Wednesday : sunny

Well the time with the boys was short, definitely would of liked to of spent more time with them, but they have to get walking, as do we. We said our thanks, goodlucks and goodbyes after breakfast. It was great to see more familiar faces. We walked to our Chitwan safari bus, with Laxman our local travel agent, he met us at the hotel.

He was so helpful yesterday with organizing Will and Bobs park and plane tickets. Now today it felt like we were getting the gold treatment, by loading our bags on the bus and getting shown to our seat.

We are off to a good start this morning, although I'm not feeling the best today at all. I've completely lost my voice and my coughing has returned and I'm seriously tired.

I was hopping for some sleep on the bus but I was thinking that we had somehow had been place on the wrong bus. Most of the trip we were on the same road that we took to Pokhara and I thought that's where we may end up, so that probably made me a little unsettled.

We eventually got to Sauraha after 5hrs of bumpy roads. When we arrived we were greeted by a resort representative and got driven to our new temporary jungle home.

We checked in quickly then had to meet in the dinning room and be briefed by Santa which is short for a long name that begins with Santa and I have forgotten it.

He told us what our activities would be over the three days, and they sound like fun. While in the dining room we were served our first included lunch.

After a short free time break we were off for our first activity which was a Tharu village walk. The Tharu are the local minority people here in the Chitwan area. It was interesting to see how they make their grass mud/cow poo homes. We also were told that the women of the Tharu people have to get full body tatoos once married, pretty extreme I thought.

We then walked through Sauraha town to get to the Chitwan national park info centre. That basically informed us the history of the park, like back in the 1800's it was a hunting reserve and it wasn't until 1973 that it became Nepal's first National park. Then it went on explaining the behavior of the main draw card animals, like rhino, elephants tigers, crocs and bears. It also went on to name all the other animals, like birds, fish snakes....etc

After the Chitwan learning lesson, our guide caught wind of a rhino in the area. So off we went into the scrub looking for the armored plated tank.

We didn't have to walk far till we came across some people that pointed us to them. There were two rhino's cooling off in the water, apparently it was a mum and her young daughter. They were all pretty much submerged, all we could see was the top of the back, head and of corse the big horn on the mum.

We walked back along the river to the hotel and watched the sun set over the Rapti river, it was a very red sun too.

When we arrived back at the hotel our dinner was ready, its great having this 3day package, everything is included and organized. Only thing we have to pay for are souvenirs and beer. Tonight was a buffet all local food, mainly Dal Bhat (lentil soup and rice)

Tonight we had a speacial guest staying at the resort, apart from Kim and I we had Nepal's deputy prime minister. He also had his entourage of assistants and machine gun equipped police as guards, so we felt very safe.

The resort had organized some entertainment tonight, they had the local Tharu people round to perform their traditional dance. It was great! It was a story dance of how they used to fend off the larger animals from their villages. So they used sticks and fire, we all got up and had a bit of a dance at the end too. At the end of the dances it was announced that the deputy p.m had donated 5000 rupees to the dance group. Everyone cheered and then the visitors and dance group all broke out in song and dance, it was like a Bollywood movie.

We were all tuckered out after the show so we went back to the room got cleaned up and watched some movies, before bed.