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

We decided that we would rush our entire trail and wait just before the end of the trail to spot the dude. So we covered more than half of our trail in less than 45 mins, while normally you’d taken over an hour and a half to cover the same distance. While we reached somewhere mid-way, we saw cars coming from the other end (the exit point of our trail was the entry point of another trail – so essentially each route is counted as two trails like a two way road, with no u-turns allowed) and decided to enquire about the ‘Young Male Lion’ that we were looking for. To our disappointment, we were told that the dude had decided to not show up, and instead walked away deeper in the forest!! To further add to our distress, some of the cars on our trail caught up with us in a while and merrily narrated how they saw a group of eight lions!! So here were, sitting in the middle of our trail having lost the bird in hand, and the ones in the bush as well!!

Indian Pita

After a while of sulking, I proposed that we move ahead slowly and spot a migratory bird – The India Pita. It took some persuasion for us to convince my friend - he was visibly much more disappointed than me (rightly so!) and not a keen birder - but we eventually moved on. Upon driving a little further, we reached a curved road where we could hear the bird around us. So we parked our car on the side, and started looking for the bird.

He was sitting next to us all this while!!

We were parked on the right side of the road, next to a small muddy hill, a little taller than our Gypsy’s tyres, and we all looking on the left (since that’s where the bird’s call came for). I was sitting behind the driver’s seat, our guide to my left and my friend on the last row of this open Gypsy (whose engine was ofcourse not running since we were parked). After about five minutes out driver looked on the right, and very slowly murmured “Aai riyo nar…”. Not completely understanding what he said, we all intuitively looked where he was pointing, and the next moment I was off my seat on to the floor of the car near about the gear box. What the driver had murmured was “Here’s the male!!” – a ‘Young Male Lion’ was sitting unnoticed on the top of the muddy hill next to our car!! “F@#k!! We are all going to die today!!” was all that we could think – no one spoke, no one could!! What do you do when you are sitting two feet away from a ‘Young Male Lion’ in an open car – and that too with him sitting at a the same height as you are???

Startled by me jumping from a seat next to him to the floor of the car, the dude gets up – so now we had a ‘F@#KING YOUNG MIGHTY MALE GODDAMN LION’ standing at a height we were sitting at, two feet away, and we were still in an open car!! “F@#K!!! F@#K!!! F@#K!!!”. Had the dude moved one step forward, his face would have been inside our car – and we would probably not have had survived to narrate this story. But we did!! After a long stern look at all of us, the dude decided that we not his usual ‘meal of choice’ but just a bunch of fat, crazy photogeeks. So he decided not to hunt, but to pose – he sat back next to the car and posed for us. PHEW!!!!...BIG PHEW!!! For the next half an hour, we followed him all around, madly clicking his picture, until he finally disappeared deep in to the forest. What a day it was – we never felt so lucky, in every possible sense. That day we couldn’t have thanked God enough!!!

 

This is a photo that I had clicked while sitting on the floor of the car, with the dude standing next to us – he was so close that I couldn’t capture him in a frame (n I shot at 55mm).