I think these posts highlight exactly the amount of chance involved in trying to find wild animals-- also I can't help but notice that when people are looking for one specific species they also end up finding many other species along the way yet the target species is hardest to find. This also goes to show something I am big on: that there is no such thing as a guaranteed sighting of a wild animal, especially of mammals. (I for instance was "guaranteed" to see moose in the Grand Tetons. After days of searching I didn't see as much as an antler). And needless to say Chli you are doing a fantastic job of recounting your Southeastern adventures to Asia! (Yet again )
yep, animal-watching is just really random. But that is why it is fun. I don't like when people tell you an animal is "guaranteed" or that you will "definitely see it" because that almost ensures that you won't see it! On the other hand, if you don't see it, that gives you a good reason to go back! I have just put a couple of photos of the wolves into the India gallery. They are not great photos of course, but they give a good idea of what they look like up there. India - Wildlife - Photo Galleries | ZooChat
Yes, that 'guarantee' is often what ensures you don't see whatever it is. I like the Tibetan Wolves, almost worth the trip in their own right.
Maybe I should count myself lucky I saw Moose there on two different visits, I hadn't realised they could be difficult.
Furthering the Moose point, the nearest big area of wilderness to me in Warsaw (Kampinos National Park, about 30 mins drive) is somewhere that, according to MammalWatching sightings of Elk (Moose) are 'near-guaranteed' and naturally I go there quite regularly, usually monthly, and I have *never* seen one of these 'near-guaranteed' Elk. Also, I know a few people who have only ever been once and have seen Elk, and I know someone who goes there more often than me and also hasn't seen one. I think there's one mammal that it is fair to call a guaranteed sighting though - Homo sapiens. (Unless you're blind of course, this comment is probably highly offensive to blind people).
the wolves were great. The unexpected animals are often the best ones - as in, I wanted to see wolves up there but really didn't think I would, so when I did see them it was just brilliant. If someone had said to me that I wouldn't see snow leopard but I would see wolves, that would have been enough to get me back up there. There are easier places to see wolves - I'll bet quite a few of the American members have seen wolves - but the Tibetan wolf is better than most wolves. And they're potentially a different species to the American and other wolves anyway (I just keep them as lupus because canid taxonomy is all over the place).
I have finished writing the Indian blogs - I'll post the next three now because they all go together (they are just broken up because they are about three places in the same general area), then there's one more location after that, then there will be an Indian round-up of costs etc (I haven't done the figures for that yet), and that's India done. Then at some point there will be the post on Kaeng Krachan National Park here in Thailand which I'll try to write today. Tomorrow I think I go to Cambodia.
BHARATPUR and the KEOLADEO NATIONAL PARK 28-31 January I had about a week left in India after Ladakh. I had planned on going straight to Bharatpur when I flew into Delhi but the flight was delayed in Leh, so had to stay in Delhi after all. Leh flights often get delayed or cancelled in winter due to the weather, usually fog or cloud. In this case my flight couldn't land on its inward journey (from Delhi to Leh) so had to go all the way back to Delhi and then sit there until the weather improved in Leh. The original scheduled departure time from Leh had been 11am but became 3.30pm instead. The next morning I took a bus to Bharatpur, six hours away. I saw my first Egyptian vultures on way, initially a couple in flight which was a disappointing way to first see a species (from a bus, with the bird in the air), but then there was a building by the roadside with a flock of about thirty roosting on the roof. I ended up seeing them quite a bit in the general area. Also there was a large herd of nilgai seen from the bus. I've seen a few mildly-amusing signs around India, including a big sign in Mumbai saying "English is ease - learn from the best" and a shop in Marayur selling "sweets and snakes". But my absolute favourite, possibly from anywhere in Asia, was seen at roadworks on the way into Bharatpur - "Rob is under maintenance". It wasn't a hand-written sign either, it was a big official sign. It just makes you wonder if they do it to mess with tourists. I had several reasons for being in Bharatpur. Foremost was the Keoladeo National Park (formerly called the Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary) which is a renowned birding spot in India. If you say to almost any Indian that you're going to Bharatpur they will immediately say "oh, the bird sanctuary". The second reason was that the town is quite close to Agra (about 1.5 hours by bus) but has cheaper accommodation. There's some sort of fancy palace