The Butterfly Liberator

Chitwan National Park, second day. Ioan and I wake up at 6.30 to go on the bird watch trip. He seems OK, but it's almost funny to see him getting out of bed like an 80 year old, puffing and aching. He has sore muscles from yesterday's elephant activities. We leave at 7, a guide, a Dutch guy and the two of us. We take the road for a couple of minutes, the guide mentions the serious fog, little chance to see anything. I ask why can't we go later and we readily agree to postpone the trip for 8.30. Ioan goes back to bed and won't leave for the rest of the day. He is clearly under the weather, maybe a touch of fever. I leave again, with Kris, the Dutch, and the guide and we have a good 3 hour bird watching trip. Nothing happens at first but at some point we see some kind of crow on the back of a rhino, I get good shots moments later and more birds join in.

A wounded rhino welcomes birds. They clean the wound and this helps it heal faster.

Birds on the rhino. Can you see the little wound on the left side of the picture?

We see a few more birds and a rhino with a huge horn and a huge erect penis. No pictures of that or just by special request. The guide is amazed, apparently the rhino got excited when four women came in his way. It calms down and lays on the ground, blocks the pass over a creek, we have to jump over it.

We end the trip at the guide's house, and while waiting for the car to pick us up, we talk a bit about economics. Everybody here saves money to build a hotel, buy an elephant and a car. The elephant might cost €25000 ($33000) but you can make $100 per day and pay it off in 3 years. But the elephant might die, the car you can sell if it breaks and get some money back. We sit on his porch, his wife makes tea, his children are gone to school. He built the house himself, it's small, maybe twice the size of my bathroom, and there are 12 people living there.
In the afternoon we have scheduled a "jungle walk plus", the plus part is that at the end a local person will show us how they pick products from the jungle to cook food. Ioan was excused for being sick, Ileana sacrificed herself to stay with him, but couldn't hide her excitement. We walk for 3 1/2 hours without seeing any animal, maybe the distant image of a monkey, a deer and a wild pig. We see some trees, we taste the outer shell of some wild walnut, we see the imprint of a paw of a rhino, a nice marsh where rhinos sometime come and a lot of butterflies, spiders and termites. We decide we don't want the plus part and it works out fine that the guide forgets about that. The most action we have all day is Ileana jumping to free a butterfly from a spider web. So I call her "Mom, the butterfly liberator!"

Poor little butterfly

Monstrous spider

On better days rhinos and tigers and deer come to this little lake in the jungle

Nothing happens, but still looking for animals