After mostly sleeping through the New Year celebration, we woke up the next morning, got ready, and met up with Kalpana’s family.  Her aunt who lives in Sauraha made me a breakfast sandwich by toasting some bread (which was like the best store-bought bread I’ve ever had…don’t know why) and putting an egg in between.  That’s not a typical Nepali breakfast from what I could tell, so it was very sweet for her to be so thoughtful and accommodating.  I decided to take a picture of the breakfast.  I’m glad I did because I wouldn’t have even remembered if I hadn’t.

We spent the day in Chitwan National Park.  Inside the park you can find crocodiles, tigers, monkeys, and rhinos, among other types of animals.  You can also find elephants in Nepal, though I don’t know if you can actually find any in the park.

To get into the park you have to ride in this long, canoe-like boat (I’m sure it has its own name, though I don’t know it) across the river that has crocodiles in it.  I took a couple of pictures of the river.  You can see on the sandy shore that there are some large crocodiles taking in the sun.  Kalpana didn’t enjoy the ride in the boat very well.  She’s not a strong swimmer, plus it’s hard to swim if you’re being chewed on by a large animal.

We had a guide the whole time in the park and road in a truck that had been converted to carry people in the back on bench seats.  Not the most comfortable, but it was cool to be outside and up close with nature.  We did manage to see a decent amount of wildlife, but weren’t lucky enough to see any rhinos or tigers.  Though perhaps not seeing them is just as lucky as they can be kind of dangerous sometimes.  We did manage to see a lot of rhino excrement and I saw a decent size tiger paw print in the mud.  That was cool.  I’ve always been a fan of cats.

Within the park they have little military camps set up.  They warned us not to look at the soldiers.  Apparently being too nosy can get you in trouble.  They periodically had checkpoints to verify that the tour company was properly documented and we weren’t doing anything illegal.  It’s actually nice that they had strict regulations like that.  You could tell it paid dividends because the park was probably the cleanest place in all of Nepal.  The natural habitat seemed to also be fairly protected.

I don’t know if the day-long trip into the park was really worth it.  It was very expensive to take the whole group.  And since I’m a foreigner it cost me like 10 times more than everyone else.  I didn’t have to pay myself, which, once again, was very kind of Kalpana’s family, but it still was pretty expensive.  That was a running theme for my time in Nepal.  Every tourist-type attraction was more expensive for me to do, even though I was going with Nepali people. 

You can view a bunch more photos of the park and our group in google photos by clicking on the picture below:

There was also a festival of some sort going on in Sauraha on the way back from the park.  There was a lot of music and dancing and an elephant.  It was pretty cool, but it did mean they shut down the main road and it was hard to get a car back to Kalpana’s family’s house.  Anyway, all-in-all, it was a good day and we spent the night back at the family home.