or something in Agra which everyone else wants to see, but I had heard that there were bats at Agra Fort so that was my drawcard. And the third reason was that Bharatpur was also reasonably close to a city called Dholpur (3 hours by bus), next to which is the National Chambal Sanctuary on the Chambal River in which live Ganges dolphins, gharials, and Indian skimmers. In Bharatpur I found that there was a string of cheap hotels along the road right next to the gate of Keoladeo. The one I stayed at was called the Hotel Pelican which is literally about three minutes walk from the gate. There were lots of other "bird" names around town - Hotel Sunbird, Hotel Peacock, Hotel Siberian (as in Thrush or Crane), Birders Inn, Hotel Eagles Nest. The Hotel Pelican was a good place to stay and I would recommend it. The accompanying restaurant is also excellent, with some of the best food I had in India. I made a brief visit to the park entrance on the first afternoon. I hadn't got into town until 3pm and I didn't want to pay the 500 rupee tourist entry fee for only a couple of hours, so I just checked on the info I needed about opening times and so forth and spent some time talking to one of the guides about the best spots inside the park. He also gave me some information on the Sariska Tiger Reserve which I would be visiting as my last stop in India (in preference to the more-touristy Ranthambore National Park). I knew about the existence of Sariska but due to not having much in the way of internet while in India I hadn't been able to find out anything about visiting. My main interest in going wasn't so much the tigers as that in Vivek Menon's field guide for Indian mammals there is a photo of a chousingha taken there. I had never seen one of these, even in a zoo, and they may well be the Indian mammal I want to see the most. Keoladeo opens at dawn (actually before dawn, at 6.30am, but it is so foggy there's no point even trying to go in spotlighting) and closes at dusk, at around 6pm or so. You can get a guide but it isn't mandatory as in so many other parks. You can walk, or hire a bicycle, or get a rickshaw. The rickshaw drivers will all tell you that you can't possibly walk because it is "too far". It is like maximum twenty kilometres if you go everywhere. On the other hand I did have a couple of English people stop nearby while I was walking and their guide said to them that their rickshaw driver would go ahead a bit so they could walk along the lake shore for birds, and they were aghast at this suggestion. It was as if he had said they would need to walk to the Bhutan border instead of one kilometre. I was going to go into Keoladeo the day after I arrived but that would be Sunday so, in expectation of it being too busy for good birding, I put that off until Monday and instead went to Dholpur to look for gharials and dolphins on the Chambal River (hoping Sunday might make it easier to share boat costs). I'll put about that in the next post. On Monday I finally visited Keoladeo. It was really foggy - and I mean really foggy, the kind of foggy where there could be a truck sitting ten metres away on the road and you wouldn't be able to see it. Apparently at this time of year dense fog is almost always present in the morning. Although it didn't clear until after 10am I managed to see a lot of birds through it, including a trio of Indian grey hornbills which were lifers (as in, I had never seen them before in my life). There was also a surprise golden jackal. I knew they were here, and I had been hearing them calling, but the only ones I'd seen previously were a couple running away at Yala in Sri Lanka so I wasn't really expecting to see any. Here I had gone off the road a bit after some babblers and there was a jackal, er, running away. It seems that is their habit. I saw ninety-four bird species today, but most of them were common Indian birds. The park is all dry open forest around lakes and swamp, so there are lots and lots of waterfowl and wading birds. If I'd come here at the start of the Indian trip I would have seen loads of species that were new for me, but now only five of them were lifers and only nineteen out of the ninety-four hadn't been seen already just this month alone (January). It was great just being able to be out birding from dawn to dusk though - not something I've been able to do much in India at all. Owls are something that the tuktuk drivers all want to show you. They know they can get birders to pay for being shown owl roosts. On the other hand, you can do what I do and just walk around by yourself and quite easily see where the guides are showing people owls. The park guides are quite happy to share information with lone birders, I think probably because they are well-aware that birders walking around alone aren't going to being paying for a guide anyway so they aren't losing money by giving you information (if that makes sense). There are three main owls everyone who is interested gets shown at some point. The spotted owlets are pretty easy because they are not as nocturnal as regular owls. The Indian scops owls are a bit harder. They roost scrunched up inside palm trees or in tangles of branches. I