arrived before us. Over the next hour more people started arriving. To our amusement two Indian guys arrived and quizzed the guys in position number one as to why they hadn't filled out their form correctly, took their form out of the pile, made us number one and promptly slotted themselves behind us in position number two. We then watched all four of them argue loudly for half an hour, every so often pointing at us. Oh well. We weren't going to complain! We watched over the next couple of hours as people would go up to the pile, count and recount all the forms to check their position. This would then mean everyone else would have to go up and do a recount to double check the order had not been tampered with. We ended up having to do the same every so often. You can't trust anyone! So funny watching anyone go near the papers and everyone would stand up straight away and watch uneasily. You just had to laugh.We were joined by our New Zealand and Ozzie friends and successfully got a ticket for the morning. We spent about four hours in the jeep in a different area of the park. In addition to the animals we had previously seen we saw sambar deer, barking deer and wild pigs. Sadly no tigers this time though. The park itself is made up of sal and bamboo forest, grassy open meadows and ravines. Very picturesque in parts. It apparently provided inspiration to Rudyard Kipling for the Jungle Book :). 
 
Other than the park there isn't much else to do in Khana. The quality of accommodation wasn't great, there was barely anywhere to eat. It felt like we were in the middle of nowhere in a small extremely dusty hot village. We'd had enough! We had done what we came here to do and didn't want to spend anymore time sitting waiting to get another ticket! We really enjoyed the park and managing to see some tigers but that was the only positive (a very good positive!) of our stay here.