We left Bangalore on Tuesday two hours behind schedule because it was pouring, and still reached Nizamabad, 770 km north, in exactly 13 hours. The idea was to push past Hyderabad so the second day would be lighter, and the road made that easy, mostly thanks to Hyderabad’s Outer Ring Road: eight lanes, well maintained, with proper exits of the kind I’d assumed were only available in other countries. As someone who dreads Bangalore’s ORR, I spent that stretch quietly resenting my own city. Adarsh and I took turns at the wheel, and neither of us arrived wrecked, which after 13 hours counts as an achievement.
Nizamabad to Tadoba is about 400 km and six hours of driving, which we stretched to nine by stopping for lunch with a friend of Adarsh’s at The Bamboo Forest, an outstanding property by any standard. His wife, it turned out, had come to one of my bird talks at Koota. Driving more than 1,100 km to run into someone from namma ooru suggests the country is mostly Bangalore with some forest in between. We reached The Spotted Owlet by evening.
Thursday, 1 October, was the day Tadoba’s core zones reopened after the monsoon closure. We had two safaris, morning and evening, in the Moharli buffer.
Some context, as promised. Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve covers about 1,727 sq km in Maharashtra’s Chandrapur district: a core of roughly 626 sq km wrapped in a buffer of about 1,100 sq km. The core includes Tadoba National Park, declared in 1955 and the state’s oldest. The name comes from Taru, a deity worshipped by the tribal communities of these forests, and Andhari is the river running through them. The 2024 estimate counted more than 95 tigers, and the reserve drew over 3.8 lakh visitors in 2024-25. The buffer is a mix of forest and non-forest land managed for multiple uses, and part of its job is to absorb tourists so the core doesn’t drown in them. The tigers, from what I saw, have not been briefed on which zone they live in.
My safari record is poor, so I went in with expectations low enough to be met by a gaur, and a gaur duly obliged, followed by a sloth bear, some sambar deers and a handful of birds. By my usual standards that would have made a respectable day and a short post.
Then came a leopard with an antelope kill, which I’m struggling to describe without slipping into documentary narration. Most sightings I’ve had amount to an animal existing near a road. A leopard with its kill is the forest halfway through a transaction, the part of its economy that usually happens when nobody is around to watch, and for a while we were around to watch.
The tiger was the other thing. He was massive, and he was walking down the track toward us, so we reversed, and he kept walking, and we reversed some more, until the only option left was to pull aside and let him through. There were six jeeps around him by then, and all six were now arranged around a single question: where this animal wanted to go. I’d normally keep the word majestic out of my writing, but I’ve tried the alternatives and they’re all worse.
What stuck me was how least bothered he was. Six jeeps full of people and cameras locked in right on him. He was on his own clock, and the most a safari permit buys you is the right to be parked somewhere along his route when he happens to use it.
After two days and 1,170 km of judging ring roads by the quality of their exits, the most confusing traffic of the trip turned out to be six jeeps figuring the way for a tiger who clearly owned his cat-walk.