got told about a pair in the dead leaves of a palm at Sapan Mori on the main path and saw those. The second time I was at the park I also saw a different one sleeping on a tree branch. The best owl, at least for me because I'd already seen the other two species elsewhere, would be the dusky eagle owls. Eagle owls are named for their huge size, like eagles. I'd seen the Indian eagle owl in Gujarat, but the dusky eagle owl would be a new one. They took some finding. I'd been told there was a pair roosting "in the acacia trees past the Keoladeo Temple". I knew where the temple was, I knew there were acacia trees all around it, I didn't know where the owls were. Eventually, at the end of the day, I managed to get some proper directions and saw the owls. Sort of. The trees they roost in are on an island, and the owls were both tucked back amongst the branches. Even through binoculars they were little more than huge brown blobs. I couldn't even see their faces. I was told that brown fish owls don't occur in the park so they had to be dusky eagle owls, but otherwise there was little I could see to identify them as such. The next day I returned in the afternoon after visiting Agra (that will be in a following post) specifically to see if the eagle owls were in a better position for viewing. I had hired a bicycle to get to the eagle owl roost quickly (just 25 rupees for five hours), but it is a poor way to bird because you miss most of the smaller species. For example, on the previous day I had seen numerous bluethroats while on foot (one of my lifers for that day), but today not a single one. However I did see a golden jackal asleep in the shade (poor photos from a distance) and an Indian scops owl roosting more-or-less in the open on a branch. The eagle owls appeared to be in almost exactly the same positions as on the previous day, but while looking at them a guide told me about another one roosting by the entrance gate. On the way out I went in search of this owl and eventually found it sitting in the open in a tall eucalyptus tree. It was coming on to dusk so no good photos could be obtained but I could see it perfectly well.
NATIONAL CHAMBAL SANCTUARY 29 January Not too far away from Bharatpur is the Chambal River, home to Ganges dolphins and gharials. I have seen the dolphins once before, in Assam in 2014, but never a gharial. At this time of year there are also Indian skimmers on the river, and that was a bird I really wanted to see. There are only three species of skimmer in the world, with the other two being found in Africa and the Americas respectively. They are called skimmers because of the way they feed. The bird itself looks much like a tern or gull with extra long wings, but the bill is quite extraordinarily-shaped. The lower bill is very deep and much longer than the upper bill, and when feeding the bird flies low over the river with the lower bill slicing through the water. When the bill hits a fish, the bird snaps it shut and has its meal. They also have vertical pupils like a gecko which is just plain weird. Most serious nature-watchers who go looking for animals at the Chambal River stay at a particular resort called the Chambal Safari. I looked at this initially but it is too expensive for me, and I also found out that it isn't actually anywhere near the river so if you want to do anything you need to pay for their tours as well. While researching I found out that there are government boats which run from the bridge by the town of Dholpur (or Dhaulpur). It is mainly Indian tourists who know about this, so the prices I found online were much cheaper than they would be for me but I didn't know that until I got there. There are buses direct to Dholpur from Bharatpur which take three hours. I could have caught one from the Saras Circle bus stand which is a few minutes walk from the Hotel Pelican, but that's just a stop rather than a station and there is no English script on the fronts of the buses, so I took a tuktuk to the main bus station in Bharatpur to be sure of getting on the right one! As usual here, the morning was slightly foggy - it was like pea-soup and didn't clear until well after 9am. The bus driver was basically driving blind; it was a little nerve-wracking! Once in Dholpur I got a tuktuk from the bus stand to the bridge over the river. I knew I was supposed to go to the other side of the bridge for the boats but the tuktuk driver said it was on this side, and I could see boats and people down there whereas on the other side there were no boats, so figured I'd go where the boats were. It turned out that some of the boats I could see belonged to one specific hotel (the Raj Niwas Palace) and the rest were for the forest department rangers. I talked to the forest department people who were there about what to do. One of them was extremely helpful and really wanted to get me out on the river because I had come all the way from New Zealand to see their wildlife. He said that the public boats did go from other side but there would be none at all available today because they were all being used by government officials for joy-riding. There went my great idea about Sunday being a good choice for