How I (Nearly) Got Kissed By A Lion At Gir National Park

Asiatic Male Lion

It was a rather quite Saturday morning, our fourth day at the Gir National Park. While my earlier (and first) trip to the Gir National Park was just before the busy season ( in October of 2010, just before the Diwali holidays; read here for details), this time around we chose to go in the busiest season – the summer holidays – as it also  happens to be the best time to spot the wild cats. As it turned out, in the first three days, we had a fairly good amount of sighting of birds, lionesses and cubs, an old male lion and a cheetah!! Boy were we lucky or what?

But greedy as we humans are, we wanted to see a ‘Young Male Lion’ as we (my friend actually!!) weren’t satisfied with what we shot of the ‘Old Male Lion’ two days back. So we started our penultimate day with the usual chore of getting up at 3 and waiting in a queue since 4 in the morning outside Sinh Sadan (the forest department office where permits to enter to the Gir National Park are issued). Finally at 6:30am we managed to get our permits and stacked our tired selves (since were following this routine of standing in long queues twice a day for the last three days) in to the gypsy. We instructed our driver and guide that we had seen enough of most things and would only focus on spotting a ‘Young Male Lion’ in this trip. So they made some calls to find out where this dude was last seen and figured that he was probably somewhere near the end of our trail (each safari permit entitles you to visit one trail, and in one direction i.e. you cannot turn around or travel in the reverse direction, nor can you jump to any other trail).

Dancing Peacock

A Pair of Green Bee-Eaters

Lesser Flameback Woodpecker

Asian Paradise Flycatcher

A Fleeing Cheetah

A Pride of Lions