Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part five: 2016-2017

one should never pick up wild lions, it results in digestion-related death.

I did see blackbuck. I did not see wolves (they are rare in the Little Rann). I've been looking for hyaenas which apparently are quite common here, but no luck. I saw some other mammals though. You'll have to wait and find out what...

 

in Mongolia I had a pack howling in the night around me when out spotlighting. That was very cool. And there were footprints when I was up in Ladakh earlier in this trip. So far no sightings though.

 

coincidentally, about a week ago I did finally manage to see some wolves. So yay for me!

I have not been having much luck with internet in India (or when I was in Sri Lanka) so the blog posts have been getting a bit behind. I'm leaving India in three days and I have several locations yet to post - actually yet to even write. I don't envy people like devilfish and FunkyGibbon who have (hopefully) to catch up with their threads. It is really hard writing posts after the actual events have moved on and you've been to other places since.

I have written the Little Rann of Kutch post, but it isn't very satisfying. I blame some kind of writer's block. But it is what it is.

 

LITTLE RANN OF KUTCH

3-9 January

In the northwest of India is a state called Gujarat which for wildlife enthusiasts has three major attractions, namely Gir National Park which has Asiatic lions and chousingha, Velavadar National Park which has blackbuck and wolves, and the Little Rann of Kutch which has Indian wild asses.

My first stop from Ahmedabad was the Little Rann of Kutch. From the hotel in Ahmedabad I had rung up a camp called Desert Coursers at the village of Zainabad, just near the Wild Ass Sanctuary, and talked to the owner Dhanraj about staying there and about organising staying at the Forest Lodge at Velavadar. This latter accommodation is quite complicated to arrange for a foreigner. You can only book it by phoning the head-office in the nearby town of Bhavnagar - but they only speak Gujarati - and then you need to pay in advance by posting them a Direct Debit cheque. But Dhanraj knows some forestry people and can sort it out from his place.

I had already more or less decided to drop Gir from my plans, despite that being the only place in the world to see wild Asiatic lions, because it was just far too expensive. The camera fee alone is US$30. The jeep safaris need to be booked months (or longer) ahead of time and now apparently can only be purchased online. You can't join in on other peoples' booked jeeps because the jeep permit is made out to specific people (so if I had booked from NZ, for example, I would have only been able to book it for myself because I'm travelling alone). It is a really weird rule - on the face of it you'd assume it was to make more money because there would be more people in more jeeps, but the number of jeeps per day is set so they are actually losing money (by not getting any extra entry fees on half-empty jeeps). There were also some ethical concerns because I had read several accounts of how the guards "herd" the lions away from the roads each morning so that they can then extract more money by saying they know where to see the lions in another spot but it costs extra to take you on that road.

So with Gir out, I was going to spend three nights at the Little Rann of Kutch and three nights at Velavadar. There are two places to stay at Velavadar. The expensive option is Blackbuck Lodge which when I was researching all this cost 7500 to 8500 rupees per night (roughly NZ$160). The cheaper option, which I was going for, was the government-run Forest Lodge which I had found (in an account by a foreigner as what he paid) was 500 rupees for a non-A/C room or 1200 for A/C. However the costs I had were now wildly wrong. Blackbuck Lodge has gone up considerably in price in the last year, to (minimum for a single) 12,000 rupees per night. And the Forest Lodge now has rates of 1000 rupees non-A/C for an Indian or US$100 for a foreigner (and 3000 rupees and US$150 respectively for an A/C room). Those are the costs of just the room, no food, no park entry fees. There was no way I could afford those prices, so the secondary option was to stay in Bhavnagar and go for a day-trip. This wouldn't be ideal - the town is about two hours by bus from the park - but it could work, except that the entry fee for a foreigner comes to US$70. I figured there was little chance of seeing wolves on a one-day excursion and zero chance of striped hyaenas (and someone at Desert Coursers who had been to Velavadar a few weeks previously told me there were no hyaenas left there now). That just left the blackbuck from my main three, and I knew there was a blackbuck reserve called Kanjari Gam near Ahmedabad which is relatively close to the Little Rann.

So I dropped Velavadar as well and just stayed at Desert Coursers for the whole time, with one trip out to Kanjari Gam for the blackbuck.

There are a few tourist camps in the Little Rann area - six just around the Zainabad area. The one all the tour companies use (and hence the one most bird- and mammal-watchers stay at) is Rann Riders which is something like 8000 rupees per night (about NZ$160). That is somewhat outside my price range, so I wanted to stay at Desert Coursers which is actually the closest to the Wild Ass Sanctuary (about 7km away), is probably the cheapest (2500 rupees per night, which includes food and a jeep safari each day), and seems to have the best ethics with regards to the wildlife. The owner Dhanraj is a hard-core naturalist which explains the last point.

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From Ahmedabad to the town of Dasada is about two and a half hours. There were Southern Plains grey langurs sitting on the roof of the bus stop shelter in Ahmedabad when I left. Something particularly noticeable when on the road in Gujarat is the camels. You still have the usual Indian street-animals like dogs, cattle, pigs and donkeys, but there are also a lot of camels pulling carts. I don't see camels often - there are no more left in New Zealand - and I forget how big they are. They dwarf the horses which are also used to pull carts. There are some individual camels which dwarf the other camels too. They are huge. And speaking of huge animals, in Mumbai, when on the way to the Sewri mudflats to see flamingoes, I saw the biggest goat I've ever seen. I honestly thought it was a pony standing outside a shop, until I realised it was a monstrous goat. A sort of Andre The Giant goat. I would have taken a photo but I only had my longer lens on my camera and couldn't get a position to take it.

For some reason the bus to Dasada didn't go all the way there, but stopped at a junction and everybody got transferred into a tuktuk-truck for the remaining twenty minutes or so. All the other passengers seemed confused about this, so it wasn't a normal thing, but nobody could explain the reason to me. I thought maybe there was some obstruction on the road ahead which meant the bus couldn't go, but two buses passed us on the way. I got dropped at the pick-up point for Desert Coursers, where Dhanraj was waiting, and he also didn't know why the tuktuk-truck was used.

