The Trigger
This started a year earlier in Spiti, when Chetan, my room-share on that trip, planted the idea of a proper wildlife trip. Twelve months of birding later, I picked up a Sigma 100-400 for my Sony body, specifically for mammals. Chetan put me onto ShareYourSafari, a small group operator known for tiger reserves. The booking went in April 2021. Cancelled when Phase 2 lockdown hit Nagpur. Re-booked for the season-opener slot, 14-17 October 2021, over the Dussehra weekend.
Onward
Maha Ashtami night (13 October). Out of the door at 4am to clear airport traffic, which was being diverted around a Burj Khalifa replica somewhere on the route. Airport in two hours. 9am flight to Nagpur via Delhi, with a T2-to-T3 transfer mid-stop. Out of Nagpur arrivals at 4pm with vaccine paperwork verified.
Checked in at Hotel Urban Hermitage, 5 minutes from the airport (free pickup-drop-off included), at the very end of the airport road. The metro line runs alongside, Mumbai-style.
Built for corporate stays. Rooms in the mid-2000 INR band. Five floors with a rooftop dining setup and a buffet on the ground floor. The food prices were aggressive across the board, including room service.
Every dish was a miss. The Paneer Jhalfrezi and Special Chicken Angara were both spice without flavour. Even the breakfast — poached eggs and steamed vegetables at 170 INR — was poorly executed.
Bedsheets were dirty (sparing the details). Room service tilted toward unprofessional. On the upside: the rooms themselves were spacious with a real workspace and a large tiled bathroom. The big window over the metro overpass gave a clean view of Nagpur traffic from the curtain.
The Plan
The package: Nagpur pickup at 9am on 14 October, Innova drop to Kolara Gate, stay at Taaru Vann or similar. Day 1 lunch on arrival plus afternoon safari. Days 2 and 3 (15 and 16 October) two safaris each, morning and evening. Day 4 (17 October) morning safari, drop back to Nagpur by 3pm for departures. Total: 6 safaris (3 core + 3 buffer). Cost: 21,000 INR with 50% online upfront, balance on the ground.
Owner-contact: Harshal Malvankar. Group size: 16 participants, batches of 4.
Safari One: Navegaon Core
Mr. Yogesh picked me and four others up in his 8-seater Innova at 10am. The remaining group was inbound on later flights landing by 11am. Different vehicles for each batch.
My roommate and the first person in the car was Altaf — trained harpist, far more wildlife experience than me, and a Tadoba veteran with this same operator. Bangalore-based for work, Nagpur native. He had come to pick me up knowing the hotel had handled my breakfast. We took a quick detour through what used to be a birding patch on the city’s edge and bagged peafowl on the way.
Picked up the rest of our jeep at the bungalow of Mr. Rajiv and Mrs. Lalita, senior birders from Pune. Both have travelled extensively and had four prior trips to Tadoba. Their stay was at Taaru Vann, a stone’s throw from Kolara Gate. Most of the group, including me, were assigned Sylvan Wood resort.
2.5 hours to Sylvan. After dropping us, the car took the couple onward to Taaru Vann, 20 minutes further. Welcome drink at Sylvan, then a quick game of pool. The resort gate has a sighting board updated daily; the previous day’s headline was Tigress Rani. We caught buffer lunch before the afternoon safari.
Each group is assigned a different zone to maximise the spread of sightings. My roommate Altaf got swapped to Mrs. Nina’s car for the safari rotation. Mrs. Nina was the daughter and wife of Bangladesh Liberation War army veterans, in from Noida on her daughters’ insistence.
First geography note: Navegaon and Kolara gates lead to the same zone. Evening safari runs 2:30 to 6:30pm. Effective showtime is 3 hours per person, because part of the route is buffer area where humans and wildlife share land.
Hard caps on jeeps per gate, 60 jeeps total across Tadoba. No littering. No leaving the jeep. No phone calls. Phones go in a locked steel hatchet inside the jeep. Pricing tiers: small bus is cheapest, 6-seat jeep is standard, 4-seat (quartet) jeep is premium for visibility, full private jeep is the top tier.
Encounters that afternoon: mongoose, spotted deer, sambar deer, pond heron, lesser cormorant, grey hornbill. Then a rumour about Tigress Sharmili moving through the area with her cubs. We paced an area looking for her. What crossed the road in front of us instead was her partner, the 10-foot male tiger Bajrangi (T-45). He stopped for a split second to look at us, then walked through to the pond. My reflex came late. I caught a clean side-profile shot, nothing more.
100 INR each to the driver and the guide. Generous tip for the day, fully earned. The other groups had blanked. We bonded over paan-flavoured hookah under the stars.
Safari Two: Kolara Buffer
4am start, replacing our scheduled Navegaon Core slot due to an organiser mix-up. That swap cost us the day. We rolled in via Kolara Gate into the buffer zone, where Sharmili and her cubs had a deer kill three days earlier. The carcass was visible at distance. The tiger was not. A male Black Redstart held its perch on the waterhole until the jeep traffic pushed it into the deeper jungle.
Drove to a second waterhole on the rumour-trail. Fresh pug marks on the bank, no animal. The waterhole was a bird hotspot: a basking cormorant, green bee-eaters, bulbuls.
All the jeeps cycled in and out around waterhole no. 2 hoping for a return visit. We retreated post-breakfast at 9am, expecting a blank for everyone.
