Tuesday February 07, 2006

Skiing in Auli and Safari in Corbett Tiger Reserve Recently four of us (Pramod Batni, Prakash Jalan, Madhu KR and myself) went for three days of skiing and two days visit to Corbett National Park.

We decided to choose Clib Top Resort at Auli (15 kms from Joshimath). This time around snow was not much near the resort but there was plenty of snow near tower number 8-10. While Pramod, Prakash and Madhu were busy in learning how to ski, I was busy in recaping old techniques which I had learned in Auli and Narakanda. There were quite a lot of mistakes which I was doing and had to correct them by taking help from the instructor. I know I had to improve a lot, so I put all the efforts in these three days. The body posture was not correct at high speeds. Finally at the end of the third day, I could manage to improve a lot. In fact I covered 70% of the skiing slope which is more than a kilometer. The slope was too good. I had to slow down at quite a few places. It's really fun. The next step in learning skiing is parallel skiing and jump. Prakash Jalan had accompanied me on third day while Madhu KR and Pramod went for a small ride to GMVN guest house and temple. I also used to visit temple everyday afternoon after finishing the skiing.

Once we finished skiing we headed for Corbett Tiger Reserve. We took a direct bus from Joshimath to Ramnagar at 3.30 am. In the national park, we could locate everything like spotted dear, barking dear, samba, tigers footprint, tigers was to mark their territory, tigers shit etc but we couldn't locate tiger. Perhaps tiger was afraid of coming in front of us. We took two safari to see a tiger but we were not lucky. One elephant safari in the evening and one jeep safari in the morning.

We started from Bangalore on 25th Jan and came back on 5th Feb 2006. It was quite cold there and we were prepared for it. The bus journey was very tiring though. We played Uno (cards) in the train. I'll remember this journey as I lost quite a few times in the game.

General Information on Corbett Tiger Reserve (source : Corbett booklet)
Corbett Tiger Reserve lies in Ramnagar (Nainital, Uttaranchal). The main office is at Director, Corbett Tiger Reserve Ramnagar - 244715 (Nainital) Tel 05947-251489, 251376, 251012.

- Year of establishmen of National Park : 1936

- Area of Square kms : 1288.32 (i) Corbett National Park : 520.82 (ii) Sonanadi Wildlife Sanctuary : 301.18 (iii) Reserve Forest : 466.32

- Main rivers flowing through the Reserve : Ramganga, Sonanadi, Mandal, Palain.

- Tigers : 143 tigers as of 2004.

- Wild animal seen Mammals : Wild elephants, Tiger, Leopard, Jungle Cat, Barking Deer, etc.

Birds : Over 580 species of resident and migratory bird

- Opening Time : 15th Nov to 15th June (2006-02-07 18:30:00.0) Permalink