Zainabad is about ten minutes from Dasada. Desert Coursers has been in operation since 1984 and is owned by the family who created Zainabad. Dhanraj's great-grandfather and grandfather were actual kings. Of course it was all a bit more grand back then, before the British rule sort of destroyed everything about the local civilisations. Now Zainabad is just your typical little Indian village and most of the structures including the palace are long gone.

The accommodation at Desert Coursers are Kooba-huts, which are round huts made of mud with tile roofs. The trees around the camp are filled with birds. Migrants like Orphean warblers, lesser whitethroats and rosy starlings; and residents like white-eared bulbuls and spotted owlets. And a couple of minutes walk away is a small rubbish-filled lake where the local women wash their clothes, which has flapshell turtles and water snakes, pied kingfishers, and all sorts of ducks and waders. You could easily see fifty species without even leaving camp.

The first afternoon I went out on a safari with Dhanraj. He doesn't normally do the safaris himself, but he's probably the best person there you could want as your driver. The safari itself is included in the cost of staying there, but the entry fee for the sanctuary is separate and paid to the park HQ. As usual in India, there are hugely different prices for Indians and foreigners. The cost of a jeep with Indians is 400 rupees, and for one with foreigners - even if there is only one foreigner and six Indians - is 4500 rupees (about NZ$90). A bit of sleight of hand avoids this where-ever possible though, with some swapping back and forth of the foreigners with Indians when the jeep goes to the HQ for the permit, meaning every jeep becomes an "Indian" jeep unless the group of foreigners is too large to allow this. I went on several safaris (of course) and paid between 50 and 120 rupees each time, the fee being split between the people in the vehicle.

On one of the safaris, the driver stopped as we passed through the village and pointed out a peacock. It was scavenging for food in the rubbish. The National Bird of India, surviving in a pile of garbage. That has to be emblematic of the country.

The Little Rann is a salt-pan. Every year it floods for several months (and all the camps close down because there's no good access for tourists), leaving only "islands" here and there. The water is shallow, only a few inches deep, and the islands don't look any higher than the surrounding land when you're driving around on the pan in the dry season. The only thing that shows where they will be is that the ground there is covered with rough grasses and thorny shrubs. It is these areas in which the wild asses and other animals spend most of their time. The rest of the Rann is completely flat, brown and white, and cut all over with tyre tracks.

Possibly because it is such a hostile environment, impossible to use for farming or settlements except for little camps at salt-extraction ponds, the Little Rann of Kutch is the only place where Indian wild asses are still found. They have been hunted to extinction everywhere else. The Wild Ass Sanctuary is obviously the best place to see them, which I did on every jeep-trip into the area, usually one or two groups of females and young, and then two or three stallions which live alone except in the breeding season. The ones here are very relaxed around people - elsewhere in the Little Rann it is another story apparently - but they do get quite a bit of harrassment. Anyone can take their car into the sanctuary so long as they get the permit, and even just in the few days I was there I saw a private car chasing a herd of asses to make them run.

Apart for the wild asses there aren't a lot of other large mammals here. There's not much to eat out here after all. Nilgai were reasonably frequent - large antelope of which the males are nicknamed "blue bulls" for their size and colour - and wild pigs were seen a few times. Everything else seems to be nocturnal.

On the first safari with Dhanraj we stayed out later than normal to look for Syke's nightjars which breed in Pakistan and migrate to India in the winter. Right now they are common in the Little Rann. Being nocturnal aerial hunters I expected to see them only flying but instead they can be spotlit on the ground where they just sit there and blink at you. Some black-naped hares were also seen. I did a couple of other night drives, which are at additional cost, mainly looking for striped hyaenas. The hyaenas are supposed to be common-ish here, and there is a particular waterhole they visit every few days, but I was unfortunately out of luck with those. In fact, the only animals I saw on any of the night drives were Syke's nightjars, black-naped hares, and desert foxes (a small subspecies of the common red fox).

Dhanraj was surprised I hadn't seen jungle cats on any of the night drives I'd done, because they are "everywhere". So one evening we went for a drive around the village. Barely three minutes after leaving the camp, there was a jungle cat, just sitting beside the road. Jungle cats are bigger than domestic cats and are all tawny, kind of like a miniature lioness. They have a characteristic way of sitting upright on their haunches, exactly like an Egyptian cat statue, and that is what this one was doing. It sat there looking at us, without any show of fear. I had my camera but I was too busy looking at the cat through my binoculars - I don't see wild cats very often so I wanted to just watch it - and after a couple of minutes it turned and stalked off through the scrub. We drove up the road a bit and then came back, and there was a second jungle cat (larger than the first one) eating something in the rubbish beside the road. I did try to get a photo of this one but didn't succeed in getting anything worth showing.

On one morning I went to a large salt lake outside the sanctuary. I think most people stay just one or two nights when they visit the Little Rann, so the lake is the standard morning trip when the sun is behind you and the Wild Ass Sanctuary the afternoon trip. The birds are pretty flighty, most being migrant waterfowl and waders which may not be hunted here but would be in other parts of their range. Both species of flamingoes are here, although not in the numbers I saw at Mumbai; hundreds rather than thousands. There were all sorts of sandpipers and plovers, but my prize for the day was the pied avocets which I have always wanted to see. Runner-up was ruffs, a common bird in Eurasia but not in the tropical places where I spend most of my birding time. Great white pelicans were in flocks, and I probably saw Dalmation pelicans too but I can't tell the two apart at a distance (I saw Dalmations in the afternoon at another lake inside the sanctuary, doubling my pelican total from two to four). There were lots of birds of prey too, including imperial eagles, marsh harriers, and a pair of red-necked falcons.

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As mentioned above, I wasn't going to be visiting the Velavadar National Park to see blackbuck because of the cost of staying there and of the entry fee. But I knew of another place to see blackbuck for free, called Kanjari Gam, near the Thol Bird Sanctuary (15km between them) which was about 120km from Zainabad. The cost of getting a car out there and back from Desert Coursers was 1200 rupees (about NZ$24). I didn't actually know anything about Kanjari Gam except that it was somewhere near Thol, and that it had a couple of other names like Kanjari Deer Park and Kanjari Blackbuck Park which gave it a captive sound. However I was pretty sure they were wild animals, and when I got there I saw they were just in the fields so not contained at all.

