INDIA 2025: RATHAMBORE NATIONAL PARK DAY 2, RANTHAMBORE FORT

   November 29, 2026

Bob's primary interests on this trip were birds and tigers. That got a little tiresome for me, and I needed a break from it and from bumpy jeep rides. Luckily, Ranthambore National Park has a great fort that four of us decided to explore while Dave and Stan went on yet another safari drive. 

An engraved sign at the fort shares some interesting details:

• It is one of the strongest forts in India.
• It dates to the fifth century A.D. (!)
• It changed hands according to who was in power, which included Sultans and Mughals.
• It has seven gates.
• There are two palaces, a mosque, a Jain temple, and several Hindu temples within the walls.

Another embossed brass plaque notes that the fort is a UNESCO World Heritage Monument.

We joined a small crowd of people at the fort entrance. It seemed to me that about 95% were Indians.

There were plenty of other locals hanging out at the fort.

INDIA 2025: RATHAMBORE NATIONAL PARK DAY 2, MORNING SAFARI

 November 28, 2025

On Day 2 in Ranthambore National Park, we again rose early and battled the crowds at the entrance gate. Paperwork for every passenger must be checked before a vehicle is allowed to enter, and that takes time. You can tell how cold is was by looking at the photo of Bonnie and Dave that I took from the back seat.

As much as I complain, I still prefer the bumpy, crowded ride to a long walk in tiger territory.

We were assigned to Zone 5 and started off (again) with a great sighting of wild boars dipping their snouts in a watering hole. The pigeons look ready to dive in as soon as the boars finish up.

INDIA 2025: RATHAMBORE NATIONAL PARK DAY 1- KHEM VILLAS AND OUR FIRST TWO SAFARI DRIVES

 November 26-27 (Thanksgiving Day in the United States), 2025

Five or six hours after we left Keoledeo National Park, located approximately mid-way between Jaipur and Agra, we finally arrived at Rathambore National Park, It looks like a short distance on the map below, and it is--just a little over 150 miles--but we were driving through lots of small villages and the pace was agonizingly slow.

Ranthambore NP is large--515 square miles--and was established first as a game sanctuary in 1955 at about 1/5 of its current size, but then was declared as a Project Tiger reserve as part of a wildlife conservation program in 1974. In 1980 it was named a national park.

The tiger population in India has doubled since the early 1970s, but at about 3,700 tigers, it is still woefully short of the estimated 40,000 tigers that roamed the country at the end of the 19th century. Without Project Tiger, tigers would likely be extinct, at least in India, which has almost 75% of the world's wild tiger population.  Today there are 57 protected areas in India that have been designated as tiger preserves.

It was getting to be late, so our driver took us directly to our place of residence for the next few days, the Khem Villas, located ten minutes from the reserve. The place consists of eight luxury cottages, ten tents, and four double rooms. Our group of three couples had tents, but not exactly the kind of tents you think of when you hear that word.

The approach to the Villas is a long, private drive flanked by the property's gardens where they grow much of the food they serve to guests in the all-vegetarian meals. There is a lot of fencing around the gardens, which I assume is to keep wildlife scavengers out.

And here is the local bakery--but I don't think you want what they are baking . . . 

Cow dung cakes, stacked five high after they are dried out and sold as fuel for cooking and heating.

INDIA: GUWAHATI TO KAZIRANGA NATIONAL PARK

 December 17, 2024

We were up at 6:00 AM, ignoring both the 12.5 hour time difference between where we were and California and our 40 hours of travel, and were down at the extensive and excellent breakfast buffet by 7:15. Chris and I especially liked the black rice in a purple pudding--more dessert than breakfast!

A driver in a small minivan came to pick us up at 8:00 AM. Our luggage caused him and the hotel staff some distress. They spent over twenty minutes strapping it to the roof, and we finally got on the road at about 8:30.

We headed east-north-east through the finger of India that lies between Tibet to the north, Bangladesh to the southwest, and Myanmar to the southeast. I had no idea that India was anything other than the downward-pointing triangle I always pictured it as.

The distance was just over 200 km, or 125 miles, but it took us 4.25 hours of driving.

It started out well enough with wide, scenic roads lined by vendors, most of them selling oranges.

CANADA: ONTARIO'S BRUCE PENINSULA NATIONAL PARK

 September 29, 2018

On our second day in Ontario we drove along the Bruce Peninsula. Toronto, our starting point (marked with a red oval below), is on the shores of Lake Ontario. The Bruce Peninsula (the red pin on the map) pokes out into the Canadian portion of Lake Huron, almost dividing that lake into two parts.

