Jaipur, India to Tiger Reserve

My sweet husband was up at 2 AM. He turned on the light and started making tons of noise. He came back into the room and I asked what he was doing. He looked at the clock and said, "Opps, I thought it was 7 AM not 2 AM." It is so funny...guess that we are not going to get a full night of sleep on this overland trip.

I re-woke at 6 AM, got ready and packed.

We had breakfast with Dale and Jenni.

We picked up shirts from the store in the lobby of the hotel. We found out that the store keeper's family had been up sewing until 4 Am to get all the clothing finished for our extended group. We also purchased some shirts for myself.

We went back to our room and grabbed our suitcases.

We managed to get to the lobby early and were able to greet Karen, Dave and Lynn and Jim they will not be returning to the ship until Cape Town.

Our group needed to get some funds in order to tip Raj as he is doing a great job. Unfortunately, the ATM was not working. Raj said that this is common in India.

There was road construction so our driver ended up actually reversing and driving backwards for a good quarter of a mile. Did I mention that driving in India is absolute NUTS!!!!

We stopped to eat at roadside restaurant. This restaurant was really questionable! We saw a woman outside cooking naan with dung....this is the same naan that we had just ate. I will be dosing myself with Pepto-Bismol for sure!

We checked in at our hotel and got ready for a game drive.

The game drive began at 2:30 PM (the hottest part of the day). We had a crazy driver. I think he was getting a kick out of throwing us around the back of the flat bed truck which had absolutely zero shocks.

We were out for an extended period of time until we finally saw a tiger. This is our first ever tiger sighting in the wild. We could not believe that the tiger just laid in the river bed as truckload after truckload of tourists came screeching up to it. Clearly, the tigers are used to vehicles and tourists.

We thought that after seeing the tiger, the excitement would be over. Nope, the driver must have been late for dinner or something. He drove like a wild man all the way to the hotel. I found this totally uncalled for and he ended up really causing several on his vehicle some severe discomfort.

We had dinner at the hotel and retire to our room.

I saw what I thought was a scorpion on the floor of our room because of how it moved. I tried to kill it but it got away and ran under a cabinet. Bob and I moved the cabinet and were able to kill the spider. We were thankful that we killed it because another member of our group got bit by one and he ended up with quite the bit bullseye bite mark.

After showering, we retired.

Halfway through the night, I had to put on a mask. I am so looking forward to getting back to the ship!
Dinner at hotel
Showered & BedRead more