I left Desert Coursers at 5.30am in order to get out to Kanjari Gam and Thol early. It should have taken about two hours. Except it took almost five hours. The driver had no clue where he was going and we spent a lot of time driving along narrow farm roads with frequent stops for directions. It was very frustrating. But I did see common babblers and Brahminy starlings along the way which were new for me. In fact, common babbler was the 1600th species of bird I've seen in the wild.

Eventually we came to a viewing platform by the side of the road with a large sign saying that this was the Kanjari Deer Park. In the field beside the platform was a large number of cows feeding on tomatoes. I climbed up onto the viewing platform - a not-exactly-solid platform made of bamboo - and scanned the surrounding fields, and there on the other side of the road were a herd of blackbuck sitting in the grass, with a few outlying males dotted here and there.

After spending some time here taking photos, mostly from a distance because the blackbuck didn't want to allow a close approach, we drove to Thol Bird Sanctuary. It was midday by now and very hot so I only stayed there about an hour before going back to Zainabad. The birds were the same as I had been seeing at the lakes in the Little Rann and the place was being treated as the local hang-out. Thol is not far from Ahmedabad and the entry fee for locals is about 30 rupees, so people come out here to have parties and picnics, and play cricket and throw balls, and generally just cause a disturbance. Meanwhile I'm there to not cause any disturbance and just look at the birds for which the sanctuary was set up to protect, and I have to pay twenty times the entry fee.

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After leaving the Little Rann of Kutch I was going to be flying from Ahmedabad up to Himachal Pradesh in the HImalayan foothills, but I had one stop before that. Dhanraj had told me of a quarry near a town called Surendranagar, about 80km away, in which Indian eagle owls could be seen. He hadn't been there himself but his father had, and through him I made contact with a chap named Bhavani Singh Mori, or as he is locally known, The Green Bapu. For the last forty years he has worn nothing but green; his house and offices are painted green; all the fixtures are green; even the toiletries in the bathrooms are products with green packaging.

Surendranagar isn't on the way to Ahmedabad but it is about the same distance between there and Zainabad, so it made sense to fit it in while leaving. I got a bus from Zainabad to Surendranagar where I was met by a guy on a motorbike who took me to another bus station, and there someone else in a tuktuk turned up to take me to Bhavani Singh's office which was indeed quite green. I'm not sure of Bhavani Singh's status in Surendranagar - he seems to be the equivalent of the king if there were such things still in India.

Bhavani Singh is a proper naturalist, his office decorated with wildlife photos he has taken, and his son Devvratsinh is made in his mold. (Check out his son's website naturehook. com). After lunch Devvratsinh and I headed out to the quarry which is about 5km outside town. The eagle owls are here all the time and are easy to find. Well, you know, except for today. For an hour we walked all round the place with no luck. I had been expecting a quarry as in a single dug-out site surrounded by cliffs, so you could stand in one spot and scan the rocks, but it is actually an area of land with numerous small pits dug out by hand, so you have to walk from one to another checking each one in turn. I did see grey-necked buntings while we were searching, which were another new species for me.

Finally Devvratsinh found an eagle owl - he'd been getting worried because this was the first time he had ever had any trouble finding them! There were actually two of the owls, although one flew away before any photos could be taken. The other one flew back and forth a few times but didn't seem too concerned by us so long as we pretended we didn't see it.

 

well I landed in Bangkok this morning, so the trip is now over. Wait, actually I shouldn't say that. In part three of this series I kept saying the trip was over and everybody kept disbelieving me. Let's just say that I have left India.

I am of course several blog posts behind schedule so I'll keep adding those, although there will be another little break in those because I'm going to Kaeng Krachan National park tomorrow for a few days. Once all the posts are done I'll add an Indian round-up of money etc. Then maybe some more travelling...

In the meantime, here is the post following on from the Little Rann of Kutch, about Dalhousie.

 

CHAMBA SACRED LANGURS, 10-15 January

In 2015 the "top 25 most endangered primates" was put out by the IUCN, and the photo at the top of the page was of the Chamba sacred langur, which is found only in the Chamba Valley in India's northern state of Himachal Pradesh, in the Himalayan foothills adjacent to Pakistan. (The pdf can be viewed here: https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documents/2015-033.pdf). As soon as I saw the photo I knew that was a monkey I wanted to see but the chances of that seemed low because when was I ever going to be anywhere near such a remote valley? Turns out that it is actually easy to get to - a long bus or train ride links New Delhi directly to the town of Pathankot, and from there is a shorter bus ride to the mountain village of Dalhousie, and just outside Dalhousie is the Kalatop Wildlife Reserve in which the langurs can be found. Simple.

Originally I was going there in November after Ladakh - I had already bought the train ticket from Delhi to Pathankot - but India's demonetisation changed the plans. I decided it would be a shame to miss it out, although going there now meant it would be mid-winter. But still, that's why I've been carrying all my cold-weather clothes around with me for the last two months instead of ditching them when I left the Himalayas last time! Best course of action for this version of the visit seemed to be to just fly in from Ahmedabad rather than spending a few days on trains and buses. Pathankot has an airport but it isn't used for commercial flights much, so I got a SpiceJet flight to Dharamshala which is about 130km away.

It was a long "day" getting to Dahousie from the Little Rann of Kutch. I was up at 6am at Desert Coursers and after breakfast got a bus to Surendranagar to look for the Indian eagle owls as mentioned at the end of my last post. In the afternoon Devvratsinh and his friend dropped me back at the Surendranagar bus station. There was a discussion about my age (they thought I was thirty [!]) and why I didn't look it (I said birding keeps you young), and then there was a discussion about how I look just like Dan Bilzerian who is an American poker player famous in India for girls. They showed me a video and indeed we do both have beards. I'm not sure there's really any other resemblance. Although perhaps that's why I get so many people wanting to take selfies with me. At 6pm I got a bus to Ahmedabad where Bhavani Singh's other son Parmarth met me and we hung out at KFC and a cafe until midnight before he drove me to the airport. Parmarth also didn't really believe my age, but rather than Dan Bilzerian thought I looked like someone from National Geographic (so an explorer instead of a poker player). He liked the idea of my travelling but was seriously weirded out by me not having a phone. He had never met anyone without a phone before and couldn't imagine how a person could function without one. My flight was via Delhi but didn't leave Ahmedabad until 6.20am and I couldn't check in until 4am, so there was more waiting. I did get an hour of sleep before boarding though. In Delhi (where the morning temperature was six degrees) there was a four-hour lay-over and I managed another hour's sleep. The Delhi flight landed in Dharamshala at 2.10pm where, despite being in the foothills, it was warmer than Delhi had been. The airport for Dharamshala is, I had read, in a little town 13km south called Gaggal, although it turned out it was actually south of Gaggal too, and called the Kangra Airport even though it wasn't in Kangra. Not confusing at all. I got a bus from the side of the road outside the airport to a place called Nurpur, and then another bus from there to a junction (perhaps Lahru, looking at a map, but I'm not sure), and then a third bus to Dalhousie, arriving there at 7.30pm which made 37 hours of travel on two hours of sleep. In the morning I found out I wasn't even in Dalhousie...

