Not all delays are bad — you never know what you’ll end up seeing!
It had been quite a while since we took a breather from the hustle and bustle of the city life. Just on a whim, we decided to take a mini vacay to Coorg — we had heard a lot of stories about it’s beauty but, never managed to squeeze some time out of our schedules for a quick getaway.
We started early in the morning — not as early as planned, we were an hour late and I was boiling! Personally, I hate being late especially if the reason for delay is — “I was trying to transfer some old hindi music to play during the drive.” But, as they say… everything in life gets better with a little bit of Kishore Kumar.
So here we were… a group of wanderers trying to escape the mundane — armed with our cars, some great old hindi music, a ton of chips and a jug full of Bengaluru’s finest black coffee.
On our way to Kutta (South of Coorg) from Bangalore, we had to drive through Nagarhole National Park — famous for it’s abundant bounty of wildlife. We were told to follow a set of safety instructions in the interest of not disturbing the animals of the park — no speeding, no loud music, no overtaking, no honking and to always keep the windows rolled up… AND AFTER THAT WE WERE READY!!
A wave of optimism filled inside us as we navigated through the narrow but well maintained stretch — we thought we’d get to spot a tiger (but knowing our bad luck from multiple previous safaries, we knew nothing would come off it eventually). However, we saw many monkeys, deers, peacocks, and wild baby elephants — as reported by our friends from the other car… we missed this sight :(
By now, it had been close to 20+ minutes since we entered the park and still no tiger… we were sulking because watching the monkeys do their thing had stopped being entertaining after the first 7 minutes. And just as our dampened spirits could hit rock bottom, we came across something beyond majestic. There she was — A BEAUTIFUL YOUNG LEOPARD IN HER PRIME LITERALLY 5 FEET AWAY. Each one of us were left mesmerised by her beauty and the raw animal instincts with which she was staring back at us. We must’ve spent TWO WHOLE SECONDS while trying to pass the beast as it kept looking at us with a menacing — “You are in my yard, punk!” look. As we drove past the leopard, a million and a half thoughts were racing through our minds — should we have waited a couple more seconds, should we have clicked a picture, should we turn and go back, should we…??? But, my 20/20 hindsight now tells me that even those 2 seconds of rawness were more than enough — we’d had our fill.
Fortunately, one of our friends traveling with was spontaneous enough to click a hasty picture. See if you can spot the camouflaged big cat in this shaky picture.
Just as we reached our home-stay, we told our host about our wild encounter with the leopard and he was in absolute awe of our good luck! He had been working with the forest department and had been living there for about 20years and he’d only seen a leopard — hold your breath, TWICE… and here we were, already half-way to beating his leopard sighting count on our first trip!
We spent the later part of that evening feasting our eyes on the Coorgi sunset and having some mesmerising locally sourced coffee but, in our heads we were still stuck in awe of the time we had our blink-and-miss rendezvous with the MAJESTIC BIG CAT — all thanks to our one-hour delay :P
