The Wilderness Calls, by Cell Phone!

Our trip to Kabini Jungle Resort was fantastic! The ride to the resort was not! The first half of the drive was reasonably smooth, by Indian standards not U.S. standards. But the second half was so rough that several people became nauseated. By comparison, the absolute worst potholes in the U.S. would be considered rare and minuscule. For some reason I lucked out and my vertigo took a day off during the trip. I was extremely relieved, because it could have been a sorry state of affairs.

On our way there, as we got farther away from the city and into the rural areas of Karnataka, I was noticing that, even many miles out, the houses had advertising on them. People here supplement their incomes by renting out the entire sides of their houses to companies as billboards. This is quite innovative on the part of the advertisers. People are so poor that to earn $300-$400 U.S. a year for just letting a company come and paint the wall of your house can make a huge difference in one's purchasing power. This was not infrequent, many of the homes had advertising on them - and it appears the world is flat in rural India, as well as in the cities, because the primary advertisers were for cell phone service. I would not have expected wireless service to be readily available so far out in the country. And then when we arrived at the resort, the first thing a couple of people did was to whip out their cell phones and check in with work.

Upon arrival we were given some instructions by the Kabini staff about what we were able to do and not do, for instance, no going in the water because there are crocodiles that would like nothing more than having a plump American for lunch. As I walked about the camp I discovered some monkeys that have moved partially up the evolution chain, what I mean by that is they had figured out how to turn on an outdoor faucet and drink from it (but did not worry about turning it off, even though there is a water shortage here). The female called her male companion over for a drink. Then they moved on to more illicit activities! I was just a little embarrassed watching them.

We had lunch, then some time to relax. At three o'clock we had tea followed by a safari ride into the jungle. Wow! We saw guar (sort of a cross between a wild buffalo and an ox), spotted deer, various birds, including parakeets, an eagle, kingfishers, and peacocks. The highlight was seeing the elephants. We were within ten feet! While we were driving out of the jungle our jeep got hung up on a pile of dirt in the road - we were stuck, it was dusk, and the tigers were hungry (I presume). But, with the momentum of our weight rocking the jeep back and forth we were able to get unstuck within a few minutes. No easy meal for the tigers tonight!

Back at the resort we watched a film about the jungle and then had dinner. When my roommate for the night, and I, went back to our room, we discovered that we would not be sleeping alone. There was a gecko above the door. Nancy was not happy, not happy at all about this. I came up with a master plan for getting it out of the room. This involved a chair and floor mat - and was not successful. That little guy was fast and started running all over our walls. We were screaming and laughing at the same time. Nancy insisted we wake up our professors to help us. Needless to say, they weren't all that thrilled with two wacky women waking them up to come to the rescue - and told us in so many words that we were going to have a house guest for the night, whether we liked it or not. We went to bed and Nancy wanted to sleep with the lights on. We could hear something outside our windows either hitting the walls or scraping the window, most likely some active monkeys. Nancy slept with her head under the covers the entire night.