Wrong call. The teams that went into core spotted T-54 Matkasur, the old male, lying in tall grass. They could not move for 2.5 hours straight — moving on a sleeping tiger is unethical and the rangers enforce it. The sighting held until Matkasur woke up, yawned, and walked away.
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Safari Three : Sirkada Buffer
Sirkada entrance was more than half an hour drive from the Kolara gate, which made the experience that much extra to deal with. This was followed by an exceptional overdose of bumpy roads, fear of the jeep getting stuck in mud amidst forest. The guide reported that there has been no sighting in Sirkada and Alizanja in over a week. As a result, chances of encounter with leopards and sloth bears were considered higher in this area.
Encountered wild boars and waterhen and a whole lot of body pain. With truck load of disappointment, our car slowly crawled to the exit gate. The guide chose to stop near a massive water body as we waited to see the deer family prancing away.
All of a sudden, the deers went on high alert and started generating repeated warning calls. The guides followed the direction they were staring at and predicted that the resident tigress and her cub will sneak out for water. Finally there seemed to be a real chance of catch!
Darkness fell on like a cloak as the calls got louder, everyone had their eyes peeled up front. As other gypsy followed suit, couple of the groups went too enthusiastic and drove too much into the expected path, ignoring our constant signal to go on reverse. However the damage was probably done as the barks came to an abrupt halt, likely the tiger getting spooked and taking a different route as so many humans encroached their path.
To add real salt to our wounds, we came back to the news that the Kolara core group had head on encounter with the coveted tigress Maya and her one surviving male cub. It is presumed that the remaining three cubs from last year are dead now, although their body had not been recovered.
Safari Three: Pause
Coverage of this safari is missing from this post. We saw little of note that round. Jumping to the next.
Safari Four: Kolara Core
Straight to the spot where Maya had been sighted the previous night. On the way, the deer alarm cued up again, with a mongoose standing in the open this time. Local lore: a mongoose sighting brings luck. The probability that day did, slightly, agree.
After the deer settled, we kept searching. The Tadoba lake shore has a designated breakfast spot with a working washroom. We worked through the hotel’s packed breakfast there. A crocodile sunbathed in the lake at the dimensional fidelity of a floating log.
The breakfast point hosted parakeets and golden-headed orioles flying through. Best meal location across the zones.
One vehicle radioed Maya in a paddy field. The convoy regrouped. Multiple gypsies clustered too tight, blocking each other’s lines. Eventually a cub became visible in the distance, swimming. It was clear we were not getting a head-on frame today.
Safari Five: Kolara Buffer
Switched out of Alizanja for a Kolara buffer roll. Bad guide call cost us the run. Another car in our group held position with Matkasur walking the road behind their jeep — he was looking for a tree to mark territory. Other gypsies got too close. He left the road for cover.
Then a Sharmili rumour went up. She was visible behind a small stream with her cubs.
Then it broke. The first car blocking the cleanest view was our own tour organiser’s. Rain rolled in. Twenty gypsies crammed into a 10-foot ditch trying to position. Sharmili read the chaos and walked away. The cubs followed.
Safari Six: Kolara Buffer
Final attempt. Fifteen minutes in, a sloth bear walking circles behind a thicket, anxious about the engine noise. He never came out. Then the headline: Matkasur, in the open. He walked the narrow single-lane track within the forest, with ten-plus jeeps in front of him and behind. We were fourth in the back convoy. Tracked the rear of the tiger for a clean ten minutes.
Until someone got too close. He turned, urinated to mark territory, and stepped sideways into the jungle. End of the trip.
Hotel and Food
Sylvan Wood: large wooden rooms, deep balconies, both open and closed shower areas, timbered architecture top to bottom.
Slightly unclean swimming pool in the centre. Healthy tree cover around the property. Common room serves as the dining area. No Wi-Fi. Mobile internet is poor.
Buffet for lunch and dinner, simple. Breakfast is packed for the safari. Hookah (500 INR) and drinks on request. Staff is courteous and fixes things fast. Our organiser ran a Maharashtrian buffet plus a gala dinner that landed several notches above the standard menu.
Separate paid food menu in the rooms. Bottled water is chargeable.
Return
Wrap-up at noon with a group photo session. Same Innova, same Mr. Yogesh. Under three hours later I was at Nagpur airport. The lounge is small. Security does not let you into the boarding gate area until 2 hours before your flight.
Met some of the same group at the gates — Maharashtra-bound on the 7:30pm flight, Bangalore-bound on the 8pm. The Karnataka-bound passengers needed a mandatory RT-PCR; the airport clinic ran the test for 850 INR, with results landing around the time their flights touched down.
Field Notes
- Stay in the jeep. Tigers in Tadoba have killed humans before. No exceptions.
- Don’t litter, stay quiet, stay ethical. Heavy fines for breaking these.
- Phone in flight mode for the safari. Some guides will let you keep it out of the box unofficially. Do not bring it out in the open during a sighting.
- Use a real operator for VIP slots. Self-booking the slots, especially on weekends or holidays, is a separate full-time job.
- Long lens, padded. The roads are bumpy. A long lens without padding is a destroyed lens. Reaction speed becomes a separate skill on these tracks.
- Calibrate by season. Summer (April-May) gives you easier sightings on dry waterholes. Winter gives you a green backdrop. Zone, guide, and weather are all individual variables that compound.
One Recommendation
It was my first tiger safari. The thing I would recommend is the experience itself. If you are doing this for the first time, target peak season — April to May — for the highest baseline odds.
We will be back.
Sayantan