Adventure Parenting: Tadoba (Part 1 of 3)

My goodness, parenting can be an adventure, can’t it? So can travel, of course. I often hear travelling with children renounced as a waste of money because at the end of every long day, parents are still parenting, just in a different location and often under less optimal circumstances. Waiting back home are the usual de-escalation techniques and distractions, the familiar routine and the unlimited supply of pesto pasta that your child will definitely eat, leaving you with only improvisation and a rising sense of regret as your protection against the inevitable meltdowns.

I have always eschewed this perspective because, for the most part, Jasper has proven relatively easy cargo. Furthermore, it has never been the parenting that I was trying to get away from. I have been escaping the city, the hustle, the smog, the noise, the frustrations of daily Mumbai life and the somewhat defeatist, sedentary allure of the sofa every evening. Parenting has always been one of the more active, varied and fun parts of my life and a holiday is an excuse to give it higher billing. 

But not this time. This time, instead of going on holiday, we accidentally set a travel adventure on a direct collision course with a parenting adventure and suffered some serious fallout. 

We have recently returned from a beautiful, ten-day tour around the India you might find in coffee table books and luxury travel features; the India with tigers and elephants, lakes and mountains, palaces and forts—with barely a nod to modernity and not a high-rise in sight. What you won’t see in this literature, however, is an over-tired almost-4-year-old Hulk-smashing his father or trying to scratch out his mother’s eyeballs. No, those particular scenes are reserved solely for the fools who tried to drag a small child along on a holiday which was really more targeted to his grandparents: the scenes which tore down the illusion that holidays are not simply ‘parenting in a different location’; the scenes which made me question every life choice that led to each disagreement; the scenes that made me seriously consider what would happen if we allowed Jasper to live out his dream of climbing out of the safari vehicle; the scenes which forced me to remember that for all his worldly outlook and well-stamped passport, Jasper is, in fact, a very small boy chock-full of very big emotions. 

I confess, I overdid things with the itinerary. Four destinations and five flights in ten days allowed us to pack it all in, but it also meant we were always on the go. Of our ten mornings on the road, only two of them didn’t require a pre-dawn alarm. At least 10% of the meals we ate were either an airline-issue paprika chicken sandwich or an airport cookie. If all the moving around was tiring for the adults, it was altogether bewildering for Jasper. The more tired and cranky he became, the more tired and cranky Dylan and I became and the more we wished I hadn’t been so ambitious. 

The reason for this mad dash around India was visitors. Taking advantage of Jasper’s Diwali holidays and in the misplaced hope of an accompanying slow-down at our places of work, we invited Dylan’s mother and stepfather, aka Joanne and Dee aka Nana and Poppy, to visit. This was their first visit to India and so we used them as an excuse to roll out the tourism red carpet and see some of the country’s best bits for ourselves too. 

I chose a slightly illogical touring route from Mumbai to Nagpur to Udaipur to Jaipur—then back to Mumbai again. The eagle-eyed etymologists among you will have noticed a lot of ‘-purs’ in the destination names. A Pur is a fort or city in ancient Sanskrit. Often, the cities were named after their founders, such as Maharana Udai Singh II who founded Udaipur in 1559, and Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh who founded Jaipur in 1727. Nagpur is instead named after the Nag River on which it sits. Nagpur is known as the Heart of India, due to its central geographic location. So central is it that it boasts something called a Zero Mile Stone from where the British measured all distances on the sub-continent. The reason our route was illogical was that we went from the west coast of India, to the heart and then back out towards the north-west again. 

These destinations were everything we wanted them to be: scenic, romantic, historic, and safely touristic. But you should know that left behind after every tranquil sunset, every exciting safari, every beautiful hotel and every indulgent, smoked salmon breakfast are the emotional (and some physical) scars of battles fought and lost. Almost all those battles were against Jasper, but a few were against the weakness of our digestive systems. This is India, after all. 

In retrospect, however, I think we grew as parents and as people during the ten days we were on holiday with the devil, and we came away with as many new parenting mantras as we did extra bags to hold Joanne’s souvenir shopping. 

Part One: Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve

It’s not admitting defeat, it’s choosing to call it a day.

First stop: tigers—India’s national animal. You might not know that India is the only country in the world to boast both lions and tigers—native and wild. India is proud of her big cats and their protection is taken very seriously. This is because Indira Gandhi, India’s only woman Prime Minister to date (she served twice) and the daughter of the country’s first Prime Minister, Nehru, championed conservation. She launched Project Tiger in 1973 when the tiger population was dangerously threatened and paved the way for the National Tiger Conservation Authority. The punishment for killing a tiger—and certain species of very rare butterfly, by all accounts—is a prison sentence and a fine. It appears the prison sentence does not come with the assurance they won’t lose the keys, and the fine is the gift that keeps on giving to the authorities who collect it. All this to say, India looks after its wildlife, but not too seriously to overlook the tourism dollars it brings. 