When I got off the bus in "Dalhousie" it was dark and a bit rainy. I went to the first hotel I saw, which was the Gateway Homestay. Nobody there spoke any English and I was too tired to bother trying, so I went to the next one along, called Dalhousie Hills Hotel. This was 1500 rupees per night, a bit higher than I wanted. The owner Sanjeev asked how much my budget was and I said 500 rupees. Somewhere between 300 and 1000 is okay, but if you say "below 1000" that is always interpreted as "1000", so I generally say "500". Sanjeev went back to the Gateway Homestay with me and sorted a room out for 500, but then said that for the next nights I could stay at his place for 500 - I think probably because foreigners are a bit of a rarity here, certainly in winter. The Gateway Homestay was actually a hotel and not a homestay at all. It could have been nice, but it was just really dirty, so for the rest of my nights here I stayed at the Dalhousie Hills.

It was cold at night, happily for me. I'd been wanting some proper coldness for ages. I wore several layers of my clothes to bed, and in the morning the inside of the window was sheeted in ice. Excellent. I went and had a talk with Sanjeev and discovered that I was actually in a town called Banikhet and that Dalhousie was a further 6km up the mountain. The reason the bus had stopped there was because the road was iced up and it had been too dangerous for it to continue. Unfortunately I also discovered that several days of snowfall had completely closed the road above Dalhousie, the road that leads to the Kalatop Wildlife Reserve, and it wouldn't be clear for at least six or seven days. I had made some advance plans in terms of flights, so this was a bit of a blow because it meant there was no way I was going to get to the reserve.

Kalatop is 13km past Dalhousie, which normally I could walk easily if there was no bus running, but apparently the snow was chest-deep so that was out of the question. Another 11km beyond Kalatop is an alpine lake and meadow called Khajjiar which I had also planned on visiting. I had found a survey of the reserve's mammals online and there were some nice species up there such as serow and goral, and apparently in winter there was the possibility of seeing ibex and Himalayan tahr on the crags surrounding Khajjiar. Apart for the mammals it was also good pheasant territory, with kalij and koklass being "common", and with cheer pheasant and Himalayan monal also there.

I knew there was a tourist information centre at Dalhousie so decided that I would head up there and see what I could find out, especially in terms of seeing the langurs elsewhere around the area. Sanjeev told me I would be able get a bus up to Dalhousie that morning because the road would be okay. I went outside - the junction was about half a minute's walk away - and waited for a bit. Then I thought I better ask the policeman who was in a little sentry box in the middle of the junction. He said emphatically that there was no bus, only taxis. I asked a taxi driver how much to Dalhousie and he said 400 rupees. Shared taxi? No shared taxis. This seemed very unlikely. I went back to ask Sanjeev, who came out to organise the shared taxi. The driver started yelling at him, I heard the word "foreigner" (Indians often mix English into their Hindi or local language), but I got a seat in a shared taxi for 100 rupees, probably well over the local price. When a few more people were on board we were off... well, except that the car wouldn't start. After several attempts at leaving a bus came along (the bus which didn't exist), so I got in that instead. But then the bus only went about 1km before the road got too slippery, so I ended up walking to Dalhousie.

The walk turned out to be well worth doing. Between Banikhet and Dalhousie it is forest all the way. In fact with Kalatop closed off, staying in Banikhet proved to be a much better choice. The parts of road in the sun were fine but other areas were just ice from one side to the other and it was safer to walk on the snow along the side. Cars, motorbikes, and even a couple of buses were just abandoned by the roadside all the way along. I passed numerous (Indian) tourists coming down from Dalhousie pulling their wheelie-suitcases behind them, because there was no way taxis could bring them down to the buses. The next day was worse for walking because the snow at the sides had frozen over and become as slick as the ice on the road.

I took quite a while to get up to Dalhousie, partly because of the ice, but mostly because I kept stopping for birds of which there were a lot, albeit of only a few species. Best "new" bird was the rufous sibia, which I thought was some kind of laughing thrush at first, but there were also white-tailed nuthatches, Himalayan bluetails and brown-fronted woodpeckers, as well as various birds I had seen a couple of years ago in the Chinese mountains like black-throated tits. At one point I caught a glimpse of a large bird with colouration reminiscent of a barbet, but I thought there was no way a barbet would be up this high in the snow - but in fact it was a great barbet, much larger than most barbets and seemingly quite common up here.

I also saw Chamba sacred langurs, which was nice. I had thought they would be more difficult to find. There are several military stations along the road, and at the first one there were two langurs sitting in a tree. I couldn't get anywhere near them, what with them being inside a military compound and all, but I took some record-shots just in case they were the only ones I saw.

I even managed to find a working ATM on my way up the mountain! I know I'm keeping a running commentary on Indian ATMs, but they are so unreliable here and yet so important to be able to access. Just on this leg of the trip there had been only one at Ahmedabad airport, which wouldn't work; two at Delhi airport, neither of which worked; and five in Banikhet, none of which worked. The one I found on the mountain was just by the largest military station, and it worked every time I tried it. There was another one inside the base as well, but that one did not work.

As I came into Dalhousie a couple of Psittacula parakeets flew across the road into a tree. I tried my best to find them to get a look at what they were, but they had either departed out the other side or just buried themselves amongst the leaves. I think they had to have been slaty-headed parakeets, which would have been a new species for me, but I had to leave them as unknowns. There were rhesus macaques in town too, really big rhesus macaques with thick golden fur, but they didn't cause me any trouble.

