Tata Safari Storme to Pench Tiger Reserve
The drive had gone on for three hours and all I had spotted was deer, bison and more monkeys than humans I had seen in the past few days. I slipped into a dream when the Tata Xenon pickup that was hastily converted into an open safari vehicle came to a grinding halt. I wake up to the sight of a frail chital leap across the trail followed by a prowling tigress and right in front of us, the jaws of the majestic wild cat sink into the neck of its prey. Turns out I was still sleeping but all of a sudden, I was woken up for real. Monkeys were sounding alarm signals atop trees and I could see a few vehicles up ahead on the same trail stop in their tracks. Everyone was alert to the sound of the monkeys as they warned their deer brethren of a predator’s presence, and there stood a good chance that even we could get to catch the sight of at least one of the 38 tigers in the Pench reserve. We waited for a full 15 minutes, the alarm sounds slowly died down and we drove back to Turia gate after our morning safari.
The striped kings of this jungle didn’t grace us with our presence. When you drive all the way to the centre of the country, you want to spot some tigers. Maybe not like in such a vivid dream, catching its prey right in front of you but at least a glimpse of it chilling under a tree, or strolling near the trail. Even that’s enough. Ever wondered why? Why would someone drive over 1500km to watch a tiger walk in its backyard?
We’ll come to that. Reclaiming a bit more of my life this month began a couple of days before my jungle safari. We drove from Pune after a whole day’s work to our night halt in Aurangabad. The next morning, I was staring at the next 600km ahead of me and the roads were nothing like the month before where we experienced some beautiful highways all the way to SAI Sanctuary in Karnataka. This month was turning out to be a challenging drive to Pench. Get off the G-Quad sections and Maharashtra’s highways are no where as nice as the ones you find in most other states, and worse, there doesn’t seem to be any effort made to improve them the further east you go from Mumbai. Bypasses through major towns like Ahmednagar are a joke but we were behind the wheel of the Safari Storme VARICOR 400. Of the 830km drive to Pench national park, at least about 300km of highways are riddled with potholes the size of craters, and it is absolutely impossible to ease your way through every one of them. Behind the wheel of the Safari Storme, you can rest assured your sump won’t kiss what’s left of the road, the suspension won’t break if you don’t brake in time for a deep pothole and the damping will be soft enough to cushion you from such craters.
It’s proper off-roading as you negotiate the Ahmednagar bypass so by the end of the day, I’ve already done my bit of 4×4 driving, even before we reach Pench, and I say that with absolutely no exaggeration. Once you near Amravati, the splendid AH46 coming from Mumbai takes you most of the way to Nagpur and leads ahead all the way to Orissa. For Pench, you change over from AH46 to AH43 near Nagpur. This four-laned highway is under construction so the traffic is thin on this route due to the harsh terrain and road work. It passes through the sanctuary, so expect Pench and the neighbouring Kanha national park to get a lot busier once the highway is completed.
While most of us would be annoyed and curse infrastructure and governments, I wasn’t going to complain about the situation. The forest authorities have stopped the entry of private vehicles inside the sanctuary from 2015 due to the difficulty the tour guides faced during jungle safaris. My drive was going to end at the gates and just because I could, also around the numerous trails on the outskirts of the sanctuary.
The forest expands even outside the buffer zone so you just need to venture a little inside the arterial road leading to Turia gate of the Pench Tiger reserve to get some off-road thrills. While we were exploring the area, we even came across a pack of jackals crossing our trail. The grassy trails in early October haven’t even broken through the track of tyres as it’s virgin to the new year after a good rainfall. In 2WD mode, the Safari can be a lot of fun in these slippery conditions. The rear wheels break traction over grass and gets the tail out and it’s a recipe for good fun, but as you go deeper into the forest, it is best to use 4-High through the undulations. How we wish a few of the river crossings from the sanctuary extended through our trail. After a whole day of driving through densely forested trails, we retired for the night. The next morning was going to be an early one.
I was induced into that vivid dream a couple of hours after we were fairly deep into the Pench reserve. A few hours before the sun had risen, a convoy of 34 open top vehicles had lined up at the Turia gate awaiting the forest officials to open the Pench tiger reserve. We were first in line. I was hoping to catch a glimpse of animals inside the reserve and I wanted them to be unaware of our presence, so we had to be ahead of the touristy pack. Predators in the reserve live free and stroll the land as you walk in your living room. As we found out, they don’t care about these vehicles, they aren’t even scared of foreign objects in their land. Sitting atop the food chain above the leopards in the sanctuary are the tigers. A reclaimed life is a very powerful life and all the power here lies with these tigers.
At last count, 3,890 tigers are alive in the world. The tiger has been an endangered species for decades and it has taken this long for the numbers to rise from what they were in the seventies. A hundred years ago, one lakh survived and the big cat is essential to the whole ecosystem. They help maintain the balance and control the growing deer population that depletes the green cover. With such few numbers, spotting a tiger is very rare. To keep human interaction to a minimum, only a small percentage of the reserve is open to visitors. A majority of Pench’s core area doesn’t have scarcity of water so the tigers don’t need to travel to watering holes or hotspots where they can be spotted. Tiger spotting aside, the park’s landscape is pure bliss. Smooth dust trails run all along the park with the rays of the morning sun piercing through the land of Mowgli. With the number of primates jumping from one tree to another, you could just picture Rudyard Kipling’s fictional classic being penned with thoughts of this place.
I remember seeing a tiger a few years ago at the Tadoba tiger reserve. I was awestruck. All I could see were the stripes on its back till it noticed our presence and turned its head in nonchalance. We couldn’t find a tiger here but visiting the Pench sanctuary is so much more. The landscape is totally a back of beyond place like the ones we have been searching for since we got the Safari Storme and at the end of the day, there is always hope to (figuratively) catch the eye of a tiger.
Until then, we might have had an uneventful wildlife escapade, but the road trip from Pune to Pench gave us plenty of time at the wheel of the Safari Storme. Its ability to power through bad roads and the steady highway speeds it can maintain on the good patches make it an ideal SUV for a road trip like this one.
