Tiger census - Day1

As expected, we reached the guest house early in the morning and it was about 4:30am when we all decided to crash for a quick nap. After an hour, we were woken up. Time to get busy. The other team reached after us as they boarded the bus pretty late in the night. In short, almost no sleep for anyone. We were divided into 4 teams and were given a list of areas to explore. We had a local representative of HYTICOS (the tiger conservation society) to help us and we were supposed to pick up local animal trackers near each spot. So we started off without any breakfast or tea/coffee and went to the first spot. First ride in the jungle was pretty exciting. Most of it was still in its pristine state. We were all set to encounter some wild animals (and pull their tail at the first opportunity:) ). But we were not destined to be so lucky. We hardly encoutered any wild animal. Most of the regular spots in the jungle were dry. We did manage to spot some pugmarks and scat (shit) but that was about it. The story continued all throughout till evening. No success at all (other than some birds and a snake). The heat was killing and on top of that, we hardly had any food all through the day. A crappy lunch, some chocolates and lots of water kept us going. We were all crying for some rest - with a 6-hour long jeep journey, 1 hour nap and and no animal sighting was making the whole affair quite tiresome. At the end of the day, we returned empty handed to another guest house, not sure what the remaining 2 days have in store for us.