The guy at the tourist centre said the road to Kalatop might be clear in two or three days but I think he was being optimistic. I had lunch at a restaurant nearby and headed back down to Banikhet. There were more sacred langurs on the roof of one of the military buildings just downhill, but their positions meant the photos were again more record-shots than anything. At least I was seeing them, even if I wasn't getting any worthwhile photos. Much further down the road I passed the first military station and tried to see the pair of langurs from the morning but they had gone. Not too far though. Just a bit further on they walked right across the road about twenty metres from me. They are amazing animals, much bigger than the other Semnopithecus langurs due to their high-altitude habitat, and appearing even larger because of the thick fur.

The next morning I was intending to walk up to Dalhousie early, looking for birds and langurs along the way, but just a hundred metres from the hotel I happened across a whole lot of birds by the roadside - grey-winged blackbirds, chestnut thrushes, yellow-billed magpies, black-headed jays, blue whistling thrushes - and then spent the next two hours on the scrubby hill above the road with birds everywhere I turned. Unlike the mixed forest higher up, around Banikhet it is all coniferous forest, with just a scant understory of rhododendrons and a scraggly shrub with inch-long spines which I do not like. I found a small rubbish dump up there which was attracting various birds too, including a grey-headed woodpecker and three species of laughing thrushes (streaked, variegated, and chestnut-crowned). Another great bird from there worth mentioning was the rusty-cheeked scimitar-babbler. The next morning I went up on the hill and there were almost literally no birds, which just illustrates the randomness of birding!

There's a short cut to Dalhousie which I had found out about the day before, which goes up through the forest rather than along the road and comes out into the big military base (the one by the working ATM). I used this after finally running out of birds on the hill above Banikhet, and found more birds on that route including numerous spectacled finches and a collared grosbeak. In the military station there was a big troop of sacred langurs sitting in the morning sun grooming each other. Males, females, babies; probably thirty or so in total. I'm glad langurs are so peaceful towards humans. If macaques were as big as these langurs there would be chaos all over Asia, with people being ripped apart and eaten. It would be like a zombie apocalypse except with macaques. I have no worries about getting as close to langurs as they will allow in order to take photos, but with macaques I'm always wary (sometimes to the point of paranoia).

I had two days left in the area, but on the last day I got really sick, probably food poisoning, so stayed in my room. The day before that though (day three) I thought I would spend on the hills above Banikhet. This didn't really work out very well. Unlike the previous bird-filled morning, today there were barely any birds all day, although new for the trip were a pair of kalij pheasants and a couple of warblers. There are lots of warblers everywhere up here but generally speaking I can't tell warblers apart because they all look so similar and are so fast and ever-moving. Today I got good enough looks at some to see they were lemon-rumped warblers and also a grey-hooded warbler. That last one is pretty easy because it is bright yellow with a grey hood. Both the warblers were lifers too so even better.

So even though I never got to Kalatop, and hence potentially missed some great birds like cheer pheasant and Himalayan monal, I had achieved the goal of seeing the Chamba sacred langurs. And that makes three of the "most endangered" primates on the IUCN's list which I have seen in the wild (the other two being western purple-faced langur which I saw in Sri Lanka recently, and the Sumatran orangutan which I saw back in 2009).

 

eventually there will be photos. I have all the ones from Sri Lanka and everywhere else in India to upload as well (and Colombo and Delhi zoos also). I have found, when uploading the Mumbai Zoo photos (to the India Other gallery), that it was very slow, but not sure if that is the new site or just the local internet - I suspect the latter. When I have some free time I will try uploading some photos.

I have photos of all the Semnopithecus langurs I saw (ajax, dussumieri, hypoleucos, priam) so I'll upload them all together because that might be interesting for comparisons. The ones I didn't see were all outside the places I visited, namely the Northern Plains Grey Langur (entellus) and the other three (two?) Himalayan species.

The military stations up there are pretty relaxed. They aren't like an American military base, for example. I think they are there because of the ongoing situation with Pakistan - all the neighbouring states seem to have big military presences. But they don't mind tourists. The main base there is also a main thoroughfare, with random people just using it as a short cut to walk between Banikhet and Dalhousie.

 

I think I actually have seen (almost) every primate I've specifically looked for on this trip, which is a bit surprising really. Certainly all the lifer species which I've looked for I have found. Long may that continue!

In Sri Lanka the only species I didn't see was Red Slender Loris and that was because I didn't look for it at all due to logistics.

In India the only primate in the areas I was in which I didn't see was the Grey Slender Loris and that was likewise because I never looked for it (I had seen that species in Sri Lanka just beforehand).

I've just been at Kaeng Krachan in Thailand and saw the species I expected (White-handed Gibbon, Dusky and Banded Leaf Monkeys, and Crab-eating Macaque). I didn't see Stump-tailed Macaques (they are difficult - I've only ever seen them in Assam) and I didn't have much of a chance at Bengal Slow Loris because you can't really go spotlighting there with elephants on the roads at night.

Only at the start of the trip in Borneo were few primates seen, but the ones in the areas I was in, I've seen before so no loss.

Out of the eighteen species I've seen so far on the trip, eleven have been lifers.



I'm still way behind on the blogs - none of them have even been written yet - so I'm going to try and get some done tomorrow.

 

My final day at Banikhet in the Dalhousie area was wasted because I got sick during the night, I think probably food poisoning. It was the only meal I ate from the hotel's own kitchen (with room service because they didn't have a restaurant) and, funnily enough, while I was eating it I was thinking "I bet I'm going to get sick from this". And I did. I had one Norflox tablet left over from Ladakh in November so I took that for my stomach, and an Ibuprofen (also from Ladakh) for the headache, and then stayed in the hotel room all day. The next morning I felt okay which was good because I was needing to be spending all that day on buses!

It was three hours to Pathankot, descending on an endessly winding road trying not to think about throwing up, and then another three hours on a bus to the city of Jammu in the neighbouring state of Jammu And Kashmir. That second bus was so full I spent most of the trip standing.