sharing boat costs! First he tried to get me on one of the hotel's boat trips which would cost 2000 rupees (about NZ$40), but the operator said no way - probably because he wanted to rent me the whole boat for 6000 rupees. (Apparently the government boats on the other side of the river would cost about 2500 for me, as a foreigner, so although 2000 would be a lot it would still be cheaper than the ones I was going to be using). With that a non-starter the ranger came up with a new plan, where for the cost of the fuel (1000 rupees) they would take me on their boat and call it a census by counting the species we saw. This worked fine for me, although I ended up paying 1500 because of the stupid money India has now (I only had 2000s and the guy only had 500 in change) but, again, still cheaper than the government boats so I'm not complaining! While all the organisation was going on I could see that there were skimmers way up-river on a sandbank. The only way I knew they were skimmers was because every so often some would fly up and settle back down, and their wings were too long to be any other bird, but even with binoculars I couldn't actually see them other than as vague bird shapes. There was a lot of phone-calling to try and arrange getting me onto the river and I had no idea if things were working out or not, so I was apprehensive that this was going to be the closest I was going to get to those skimmers! Finally, though, we were underway. There were a few rangers and/or friends in the boat and their wives had turned up for trip too. Within a few minutes I had seen gharials and muggers easily, of all sizes from small to huge, and also the flock of skimmers on the sandbank of which I got some acceptable photos. Lots of other birds along the river too, like ruddy shelducks, osprey, pied kingfisher, bar-headed geese, river lapwing, and the endangered black-bellied tern. There was one dolphin seen briefly, basically a few splashes but enough of it was seen to "count it". As mentioned earlier I have seen Ganges dolphins before, at Tezpur in Assam in 2014. In my vast experience of these two occasions I'd say that Tezpur is much better than the Chambal, but I guess season and basic luck come into the equation. However the rangers said I was lucky to see the dolphin (whereas they "guaranteed" I would see the gharial and skimmers).
AGRA 31 January I figured I "had" to go to Agra while at Bharatpur. I quite like really old archaeological sites like Angkor or the Terracotta Warriors to pick two which I have specifically gone to see, but the Taj Mahal wasn't really interesting to me. It's just a palace. But it seemed a bit perverse not to go there when it was so close by. More importantly, I had read on Mammalwatching that naked-rumped tomb bats could potentially be seen inside the old Agra Fort. That was a far better reason for going, and I could tag the Taj Mahal on as well. A few minutes walk from the Hotel Pelican is the Saras Circle bus stand from which one can catch frequent buses to Agra. This is quite handy as it saves on the tuktuk fare to the main Bharatpur bus stand. The fog was so thick that other vehicles were invisible until only about ten metres away, and it didn't clear until after 10am when nearly at Agra. The Agra Fort is okay, just an old fort such as can be seen in many parts of India. The entry fee for foreigners is 550 rupees which isn't particularly cheap (about NZ$11), especially when it seems like most of the building is unavailable due to restoration work. According to Mammalwatching (from several years ago) the tomb bats are easy to find in the ground-level rooms on the side of the fort which faces the Taj Mahal. Unfortunately those rooms are no longer able to be visited. I wandered round the accessible areas a few times searching. I knew tomb bats clung rather than hung, so I was looking along the tops of the walls where they meet the ceilings, figuring that would be the most likely place for roosting. Eventually I found some bats, and once I did they proved to indeed be common - you just need to know the right sort of roost-site. It's a bit difficult to explain but there was an open-fronted "room" off a courtyard with pillars and arched sections inside. In the tops of the arches were double rows of ornate brickwork, and between them were roosting the tomb bats. They were basically wanting dark narrow crevices in which they can cling out of sight. The archways aren't high either, so it was easy to get photos. With that accomplished I tried to go see the Taj Mahal. In theory it can be seen from the fort, but not today because of the smog (that's smog, not fog). I didn't want to pay 1000 rupees to go inside the Taj Mahal - it's just a palace - but I figured I should at least see it, even though I know full well what it looks like. Long story which I won't go into but after quite some time I saw it from a distance through smog after a sequence of tuktuk-related events and that was enough because I was getting a little annoyed, and then it was capped off by the tuktuk driver trying to tell me he had said double the agreed price, which ended with a - shall we say - "loud argument" which he did not win.
