Generally one journeys to India for cultural and architectural masterpieces like the Taj Mahal. Our trip in the winter of 2025 was to experience wildlife. India is one third the size of US, with four times the populations—1.4 billion people! They take great pride in their national parks, with their first national park established in 1936. Today they have more than 166 national parks. We experienced three—Bandhavgarh and Kanha in the central region of the country and Kaziranga in the northeast, just south of Bhutan.

Our goal was to see India’s apex predator, the illusive Bengal Tiger. We searched for them by following their tracks and listening to alarm calls from Langur Monkeys and Sambar deer. Along the way we met Asian elephants in the wild and at work, one-horned rhinoceroses with their young, the rarely seen and vicious predator wild dogs, and one of the most endangered species of apes, the Hoolock Gibbons, who live in a treetop ecosystem. And quite unexpectedly one morning, we climbed upon the back of an Asian elephant behind his mahout to mingle with a herd of rhinos.

I was invited into a rural home where I found this beautiful Indian child sitting in the kitchen waiting for the delicious curried dish simmering over a log.

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