I had never had any prior intention of going to Jammu but that is where I had found a cheap flight from. From the bus stop I walked round numerous hotels, all with the immediate response of "no rooms" or "all full". Several times the reception guys would immediately start shaking their heads as soon as I appeared in the doorway. This was a little suspicious because I've never come across so many "full" hotels before, especially when they clearly have empty rooms visible. At one point when I stopped at a tuktuk stand to ask if they knew any hotels, there was a conversation amongst the men in which I heard "Green View Hotel" and "foreigner" which I thought confirmed my suspicion that most of the hotels simply weren't allowed or didn't want a foreigner staying there. Sure enough, after asking at several hotels en route to the Green View, all of them "full", the Green View had a room for 600 rupees.

I'm not sure how many foreigners even come here. At the restaurant at which I got dinner that night, every single person in there was staring at me like I was an alien. Possibly of note, if you check your government website's travel advisory, Jammu will probably be on there. I just checked the New Zealand page and it says "There is extreme risk to your security in Jammu and Kashmir due to the threat of terrorist activity and ongoing political violence." I think most countries are listing the state as a high or extreme risk, and while the city of Jammu is not considered as life-threatening it will still say something like "reconsider your need to travel there." On the other hand it will probably say something about the whole of India being unsafe to some degree and not to go there.

There was a tv in my room, and when I turned it on there was an Indian music video playing. Back in my home-town of Christchurch in New Zealand, there is a kids' paddling pool next to the beach at New Brighton, and in the pool is a concrete whale. On this video there was a girl in a paddling pool next to a concrete whale while the guy sung to her from the side. "Huh, funny, there's one of those in India too," I thought. Next scene, I thought "wait, that's the outside of the New Brighton library!". The whole music video had been filmed in New Zealand - at one point they were in front of the Timaru Motors sign. I knew Bollywood movies filmed in New Zealand quite often but I had no idea they came all the way over there to film music videos. That doesn't seem to make any sort of sense financially, especially when they are just filming scenes in towns and cities.

I was only in Jammu overnight, and early next morning I headed off to the airport.

 

SNOW LEOPARDS, ROUND TWO

16-26 January


Back in October/November I spent some time in Ladakh looking for snow leopards. The first post of that part of the trip is here - Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part five: 2016-2017 - and that covers all the basics so that I don't need to repeat myself too much in this post. I did not see any snow leopards then but I was told that January to March is the very best time to look for them, despite it being the dead of winter, because that is when they are breeding and lose all their shyness, as well as when they are at their lowest altitudes. In brief terms, during winter the bharal move downwards because their grazing gets covered in snow, and the snow leopards follow them down. At other times of the year they are much higher up and much less accessible for people to find.

I decided to return to Ladakh to try my luck again. My Indian visa would run out in early February, which meant mid- to late-January was my time-frame. For the last couple of months I had been carrying around my cold-weather clothes for this purpose and I was hopeful they would actually get some use this time. It was quite cold in Himachal Pradesh where I had just come from (to see the Chamba sacred langurs - see the last main blog post) and in Ladakh I would be much higher. My fingers were crossed for freezing temperatures. I have some sort of unnatural resistance to cold. It's like an X-Men-style mutation, where my superpower is being able to go birding when it's cold outside. I was hoping to find a level of coldness to challenge me when I got up to Ladakh but no. It was extremely cold up there (at least minus twenty Celsius at night) but I rarely felt inconvenienced by it. I shake my fist in defiance at the god of winter.

I was told to be at the Jammu airport two hours before the flight. In Jammu and Kashmir and in Ladakh there is supposedly heightened security measures at the airports which holds things up. I say "supposedly" because I didn't actually see any signs of this either in October/November or now in January. But my flight was at 9.30am so I got there at 7.30am. The airport wasn't open yet. Anybody dumb enough to have actually turned up early stood outside the gates in an orderly queue until the guards started letting people in at 7.45. But that was only to get through to the waiting room, and it wasn't until 8am that everybody continued on to the terminal. The power kept going in and out which held things up quite a bit - the x-ray machines would take a little bit to restart after each power outage, a few people would get their bags through, and then the power would cut out again.

Some may remember earlier in the thread the discussion about batteries in check-in luggage vs carry-on luggage (see this post onwards: Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part five: 2016-2017 ). At the Jammu airport there is a big sign on the wall saying that all batteries must go into your check-in luggage. This is for all airlines, including SpiceJet which elsewhere specifies batteries need to go in carry-on "for safety reasons". Same at Ladakh airport - all batteries have to be put in your check-in bag.

Despite all the hold-ups I was at the check-in desk by 8.30am, an hour before the flight which is (of course) plenty of time for domestic. In any case it turned out that the flight was delayed by about an hour.

It's only about forty minutes to fly between Jammu and Leh. There were a surprisingly large number of passengers - the plane was basically full. I had been under the impression that there were virtually no tourists to Ladakh in winter, which is why half of Leh shuts down until spring, but I discovered that for just a few weeks in January there is an influx of a few hundred mainly-Indian tourists to do the Chardar Trek which is a multi-day hike along a frozen river through the mountains.

Last time I was in Leh everything was the green and yellow of autumn. Now all the leaves were gone and everything was brown. The entire town was the same shade of dusty brown, and only the surrounding mountains were white. That afternoon Leh also turned white, with the first snowfall they had received that winter. It used to be that Leh was under snow all winter every winter; now it rarely snows there due to changes in the global weather patterns.

Rather stupidly I hadn't booked anywhere to stay. I hadn't had any good internet access for ages which was the main reason, but also I hadn't expected there to be much in the way of competition for rooms in winter at those few hotels which remain open. Luckily there was no problem, and I got a room at the Cozy Corner Hotel where I had stayed last time. There had been a change of management in the last couple of months and the price had gone up a little but not by too much. The new manager said I could have a room without heating for 900 rupees or one with heating for 1200 rupees. Because I am a̶n̶ ̶i̶d̶i̶o̶t̶ clever I chose the unheated option. It was going to be even colder up at Rumbak so no point wasting money on heating down here.

The toilet in the bathroom was frozen solid (boiling water poured into the bowl solved that) and all the pipes were frozen so instead there was a big bucket of ice-cold water. Looked like no washing for the next ten days! That evening while I was eating dinner in my room I was literally watching the water in the glass on the table freeze inwards across the surface. And I do mean "literally" in the true sense of the word, not figuratively.

