8 December 2004

Tales and tigers at Kipling Camp; The exceptional wildlife viewing at India's most famous jungle encampment rivals the exploits of its patriarch
 

ERIC ELLIS

Marvelling at a royal Bengal tiger up close is reason enough for visitors to make the trek to Kipling Camp, the most famous of India's jungle encampments. But travellers would be well advised to find out whether the camp's entertaining patriarch, Robert Hamilton Wright, OBE, is visiting from his home at Calcutta's pukka Tollygunge Club. If you're lucky, and Wright is in good form, you'll get a dose of living history around the camp's groaning dinner table from one of India's last true statesmen.

A “statesman,” however, is not how Calcutta-born Wright sees himself, despite his prized gong from Buckingham Palace and a lifetime at the heart of India's establishment. As the cravat-wearing octogenarian kicks back in his easy chair, overseeing Kipling Camp's myriad activities — pink gin and cigarette in hand, Becky, his loyal Labrador, at his feet — he suggests an altogether different description.

“Cad!” Wright firmly declares. “If I wrote my biography, I'd call it ‘The Cad of Calcutta.'

Perhaps fortunately for India — and many of Kipling Camp's guests, who include the rich and famous of other countries as well — Wright is too busy as a bon vivant to put pen to paper any time soon.

But gently prod him as he seats himself around the camp's open fire after a successful day spent tiger-spotting, and if he likes you (and Wright likes most people) tall stories will tumble forth about Bob and the British Royals, Bob and Mother Teresa, Bob living the high life of the British Raj in old Calcutta, Bob and, well, you name them, Wright's probably got a anecdote about them.

But are his stories true? Did the King of Bhutan really do that? And Princess Diana? Surely not? Well, after an enraptured evening at Wright's feet, it probably doesn't matter. Their joy is in his vivid telling — and the magnificent venue he's occupied since 1982 for his yarn-spinning, Kanha National Park, in the Mandla District of Madhya Pradesh.

But Wright isn't the only great yarn spinner who is famous around Kanha.

This magnificent national park, one of India's few remaining wildernesses, also evokes the work of Rudyard Kipling, the great chronicler of 19th-century British India who conceived the delightful tales of The Jungle Book.

It's not clear if Kipling actually visited Kanha or the camp that bears his name (a pragmatic Wright is uncharacteristically coy about all that). But all the tale's characters — Rikki Tikki Tavi the mongoose; Baloo the friendly bear; Shere Khan the majestic tiger — seem to frolic in the jungles and grasslands of Kanha's 1,945 square kilometres, one of India's biggest national parks.

Kanha is regarded by naturalists as one of the world's best locations, outside Africa, to view wildlife in its natural habitat, and probably the best to see tigers in the wild.

And Kipling Camp itself is a fine place to start the safari. About as close to the park as the law allows, its unfenced boundaries form part of Kanha's buffer zone. Tigers — a 2002 census tallied 114 in the park — regularly wander through Kipling's grounds, along with leopards, jungle cats, wolves and gaur, also known as Indian bison. Indeed, it's quite a magical thing to be enjoying an al fresco lunch with Wright and his young mostly English staff on a cloudless day only to hear him break off one of his myriad anecdotes of merry old India because a family of delicate chitals or barasinghas grazing just metres away has attracted his eye. Or that a squadron of langur monkeys has descended on the kitchen, anxious to sample some of Kipling's famous curries and some visiting jackals are sniffing nearby.

Part of Kipling's and Kanha's appeal is their glorious remoteness. Situated almost precisely at the geographical heart of the Indian subcontinent, it's 24 to 30 hours by rail from Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta. And that's only to the regional railhead at Jabalpur. From there its another three or four hours on very ordinary roads to Kipling. Travellers can fly from India's bigger cities to Nagpur in eastern Maharashtra state, but add another two hours to the drive to Kipling.

This remoteness is underlined in camp. Naturally, there's no mobile phone coverage and you can pretty much forget about the Internet. There is a phone, but it was down for three of the four days I was in camp, which I'm told is normal. While Kipling is well supplied with provisions brought down from Jabalpur's markets with each new arrival, visitors are advised to bring creature comforts and personal items with them.

But somehow it all doesn't matter once in camp. The accommodation — 18 double cabins — is basic but very clean, likely much as it was in British India, or perhaps as it is in your eccentric great-aunt's house. Camp life revolves around a central area, covered but without walls, which is Kipling's dining room/living room/lounge/library. With Wright's young staff of well-bred English teens on their gap year before heading up to Oxford and Cambridge, the camp effects a house party atmosphere presided over by Wright and his tall stories.

There's a vaguely military whiff about Kipling, unsurprisingly given Wright's stint in Normandy and in the Sudan Rifles, and because British India attracted squared-away officer types. A typical Kipling day involves bed-tea — a diehard British Indian military tradition — before dawn at 5 a.m. Then it's out of bed and in the back of one of Kipling's safari four-by-fours by 5:30 and to Kanha's gates for the 6 a.m. opening as dawn breaks over the park. This is considered the prime time for tiger-tracking, as the great beasts go hunting the deer they breakfast on. With luck (visitors are rarely disappointed), a tiger or two will be spotted, along with leopards, hyenas and myriad deer and birds along Kanha's networks of rudimentary tracks.

Naturalists complain Kanha is being overrun, but during a morning's sorties through the park its likely you'll see no more a dozen people. Kipling provides a picnic breakfast at a safe area in the park at around 9 a.m., and then it's a few more hours in the wilderness before a much-anticipated lunch back at camp. Afternoons provide a choice of more animal-spotting in Kanha or a ride aboard Tara, Kipling's resident elephant. Visitors accompany the pachyderm on her daily two-kilometre walk and bath in the watering holes of the Banjar River. Kipling even boasts its own howdah.

It's all very appealing, and one could easily while away a week in Kipling. But if Wright and his living history of India is in, and in good form, you had better make that two.