Madi

What an amazing opportunity to get out of the city and go on some jungle adventures. We took a 6-7 hour soul crushing bus ride over the worst road I've ever been on in my life. The roads here aren't roads, they are composed of randomly sized rocks placed haphazardly with rubble and other random leftover carnage from the landslides caused by the earthquake in 2015. Pitted and rudded potholes bigger than the wheels of busses are scattered throughout the 100 something km journey in copious amounts. The best thing to do is Medicate up, engage the core and submit to it like drinking tequila. It burns along the way but afterwards you feel euphoric.....and very grateful for everything we have back home. For me this experience here in Chitwan National Park was a collision of heart and mind. The right and left sides of my brain firing fully in order to make the next power move decision and be at peace with it once made. "The paradox of life" is something Joel used to say to me and I heard him saying it a few times to me these past few days. I remember asking him more than a few times what it meant and then googling it after too still being confused. Ahaha. Now I think I know what he meant. The resulting brain collision resulted in me getting a stress cold and probably getting Beth sick too however the experience was a little enlightening.

We found a great place to stay that provided tours and treks in Nepals only national park and saw some really neat wildlife. Last year this park was poach free apparently however the years of hunting and mans need to control everything and capitalize is very clear here. In the mid 1900s before this was a park hunting was rampid until the rhino population was almost completely depleted. Elephants have been completely dominated in Nepal. There was a breeding centre here in which we did not visit but I asked our guide on the jungle trek some questions about it and the answers I received were very disheartening. Newborn elephants are immediately trained and broken in, male elephants are then shipped off to one of the many army posts. 2 elephants a guard post with about 45 posts around the park. The tusks are sawed off when they become a threat. Female elephants remain in captivity forever basically even though they do go on daily walks into the jungle they chain them up the rest of the time.Read more