Chitwan Tour

Five to six hours by road from Kathmandu, following the Trishuli down out of the hills, or twenty-five minutes by air to Bharatpur. Either way the change is dramatic - from a valley at 1,400m to flat, hot, green Terai at under 200m, which is the other half of Nepal and looks nothing like the half most visitors see. We check in to the lodge, and there is time in the afternoon for a first walk down to the Rapti riverbank, where the sunset over the river with the park on the far bank is the fixed point everything else here arranges itself around. After dinner there is a Tharu cultural programme in the village - stick dance and song from the indigenous people of this part of the Terai, who lived with malaria here for centuries before the land was cleared in the 1950s.

Out at first light by jeep into the national park, which is when the animals are moving and the light is best. Chitwan protects nearly a thousand square kilometres of sal forest, elephant grass and riverine grassland, and holds one of the strongest populations of greater one-horned rhino anywhere in the world - a sighting is close to certain, often at very short range. Tiger, gaur, sloth bear and leopard are all here too, though seeing them is a matter of luck. Later in the morning we take a dugout canoe down the Rapti, drifting silently past gharial and mugger crocodile basking on the banks, with kingfishers and storks along the water. The middle of the day is spent out of the heat, and in the afternoon we visit the elephant breeding centre and walk in the buffer-zone forest with a naturalist.

An early walk along the community forest edge with a naturalist, which is the best hour of the day for birds - Chitwan has over five hundred recorded species, and in a good morning you might see fifty of them, including hornbills, bee-eaters, paradise flycatchers and any number of raptors. It is unhurried and on foot, so it feels quite different from the jeep. After breakfast we make the drive or the short flight back to Kathmandu, arriving in the afternoon. Two nights is the minimum that makes the journey worth making; three is better, and easy to add.