At the far northern end of the peninsula lies Bruce Peninsula National Park, shown on the map from Wikipedia below. Covering 60 square miles, it forms the core of UNESCO's Niagara Escarpment World Biosphere Reserve. (That's a totally new UNESCO category for me.)

But first, we had a drive of about 290 miles to get there, and like just about every road trip we've ever taken, there was a lot to see along the way.

This was a definite first for us. We've never seen a turtle crossing sign before.

WEST TEXAS: CHISOS MOUNTAINS IN BIG BEND NATIONAL PARK

December 29, 2018

We were surprised to wake up in our hotel in Marathon, Texas (population 500), to below freezing temperatures, ice on the parking lot, and a heavy layer of frost on the windshield.

I checked the temperatures at home and in places where family members live around the US and discovered that the warmest of those places was New York City, the place furthest north (by far). Crazy!

Bob drove carefully (for Bob) on the icy roads.

We loved the tiny towns we passed through. They had a lot of personality. 

We were headed to the eastern end of the same park we had explored the western end of the previous day.

WEST TEXAS: BIG BEND RANCH STATE PARK AND BIG BEND NATIONAL PARK

December 28, 2018

We had originally tried to make this a trip without a ton of driving. Bob loves to drive, but our son and I are not quite as fond of being passengers. Unfortunately, the trip turned out to be mostly driving, with some short to medium-long stops along the way.  Luckily, we had a couple of good books to listen to.  We had finished When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanthi on the long drive from Phoenix to El Paso (#1) and then on to Alpine (#2), and we started Educated by Tara Westover on our second day of driving from Alpine to Big Bend Ranch State Park (#3) and Big Bend National Park (#4)

We began the day having breakfast in Marfa (#5), a little town with a big spirit that I'll write about in another post. Then we headed south towards the Rio Grande River through a rather barren but still interesting desert landscape.

NORTH DAKOTA: THEODORE ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK

September 14-15, 2019

Theodore Roosevelt National Park comprises over 70,000 acres (110 square miles) and gets about 800,000 visitors a year. Roosevelt's experiences here in the 1880s and 1890s influenced his pursuit of conservation policies as President of the United States from 1901 to 1909, so it seems appropriate that it is now a national park.

The Park started out as the Theodore Roosevelt National Wildlife Refuge in 1946. In 1947 and 1948, two parts of it were designated as The Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park, the first (and last) Memorial Park ever established, and in 1978 it received its current name and status.

The park is known for its wildlife, and we were excited to get "up-close and personal" with some if it . . . until we saw these signs:

I like the "rule of thumb" at the bottom of this one:

I spent parts of two days in the park, and Bob, who got up VERY early in the morning on the day we flew home so that he could spend more time in the park while I slept, spent parts of of three days there.

Roosevelt spent much of his time in an area called "the badlands."  "Badlands" is a generic term for a type of terrain characterized by eroded sedimentary rock with steep faces, unusual rock formations, deep ravines, minimal vegetation, and often unusual color displays.

NORTH DAKOTA: MEDORA

September 14-15, 2019

I have a love-hate relationship with Teddy Roosevelt. I love his break-the-mold, swashbucklin' style, his bold approach to life, his can-do attitude. But there is part of me that doesn't care for his certitude, his belief that he was always right.

Teddy was a bit of a chimera, a beast made up of many different body parts. Among those parts are the politician part, the Rough Rider part, the cattle rancher part, the conservationist part, and the husband and father part. I've already included David McCullough's insightful biography of TR, Mornings on Horseback, in my post about Oyster Bay, which covers Teddy's childhood and young adult years. That book (and another book I review in my next post) covers Teddy's loss of his first wife and his mother on a single day--February 14, 1884--and his subsequent flight from New York to North Dakota, where he would work through his grief.  (Apparently he rarely if ever mentioned his first wife again, even to their daughter, one part of him I am not impressed by.)

Teddy had been to North Dakota the previous year to hunt bison (a very TR-esque activity), and during that time he had purchased the Maltese Cross ranch for $14,000, substantially more than his annual salary. When Teddy returned to North Dakota in 1884, he purchased a second property, Elkhorn Ranch, and built a home on it.  He maintained both ranches, which were near the just barely established town of Medora, until 1898. 

