On September 29, a friend and I get into a car in Bangalore and drive to Delhi. At Delhi airport we will shake hands, or hug, depending on how the previous 2,400 kilometres went, and board two different flights. He flies to Kathmandu to walk uphill for a week on purpose. I fly to Goa to sit at sea level and do as little as the coastline permits.
If you told a stranger we were driving ten days only to board different flights at the end, they’d assume one of us had said something unforgivable around Nagpur.
Every friend group eventually splits along the mountains versus beaches line, usually in a group chat. We skipped the poll and bought tickets to opposite ends of the map. He gets the altitude, I get the tide. On a map of India, everything in between is the middle, and the middle, conveniently, is where the wildlife is, which we both are excited about. What I am not excited about is knowing that between the two us, my Hindi is better while covering central India all the way to the capital.
So the shared part goes like this. Three tiger reserves in central India. Seven days of driving, seven safaris, one walking trail. A final morning with a 230 km drive to two flights that leaves post lunch whether or not we are on it. I have been assured this is fine, mostly by me.
Planning it was largely an education in how wrong we could be. The forests of central India shut their core zones for the monsoon and reopen on October 1, a date the tigers observe more faithfully than our first draft did, which had us parked outside a closed forest for two days. One leg we had pencilled in at five hours turned out to be ten, lodge to lodge, so we now stop overnight in a city chosen almost entirely for being halfway. I also learned that Goa has two airports with codes one letter apart, and that booking the wrong one is a mistake people make exactly once. Which I have successfully completed a few years ago.
Our first safari lands on October 1, the day the season opens. I have no idea what that means in practice. The forest department publishes the date, not the attendance.
What I can predict is my own behaviour. I will be the person in the car pointing at raptors on power lines at 90 km/h, which is a hazard whichever seat I’m in. He’s off to look at the Himalaya, which in recorded history has never once failed to show up, while I spend ten days looking for animals with no such track record.
The map below has every stop pinned. What it can’t tell you is what turns up at each pin, whether a forest reopening on October 1 has anything to show for it, or what ten hours in a car does to a friendship that already has a scheduled ending at Delhi airport. Those answers arrive the same way we do, one pin at a time.
If you’d like to follow along, the trip will come out in three sizes. Instagram gets the daily version: one frame/ clip, posted the same day, including the days when nothing happened for 600 km. YouTube gets the highlights, which is to say whatever survives the edit once the car is parked. And this blog, the one you’re reading, gets the long version, a piece for each place, written at leisure and when the memory cards have been emptied.
Somewhere between the first safari and the last, one of us will quietly start envying the other’s destination. I’ll report which one.