I rested up for the first day to get used to the altitude but really it didn't affect me too much. I'm not sure if that was because I had come from Himachal Pradesh rather than Delhi (i.e. I had been at an in-between altitude for a week or so) or if it was just random. The second day I walked round to the Wildlife Office, about forty minutes away, to see about the permits for the Hemis National Park. Last time I had done this through the Eco-Tourism place in town but there were some discrepancies in what I was being told about pricing so I thought I'd go to the actual office to be sure. This, in fact, did not work out in my favour. In October I had paid 3000 rupees for ten days; this time I paid well over twice that, at 7600 rupees for five days! (In both cases the number of days were estimates, so I really spent longer in the park on both occasions). The difference was due to the Snow Leopard Foundation fee, which is 1500 rupees per day and which had been somewhat side-lined last time. The actual park entry fee is just 20 rupees per day but that's only if you're trekking from one village or camp to the next - anybody staying in the area is considered to be snow leopard watching and has to pay the 1500 for each day they are there. At least it was still a lot cheaper than going on a tour.

There's a tourist office in town and I had been in there earlier. The guy in there had told me I should just go to the national park without a permit because there was nobody up there to check it anyway. This had been tempting in monetary terms but just totally against my ethics. Firstly, it's not in my nature to be dishonest; secondly, the fees are there (in theory - and I do think at Hemis in reality) to help preserve the park which is obviously important; and thirdly, I don't know how strict or casual the reaction would be to being caught without permits. I suspect in Ladakh there would be no problem if caught, and I doubt anybody would be checking anyway. The first time I was up there I barely saw anybody. This time I saw a few groups but nobody asked me for permits - on the other hand I guess all the guides already know who is supposed to be up there so would have known I already had the permits.

Anyway, the permits were sorted and everything was good. I could have gone up to Rumbak on the third day but I had pencilled that in for birding at Thiksey where people go to see ibisbill on the Indus River. It's easy to get to by shared taxi. From the Main Gate in Leh you just take a taxi to Choglamsar and then another from there to Thiksey or to Shey which is also by the river, and each section only costs 20 rupees. I had been intending on leaving early but the hotel had other ideas on that. Most of the restaurants in town are closed in winter, and there's basically nowhere to eat in the morning. The hotel provided breakfast from 9am. On my first morning (day two) I had asked for breakfast to be at 9am. At 10am I finally went out and asked where it might be, and the response was "do you want breakfast now?". Second morning I had told them the night before, then at 8am in the morning to be sure, then 9am again. I finally got it at 9.45am. Mornings are not a strong point in India.

At the Main Gate I got a taxi to Choglamsar straight away - they leave every ten minutes or so, and the trip only takes fifteen minutes - but once there I had a fifty minute wait before there were enough people to leave. I think this was probably because it wasn't early morning. It didn't really matter because it wasn't like the day was going to get too hot for birding!

The taxi dropped me at the entrance to the monastery in Thiksey (it's quite impressively built, more or less, on a cliff face) and then I realised I had no idea how to get to the river. I knew where it was but the roadsides were largely blocked by walls. I started walking, asking along the way, and after a kilometre or so found a narrow side-road which led to the river. Everything was covered in snow, and there were little animal tracks everywhere. Hares, pikas, something small like a mouse, even a fox. I didn't see any of the mammals but there were accentors all through the trees. Most of them were black-throated accentors which I thought were buntings initially (google them for a photo and you'll see what I mean), but also a couple of pairs of robin accentors and brown accentors, both of which I had seen last time I was in Ladakh. A bird I did not see was ibisbill. The only part of the river I could get to was a stretch of about a hundred metres which was deep water covered in a slurry of ice which made a slushing noise as it flowed. Ibisbills need shallow stony water for foraging, so this was no good. I have seen ibisbill before (in Assam in 2014) so no matter.

The next morning I headed up to Rumbak.

 

So, I had been anticipating bone-numbing cold as I ascended the Rumbak Valley. Five hundred metres in altitude must be a lot in the Himalayan winter. I had even plaited my beard to keep it from freezing into a block of ice (the day before at Thiksey my breath was settling on it and turning into little balls of ice, and it ended up like a Christmas tree). Bah, I had to actually take off a couple of layers of clothes as I walked. Stupid Himalayas.

I spent the first half of the day in the Husing Valley, snow leopard central at this time of year, before heading up to Rumbak village. There was a small herd of bharal in the Husing but nothing else. The little river up the Rumbak Valley was frozen solid so there wasn't even its mocking laughter to break the silence.

At the village I went to the homestay I had been at last time but they weren't there that day so I stayed at the next one along, the Thakskan Homestay. The daughter Angmo spoke good English which was a bonus. This family had very little in their house, unlike the other one with all its rugs and tables and dressers. Without wanting to sound "superior" I felt like staying at Thakskan was a much better use of my money because they obviously had less than some of the other homestay families. (Whispers: the food was much better too!).

I spent all of the next day in the Husing Valley and saw nothing at all there except the same herd of bharal. While I was up there a group of three Thai snow leoparders arrived at the Goba Homestay in the village. And when I came down from the valley at the end of the day I discovered a group of eight Swedish snow leoparders had also arrived at the campsite (at the mouth of the Husing Valley). They were all up on the viewing point right above camp. The presence of tour groups with all their designer gear and scopes and support crews kind of ruined the atmosphere I had last time. Now I felt less like the intrepid adventurer and more like the crazy homeless man wandering round in the mountains yelling at rocks. Actually I had seen my reflection in a window as I walked through Leh the other day, and I did look like the classic hobo of American movies, with the hooded jacket from under which pokes only the brim of a cap up top and a sprawling beard at the bottom. And not the harmless drunken kind of hobo who thinks some guy just fell out of a ball of light and stole his pants, but the stabby kind of hobo with the deranged look in his eyes.

I waved at the Swedes as I passed by below and considered going up to say hi just in case they had seen something, but they were mostly just standing around (rather than looking through their scopes) and it would have taken me half an hour to get up to where they were so I kept going. Half an hour doesn't sound like a big detour but it's over an hour back up to the village and you need to make sure you're back there before dark. The next morning I met them and found out they had seen a snow leopard...

