India – Tiger Expedition: Seeing the Cubs

Today we go to zone 4. If we are lucky enough, we could see tigeress Krishna and her three kittens. Currently the youngest branches in the park. Among the siblings is one girl and two boys.

We are the first on the gate again, but today it will be a bit different than before. Once the door opens, Nafees closes: "Hold on, we have to hurry." Within a minute, the car is picking up speed. The guys already know, so I'm entrusting the camera to Bob, and I stick to it. The terrain is terrible ... stones, roots, straight ahead, downhill for a while, then up again. On the back seat, literally a flag.

We arrive at a small but very nice water surface that stretches out in front of the rocks. But the tigers aren't here.

But our guides do not give up, they walk a bit and take a look for clues. And now they are clear, there are traces, so reverse, left, right, bypassing the small summit and we are slowly going down to the grassy area ahead. There are! First I see one kitten among the stones just before us. When I look around, another lies in the grass a little to the left and there is a third, masking between the stems. Well that's great, so we have all the cubs.

Their mother left them for a while, so we can enjoy them themselves. We're really first here, so now I appreciate the frantic ride. We can get close now and focus on details.

When I saw baby tigers, I remembered fairy tales. I drive the world and always try to get local fairy tales for my clients. My favorite destination is Vietnam and also Vietnamese fairy tales. Lots of stories explain the history of the country, natural phenomena and other attractions, one of the fairy tales is "How the Tiger came to the stripes". You can find the answer in the Dragon King book or in my trips to Vietnam.

Our chance to take pictures of young tigers took about 15 minutes. They gave us so much to get up slowly and move into the thicket. We can only guess there, they have great mimicry. We are really alone for 15 minutes, as the engines of other jeeps and buses start to get out of the distance, kittens leave. We're still going to see other parts of this zone, but we can't see any tigers.

In fact, this group of tigers is currently the youngest one to see in the park. So it is quite simply decided to try our luck in the afternoon. However, we will keep it next time.

GPS: 26°01'04.4"N 76°30'11.4"E

Text and photos: Magdaléna Radostová