We recently visited Kaziranga National Park, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This reserve is located in the North-East Indian state of Assam.

During our 3-night/4-day stay at Kaziranga, we went on 2 elephant rides, a jeep safari, visited India’s largest orchid park (The Kaziranga National Orchid and Bio diversity Park), drove to a waterfall 40 minutes away from the reserve and saw the Hathikuli tea-estate gardens, besides getting a conducted tour of their factory. Photography/videography was not allowed in their factory!

In this post, I want to share my favourite part of the jeep safari at the Western range of Kaziranga National Park.

On our second day at the reserve, we went for an early morning elephant ride in the the Central range (also called the Kohora range), and then took a jeep safari in the Western range (or the Bagori range) after breakfast the same day. The two hour jeep safari started at 09:15am, but slightly exceeded the two hour time period as we stopped often to click pics.

At the start of our jeep safari, we could only spot a few migratory birds in ponds, and deer and rhinos far away, but as we moved on we could finally see the mesmerising Asian elephants.

We thought we should move further to see more. So, didn’t notice the baby elephant under its mother’s legs in the pic below.

Slowly, the baby and mother elephant walked past the tall strides of grass seen on the left of the pic below. I felt they moved forward so that I could get a snap of them!😀

Many elephants were grazing far from our sight as well.

I guess the stork was going on an ‘elephant safari’ too, like we had done that morning! 😊-

While writing this post, I felt I could’ve got a better shot of the mother and baby elephant together, if not for the long grass…

In the short clip below, it looks like both the baby elephants were trying to interact!!

After around five minutes, we had one of the best moments of a wildlife safari. The elephants walked towards the road were the jeeps were, in order to cross the road.

As we were watching the elephants walk towards the road where the jeeps waited to see the animals, my mom commented that just like kids, even young elephants stick to their moms!!

I guess I’d call this the show stopper moment because for a second, everyone including the driver of our jeep who was used to the place got worried, when one of the elephants who was making her way forward, turned towards us and gave us a glare, or a ‘stern look’, even though we were keeping silent in order to not disturb any of the animals in their habitat, to which we were just visitors. While the other elephants continued to walk forward, this one stayed on and kept an eye on us for a few more seconds and then moved on. We were surprised to see how the elephant too, felt protective of its young one, when it came against outsiders…

When the group of elephants got together to cross the road, they first sent one of their members to cross the path to check if it was alright for the rest of them to follow. It was amazing to see how animals like humans, were making sure their surrounding was safe for them and their group.

One of the elephants took a straight walk before turning back to the bushes-

Video of the elephants crossing the road-

I’ve often seen clips of elephants stopping vehicles on the roads and demanding some fruits or not let the cars go by. Recently, I saw a video of an elephant stopping a truck and taking a bundle of sugarcane from the back of the vehicle. Although that’s not what happened to us exactly, the elephant giving us a glare for a second did make me think of these clips I’ve seen. I was thinking if something like that would happen to us while we go on a safari, but the elephants stay in their habitat and don’t disturb anyone unnecessarily and even when there are fights, its mostly between two elephants only, our driver informed us.

While on our way back to the starting point of the safari, we could see a leftover bone of an elephant. Our driver told us it belonged to a tuskless elephant, which was killed in a fight with another elephant having tusks, almost two years ago, and that most fights occur between elephants with and without tusks.

I’ve read so much about how elephants live as a family and are very smart animals, but was the first time I got to actually see it. What astounded me was how one elephant, I believe the head of the herd, first crossed the path, after which the rest of them followed her next and how these mammals think for each other too, and not just for themselves.

That’s it for this post guys!! See you in the next post. Have you guys gone on jeep safaris before? Did you encounter or have a unique experience? Let me know in the comments section below!!

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