Never very large, in 2010 Medora had a population of 112, and yet these days they manage to run a few hotels and several restaurants, and their website claims they are "North Dakota's #1 Vacation Destination."

However, it's not the town people come to see. Rather, it is the national park that is right down the road: Theodore Roosevelt National Park.  

But first, Medora.

When Teddy came through Medora on a presidential tour of the Western United States in 1903 (not surprisingly, he was the first president to visit Medora), he made such a good impression that a local hotel changed its name to the Rough Riders Hotel to honor his role in the Spanish-American War. The hotel was renovated in the early 1960s, and since 1986 it has been operated by the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation, a non-profit organization. Another remodel in 2008 added 68 guest rooms.

We stopped for dinner at the hotel, the nicest place to eat in town.  It has a beautiful lobby.

There are several pieces of Roosevelt-themed art in the lobby.

RUSSIA, KALININGRAD: THE CURONIAN SPIT

June 29, 2019

In an earlier post I mentioned the Curonian Spit, a geographical and geological oddity that separates the Baltic Sea from the Curonian Lagoon. This UNESCO World Heritage Site (since 2000) shared by two countries is a 61-mile-long sand dune that connects to Kaliningrad on one end and to Lithuania on the other. At its narrowest point (which is on the Russia side) it is only 437 yards across, and at its widest point (which is on the Lithuania side) it is almost 2.5 miles across. The spit is the only national park in Kaliningrad.

We spent our last afternoon of the 21st day of a very long trip driving and walking along this unique landform. We made five main stops: 1. the Baltic Sea, 2. an ornithological station, 3. the Curonian Lagoon, 4. the largest sand dunes on the spit, and 5. the Dancing Forest.

1. The Baltic Sea

Our guide Elena told us that the spit was heavily wooded until the 1500s when German invaders cut down all the trees. Wind and water swept over the spit, covering it with sand. For the last few decades, conservationists have been working to reclaim the spit from the sand, planting hundreds of thousands of pine trees (mostly) and other trees and grasses that hold the soil in place and create new land. It is a very slow, tedious process that will take a century or more to take root. (No pun intended.) The spit, in most places, looks heavily wooded, but pull away the delicate grasses and lichens, and the foundation is sand. It is really bizarre.

There are many hiking "trails" made of wooden planks on the spit. Any footsteps on the fragile growth contribute to erosion. We walked on four or five such paths, including this first one shown below that led to a beach on the Baltic Sea. 

ICELAND, THE GOLDEN CIRCLE PART I: Craters,Thingvallavatn Lake, and Thingvellir National Park

June 12, 2019 (I've decided to start putting the date of the trip on each post. Sometimes it takes me months to get around to posting about a trip, and so when I come back to the post, it's hard to remember what season of the year, or even what year, we were somewhere.)

On our third day in Iceland, the ten of us went on a tour to what is called "The Golden Circle," a 186-mile scenic loop on the southwest side of the island. Here is what it looks like for most tourists:

Our savvy guide took us on a slightly different route, which meant we missed most of the crowds in the beginning AND had a better view of a volcanic basin and a lake. We began in Reykjavik and went clockwise:

And here is a map of Iceland for reference:

The initial part of the drive was pristine in its beauty and completely devoid of other tourists, although the Golden Circle is the most popular tourist drive in the country. We did see lots of tourists later in the day.

The road leaving Reykjavik was lined with lupine and yellow flowers:

After some time, we passed through three consecutive craters created by volcanoes--rugged lava rock splattered with lichen:

SRI LANKA: BUNDALA NATIONAL PARK

After multiple trips into Yala National Park (three for Bob, two for me), it was time to move on. We returned to the hotel and had lunch, then packed up for our final safari at Bundala National Park, a one-hour drive away.

Honestly, by this time I was pretty tired of driving along dusty, bumpy roads looking at/for the same animals we'd already seen everywhere else. This was to be our sixth half-day safari drive (although I skipped #4), and wasn't too thrilled with the thought of another.

Bob, on the other hand, could have keep going for days.

And so on we went to Bundala National Park, situated on the Indian Ocean and the smallest of the four national parks we visited--just 13 square miles.

In 2005, UNESCO declared these wetlands to be a Man & Biosphere Reserve.  The focus of the park is definitely on birds, although we saw other animals, including one lonely elephant.

It was very different from the other national parks we had visited--flat and open and marshy: