ATR - Day 94: Clicked some more LTMs before arriving at Annamalai Tiger Reserve

We went to have another round of clicking LTMs and got a few good pictures but not as many as before. Came to Annamalai Tiger Reserve thenafter.

January 2, 2024

Tuesday, 11:30 PM

Hotel Bel Visto, 

Cooperative Colony Road,

Valparai, Taluk Valparai,

District Coimbatore, 

Tamil Nadu, India  

Got up and went straight to get some more pictures of LTMs. And we did find the LTMs, but they were not interested in doing much. They kept sitting and looking around and we kept sitting, looking at them. I got a few good pictures but very few, given the enormous amount of time we spent, patiently waiting for them to do something different. So not much came of the first half of the day. 

We returned to our hotel, packed our bags and left for Annamalai Tiger Reserve, where we were staying in a guest house inside the reserve. When we reached there, we found that the guest house was deep inside the forest, which was fine but there was nobody there. We were told that we would find a caretaker there but all we found there was a guest house with nobody taking care of it. We called out. “Anna! Anna!!” But no Anna responded. For a long time, we stood there waiting for someone to come but when none did, we decided to take a round of the property. We found an empty cage meant for big cats, which is not all that uncommon in the jungle setting. And that’s it. Just that cage and lifeless walls. We moved around some more and called out for Anna some more. While we were standing, looking around and wondering what to do next, Anna stepped out of what looked like a makeshift toilet, after spending a handsome amount of time inside and presented us with another difficulty, which was beginning to feel usual even though we couldn’t get used to it — communication. He knew no Hindi or English and we had no initiation in Tamil. But we managed to somehow communicate. 

He told us that there were no safaris organized there at the reserve and while we did have our rooms but there was no internet connectivity at all and I had to have some kind of connectivity because I had a few urgent things to take care of. So we stayed there for a bit but had to make an exit to find another place to stay. We drove around and finally found this place where we currently. This is a decent place to stay. After we had arranged for our stay and settled in, we went to eat something, but we got to eat today was not good at all, the less said of it the better.