We flew to Nagpur, a city in the northeast of Maharashtra (the state in which Mumbai is the capital) from where a 1.5 hour car ride took us to the Bamboo Forest Safari lodge, on the outskirts of the Tadoba-Andhari tiger reserve. The reserve is believed to be home to around 115 tigers although if that many were anywhere near us, they stayed very well hidden.

Tiger camouflage is something which fascinates me. These magnificent cats are enormous, bright orange, and covered in bold, black stripes. Yet somehow, they can be almost impossible to spot in both long grass and spiky bushes, even when they are less than two metres away. They are stealthy too, which is all the more impressive when you consider that females weigh about 150 kilograms and males weigh up to 250 kilograms. 

It was under spiky bush conditions that we had our first and most magical encounter with not one tiger, but three: a tigress and her two six-month-old cubs. We had been circling this particular bush for a while. For so long, in fact, that the other four or five jeeps who had been keeping pace with us originally had all given up and gone to search elsewhere. The regular stops we made to examine the tracks in the mud beneath our tires kept Jasper interested and, more importantly, quiet. Both our driver and our mandatory park guide seemed to be on the scent of something that they had pinpointed as being hidden deep in a particularly antisocial bush. Given how exposed we were in our open-topped, open-sided jeep, even the most gentle of branches could have caused some discomfort, but this bush was really out for our eyeballs. 

I was trying to shield both Jasper's and my eyes when suddenly, there was a lot of shushing and pointing. “Tigers,” someone whispered. I did my best to straighten up my defensive hunch and follow the direction of the point. “Wow,” I heard from the back seat where Joanne and Dee were sitting slightly higher than us. I shuffled a little and tried to help Jasper also follow the direction of the point, but in all honesty, I couldn’t see squat. I could barely see beyond the twigs right in front of my face, let alone make out a tiger or three. 

And then I saw him: a bold little tiger cub inching his way silently towards us. He was as fascinated by us as we were entranced by him. We held our breath and by the look of our photos, he held his. Something we hadn’t been aware of before travelling was that there is a ban on mobile phones in the park and so, were it not for an eleventh hour decision by Dylan to pack a digital camera, this moment would have stayed in the park. But as it was, Dylan managed to capture the full beauty of his markings and the calm curiosity on his face on our communal camera. 

I will admit I was unnerved by how long we were able to engage in this silent exchange with the cub because during the time our eyes were locked on him, the mother had disappeared from view. Like I said, stealthy. But luckily for us, apparently not hungry enough to flank a jeep full of tasty tourists. 

In hindsight, despite my twitchy looks over my shoulder in anticipation of an ambush, we all wish that we had lingered longer in this moment because our second and third encounters with tigers were nowhere near as special. To me, tigers are creatures so intricately designed that you can’t quite believe they exist. And for all of us, that first encounter now feels somewhat surreal. That we found a tiger, that there were cubs, that Jasper behaved and that there was no one else around feels like nothing short of a miracle. Our other drives gave us a single tiger, a long wait, a feral child, a convoy of jeeps and a hasty retreat from the crush of zoom lenses—as soon as we had our photo—to seek out crocodiles, peacocks, deer, monkeys and owlets. Nobody else gave two hoots about those. (!)

Our most enjoyable safari drives were when Jasper was asleep. The early starts, afternoon swims and excitement of having visitors left him oscillating between two physical states: violently opposed to everything (especially sleep) and comatose. The former state was particularly difficult to manage within the confines of a car. We had made peace with the fact we might need to placate him with a screen if he grew restless, but mobile phones weren’t allowed in the park. We sang, we played eye-spy, we ate biscuits (not a great idea, when you are trying to be quiet), we listened to stories on his Yoto story box, but all he wanted to do when he was awake was to climb all over, or out of, the jeep. Neither were permissible by park rules and so we were trapped. 

Photo taken during our breakfast stop, outside tiger territory.

Parenting on safari was never going to be easy. Even before the long hours spent being ‘not seen and not heard’, there were sunscreen and mosquito repellant battles at dawn and the reshuffling of Jasper's usual meal times to suit the hotel kitchen pre and post visits to the reserve. But it wasn’t until our fourth and final safari that we finally learned a valuable lesson: know when to call it a day. Adapting very well to her locally assigned role as the family matriarch, Joanne declared with some authority upon entering the park ‘once we see a tiger, we go home’. Never has a wiser word been spoken. She saved us a lot of futile child wrangling and quite possibly saved Jasper from becoming a big cat lunch.

We barely survived a thirty minute silent wait for a tigress to rouse from her nap amidst some long grass. Even when she finally stood up and strode majestically to the water’s edge for a drink, Jasper was far more interested in just how hard he could kick me in the face. No sooner had she disappeared from view again, we turned tail and retreated to the lodge. 

Stayed just long enough to get the money shot.

All things considered, we are lucky we all lived to fight another day. And boy, did some of us fight. 

Still to come: More Adventure Parenting in Udaipur and Jaipur.