I'm sure the tour companies wouldn't want it being known, but that is what all the spotters were telling me. All I know for sure is that the first time I went there a tour group just before me went home empty-handed, and of the three groups that were there on my second visit only one group (and only some members of that group) had a very distant and unsatisfying sighting. There obviously is still the chance of seeing them really well - the one on a kill right above the camp for ten days, until a week before I arrived, for instance. But all the spotters were saying that it is, in general, very difficult now to get good (or sometimes, any) sightings. A number of people in Leh, on both my visits, told me they used to be seen on occasion even in Leh itself during winter because the bharal would come down that low. But now it doesn't snow enough.
Here is the final story from India: SARISKA TIGER RESERVE 1-3 February My flight out of India was on the 4th of February. I had time for one last stop. Initially I had planned on Ranthambore National Park, just to add tiger even though I thought the park might be so touristy as to be a horrible experience. I'd seen a tiger only once in the wild, at a great distance at Kaziranga in Assam in 2014, and I'd have quite liked to see one properly. Then in Gujarat someone mentioned the Sariska Tiger Reserve to me as a good place. I couldn't find out much due to a chronic lack of internet almost everywhere I went, but I did happen to notice in Vivek Menon's field guide to Indian mammals that a photo of a chousingha (four-horned antelope) had been taken at Sariska. That photo sealed the deal, and I decided to go to Sariska instead of Ranthambore. While at Keoladeo one of the guides told me the closest town for accommodation and buses is called Alwar. From Bharatpur I took a bus to Alwar, three hours away. Close to the bus stand I found a hotel called the Galaxy Guest House which amazingly had WIFI. The rooms were 1200 rupees but they gave me one for 1000 instead. Not as cheap as I would have liked (it's about NZ$20) but it was in the right place and only for two nights. When I checked in I was told that they had no restaurant, only coffee and tea - later I found out they did have food (as room service) which was lucky as finding somewhere to eat in the area proved extremely difficult. The guide at Keoladeo had said I would need to get a taxi or tuktuk to the park from Alwar, which could have been pricey as it is a distance of 35km. When I arrived at the Alwar bus stand the first thing I did was to go into the office and ask about a bus. It turns out that the park HQ is directly next to the main road between Alwar and Jaipur, and buses do that route every twenty minutes. And from Alwar the hour-long journey only costs 35 rupees. Nice and simple. After checking into the hotel and finding some food, I decided to bus out to the park to check on what information I needed for tomorrow. It was only an hour and I wasn't doing anything else, and I figured I'd rather find out times and costs for myself than rely on second-hand information from anyone in town (none of whom would know the foreigner prices anyway). It was just as well I made the "trial run", so to speak, because I stood at the wrong platform waiting for the bus for almost an hour before finally being directed to the right spot by one of the drivers. What was most annoying about it was when each bus arrived at that spot I would lean into the office and say "that bus?" and the guy would say something like "no but just keep waiting"! There were rhesus macaques all along the way to the park - you couldn't go more than a couple of minutes without seeing them along road. There were also Southern Plains langurs at one point. Once at the park I found out that there are two entry periods, as is usual in the jeep-safari parks, but the time-slots are remarkably narrow. The morning entry is between 6.30 and 7.30am, and in the afternoon between I think it was 2.30 and 3.30pm or something like that. The safaris last about four hours, but they are quite pricey if by oneself - although by no means as expensive as at many of the national parks. The foreigner price is 570 rupees for entry (locals 105 rupees). Then the jeep is 2100 rupees, the guide 300 rupees, and the jeep entry fee 250 rupees (even though it is the park's jeep! Just another way to squeeze money out of the visitors' pockets - at least there's no camera fee). Although I was within the entry period for