Chitwan Luxury Tour

A twenty-five minute flight to Bharatpur instead of six hours on the road, and a short transfer to a lodge on the park boundary or the riverbank - one that keeps its own naturalists, runs its own vehicles and takes small numbers, which is what actually separates a good Chitwan trip from an ordinary one. You have the afternoon to settle in: the grounds, the pool, and the walk down to the Rapti for sunset, which is the fixed point every day here arranges itself around. Your naturalist joins you at dinner to plan the next two days around where the animals have been that week rather than around a fixed programme.

Out at first light in a small private jeep with a naturalist who knows where the rhino were yesterday - that knowledge, and being in the right part of the park at the right hour, is the difference between a good day and a full jeep at nine in the morning. Chitwan holds one of the strongest populations of greater one-horned rhino anywhere, and sightings are close to certain and often at short range; tiger, gaur, sloth bear and leopard are all here and are a matter of luck. We come back through the heat of the day for lunch and a long, empty middle of the afternoon, then go out again in the late light when the animals move a second time. Evenings are on the riverbank.

A dugout canoe on the Rapti at dawn, drifting silently downstream past gharial and mugger crocodile on the banks with kingfishers, storks and darters along the water - it is the quietest way to see the park and the best hour for birds, of which Chitwan has over five hundred recorded species. Afterwards a guided walk in the buffer-zone forest with an armed naturalist, on foot and at ground level, which feels completely different from the jeep. The afternoon goes to a Tharu village - the indigenous people of this part of the Terai, who lived with endemic malaria here for centuries before the land was cleared in the 1950s - and there is a cultural programme after dinner.

One last early drive into the park, which is often the best of the trip because you know by now where to look and the naturalist knows what you still want to see. Back for a proper breakfast, and then the short flight from Bharatpur to Kathmandu, arriving in the middle of the day. Anyone wanting more can add a night, and three full days in Chitwan is genuinely better than two.