To make that a little easier to swallow, it turned out that the cat was so distant that it couldn't be seen with the naked eye, it was only for a few seconds as it crossed a ridge, and only half the group saw it. I spent half the day with the group (there are limited "best vantage points" so everyone does tend to end up in the same spot) and while talking to one of their spotters found out some disturbing news for potential snow leopard hunters. In my last post I mentioned how Leh hardly gets snow in winter now because of global warming, and it is the same higher up. The Husing Valley area used to be under snow every winter, now it rarely is. Same at Rumbak village; rarely any proper snowfall. Up until maybe three years ago the Husing was pretty much guaranteed for snow leopards. Every two or three days there would be a cat somewhere right near camp. Now the majority of groups leave with either no sighting or only a distant one, whereas it used to be the total opposite. They can obviously still be found higher up, but in winter the oxygen levels drop so going higher is more difficult than in summer. The days of easy snow leopards at Hemis seem to be largely over. Of course luck plays a large part still: in December there was a kill right above the lower campsite - there were no tour groups there but for ten days the snow leopard was easily viewable. The spotters were showing me photos and video they took with their phones! I missed it by a week.

Speaking of spotters and tour groups, something I noticed with all three groups I encountered (a group of seven Belgians arrived later) is that few of the participants made any efforts on their own to look for the snow leopards. A very few individuals would stand there scoping, but mostly the spotters were doing all the work while the foreigners just sat around and talked. It was a depressing example of how some people go nature-watching. Pay someone else to do all the leg-work and then reap the rewards. I mean, that's fine if that's your thing but for me it would be so hollow. I like getting the rewards off my own back.

It's really a bit of a guessing game as to where one should go to look for the snow leopards, especially considering what I had been told yesterday. So the following morning, on the advice of the spotters from the Swedish group, I stayed up by the second campsite near the village. The Thai group were there too and the Swedish group arrived later. The temperature up here is around minus twenty Celsius at night, and it takes a long time to get anywhere close to zero during the day - especially on the hillside where I and the Thai group's spotters had parked ourselves. It was on the opposite side to the rising sun, so remained shadowed until around noon. Even for me it was cold! I was wearing two pairs of woollen socks over a pair of thermal socks, and my toes were still complaining. No snow leopards were seen but it was a three-gamebird day, with Tibetan partridges in with the regular chukar around the village, and Himalayan snowcocks on the hill opposite.

The Swedish group spent their next couple of days back down at the Husing (and didn't see anything). The Thai group wavered between the Husing and the village area (and didn't see anything). The Belgian group which arrived two days later stayed in the Husing (and didn't see anything). Things were not good for anyone.

I tried the Yurutse area next. There are lynx up there and it seemed just as likely for snow leopard as anywhere else. Yurutse is a one-building village about an hour further up from Rumbak. The yellow dog was still keeping watch from the top, as per last time I was there, and there were more Tibetan partridge in the field out front. There was just as little snow as everywhere else, although the mountains beyond were gleaming white.

I didn't go much past the first base camp which lies beyond Yurutse. I had hoped that maybe the argali might still be around higher up given the lack of snow, but one of the spotters told me the herd never came back over the pass from last year and there was maybe just a lone male left. So instead I sat by the base camp and kept an eye on the valley in case a lynx went past. Forlorn hope, but they are there and I thought maybe they might be more active by day during the winter. There were certainly still a lot of woolly hares around the place.

After a couple of hours I thought I might go a bit higher. I got to the start of the vegetated part of the valley (low red shrubs) and saw something yellow quite far ahead. I got the binoculars on it and my first thought was "how did the yellow dog get up there without me seeing it go past?" - then I saw a second one up behind the first one. I am really glad I saw the second one, because otherwise I would have just dismissed the first one as the yellow dog and turned my back on it. But two together meant it wasn't the dog from Yurutse. You may recall from the last visit that before coming to Ladakh I was a bit concerned about safety because the state has a huge feral dog problem, with people regularly being attacked and in the Nubra Valley area even being eaten by packs of dogs. On my last visit I found the dogs around Leh to be harmless (at least by day) and hadn't see any in the Rumbak area apart for a couple of harmless house-dogs. But these two were well away from the village. I glanced around for higher ground from which I'd have a chance at defending myself, but there was nothing which a dog couldn't also get to easily. I couldn't run at this altitude, and I wouldn't have a hope of fighting them off if they attacked.

I took another look at them through the binoculars to assess the situation. The one behind, the larger one, had seen me, was staring straight at me. But I breathed a sigh of relief. They weren't yellow dogs - they were yellow wolves! I'm scared of dogs, but wolves are fine. In fact I had actually been hoping to see wolves, I just hadn't expected them to be yellow. The wolf which had seen me turned around and trotted back the way it had come. The smaller one didn't realise and kept coming. Then it stopped and looked back, looked forwards, looked back. I could almost imagine it saying "hey, what's wrong?" to the other one as it left. Finally it saw me, and also turned and left. Not running, but at a quick walk. Very cool indeed. My first wolves. I even got photos, which (after super-heavy cropping!) can be identified as wolves and not just fuzzy yellow blobs. Also I didn't die, and that's always a bonus.

The next day the Thai group left. They never saw a snow leopard. The Belgian group also left after just a couple of days. They never saw a snow leopard. I watched the hills around the second campsite all day, no snow leopard.

In the night it snowed. In the morning it was still snowing. It was only the second time it had snowed at the village all winter, and the first time had only been a dusting. I went up onto the hill anyway. It was my last day and I didn't want to waste the hours, but the falling snow made anything past twenty metres invisible. All that happened is that I turned into a walking snowman. I went back to the homestay for breakfast. The taxi was meeting me down at the road at 2pm, but I couldn't do any watching until then because of the white-out. Very frustrating. At noon I left for the walk down. I passed the Swedish group coming up - some had already gone back to Leh, and the rest were staying their final night in a homestay. They hadn't seen anything since their initial fleeting glimpse on the first afternoon. In fact I think I was the only person who had seen any other mammals apart for the flocks of bharal (I had seen the wolves, woolly hares and a single large-eared pika).

I really hope they did see a snow leopard on their last day, and I genuinely mean that. It was hard work up there. I just wish I'd gone up there three or four years ago when seeing them was a good certainty.