that afternoon I wasn't too keen on paying 3220 rupees for my visit (about NZ$65) unless absolutely necessary, so figured I'd go in if someone else turned up and let me share their jeep, but otherwise I'd come back in the morning and try then. I did find out while waiting that chousingha are actually very rare in the park, which wasn't great news, and that there are only fourteen tigers in the reserve. The tigers had actually died out in Sariska by 2004 and have been reintroduced from Ranthambore since 2008. No other visitors arrived - the rangers said hardly anyone comes during the week, only at the weekends does it get a little busy - so I caught a bus back to Alwar, where it took me an hour to find a working ATM. The ATM situation is when I start getting really frustrated about India! But on the plus side, I found that the daily withdrawal limit had gone up to 10,000 rupees, a few days before I was due to leave the country. It took another half-hour before finding somewhere to eat that wasn't just the fried rubbish they sell round the bus stand. The buses to the park start running really early, something like 4.20am, and so I got out there easily before the ticket counter opened at 6am. I waited until 7am in case anyone else arrived (it doesn't get light until then anyway) but nobody did so I took a jeep alone. Just inside the gates we saw a black-naped hare which seemed like a good start. I've seen these elsewhere but the subspecies in this part of India has a brown nape rather than black, so looks a little weird. However the rest of the safari was uneventful. I might even say it was a waste of money but I only use that phrase because all the mammals (and the few birds) which we saw were common species which I had seen at several other locations, species like nilgai, spotted deer, sambar, wild pigs, and langurs. If I had just arrived in India they would all be really cool to see, but alas that was not the case. And of course, tiger and chousingha were what I had my sights on. It is a really nice park to drive around in though, and very peaceful without other visitors. When we got back to the HQ there were Southern Plains langurs all over the place, so I managed to get some photos of them at least. Then the guide sprung on me that striped hyaenas and Indian crested porcupines could be easily seen at night - and that they do night drives for them for the same cost as the day safaris!! This was a brilliant surprise because almost nowhere in India are night drives or spotlighting allowed in the parks. I just wish they had told me about this the previous afternoon when I was there. Two jeep rides at NZ$65 each made for a costly day/night on my budget but I wasn't going to pass up hyaenas! I did have my reservations about how likely they would be, despite the guide saying they were very likely, but I figured that at least we would see porcupines. That afternoon the jeep picked me up from the hotel in Alwar and we were off. The reserve is split into three zones and the one they go to at night is not the same as the day zone. It is quite close to Alwar in fact. It was a much more satisfying drive than the morning one. Sadly no hyaenas were seen, but there were six Indian crested porcupines, including three all together in one group, three black-naped hares, several sambar and chital, as well as a jungle nightjar and an eagle owl of some sort (probably Indian eagle owl, based on the habitat there). The guide did seem very certain we would see hyaenas so I think with a few night drives you'd probably get lucky. I would have paid to go out again if I had had the time to stay longer. The next mornng I took a bus for four hours to Delhi where I got a room at the Hotel Brij Palace for 650 rupees. Their WIFI worked perfectly which was a first for any of the places I stayed at in Delhi! My flight to Bangkok was at 6.30pm the next day, so in the morning I visited the Delhi Zoo. Due to a bird flu scare the zoo had closed to the public in October, just a few days before I first arrived in Delhi, and had only reopened a couple of weeks ago. I was interested in seeing this zoo because it was regularly said to be the best (or the only good) zoo in India, and I also was interested in seeing how it looked after three months of closure. The review is here - Delhi National Zoological Park - Delhi Zoo visit, 4 February 2017 - but in short it was indeed a very good zoo and well worth visiting which is more than I can say for some other places I have seen.
...and some extra bits: I spent 55 days in India on this part of the trip, averaging NZ$38.40 per day which made it the most expensive of the destinations so far. But there is a lot of variability in costs around India. For example, if I break India down into regions, then Kerala averaged NZ$24 per day and Dalhousie averaged NZ$22 per day. At the other end, the Little Rann of Kutch had an average of NZ$45 per day (which is actually cheaper than it would have been because three of the six nights I spent at Desert Coursers were free), and Ladakh had an average of NZ$48 per day (because of the snow leopard fees and having to pay for the taxi to and from Rumbak by myself). Here are all the country stats so far: MALAYSIA: *1192.10 Ringgits spent over eleven days (NZ$397.50, US$284.85, UK£232.90, €261.70) *Average spent per day: NZ$36.10, US$25.90, UK£21.20, €23.80 *114 birds seen, 2 lifers (c.2 percent of total) *23 mammals seen, 2 lifers (c.9 percent of total) INDIA (round one): *43,068 Indian rupees spent over 25 days (NZ$896, US$635.50, UK£507.50, €590.50) *Average spent per day: NZ$35.80, US$25.40, UK£20.30, €23.60 *95 birds seen, 14 lifers (c.15 percent of total) *9 mammals seen, 4 lifers (c.44 percent of total) (The low animal numbers are because most of the time was spent in Ladakh) SRI LANKA: *87,626 Sri Lankan rupees spent over 26 days (NZ$829.60, US$594.45, UK£470.75, €561.10) *Average spent per day: NZ$31.90, US$22.85, UK£18.10, €21.60 *158 birds seen, 64 lifers (c.40 percent of total) *25 mammals seen, 18 lifers (c.72 percent of total) INDIA (round two): *101,187 Indian rupees spent over 55 days (NZ$2110, US$1513.30, UK£1214.70, €1431) *Average spent per day: NZ$38.40, US$27.50, UK£22.10, €26 *312 birds seen, 88 lifers (c.28 percent of total) *38 mammals seen, 18 lifers (c.47 percent of total) I thought I might just include all my flights here too, for anyone interested in that detail. I've put them into two blocks, and rounded the figures. The first lot are the ones I booked before leaving New Zealand, and they were supposed to be the only flights during the trip - but then I had to go to Sri Lanka (last-minute, so more expensive than I would have liked) and also decided to go back to Ladakh, so a few more had to be added in. Christchurch to Auckland (Air New Zealand): NZ$73 Auckland to Kuala Lumpur (Air Asia): NZ$316 Kuala Lumpur to Sandakan (Air Asia): NZ$61 Kota Kinabalu to Kuala Lumpur (Air Asia): NZ$57 Kuala Lumpur to New Delhi (Air Asia): NZ$174 Return flight New Delhi to Leh to New Delhi (Jet Airways): NZ$182 Kochi to Bangkok (Air Asia): NZ$128 [never used because I had to rearrange the trip] New Delhi to Colombo via Chennai (SpiceJet): NZ$254 Colombo to Madurai (SpiceJet): NZ$115 Ahmedabad to Dharamshala (SpiceJet): NZ$146 Jammu to Leh (Air India): NZ$48 Leh to New Delhi (Air India): NZ$94 New Delhi to Bangkok via Calcutta (SpiceJet): NZ$184
