To Kaziranga

Through morning streets of a waking Delhi to the domestic airport. Legions of men and saried women en route to work: walking, riding, driving. Clustered at bus stops. Sardined into buses with limbs poking out doors and windows. Street dwellers emerge, dirty and disheveled, from corrugated lean-to’s, washing and cooking and eating beside the road.

Gut-dropping turbulence and a three-bounce landing and we arrive in Guwahati. Then comes the dangerous part: five hours on the main east-west highway that runs through Assam. A two-lane nightmare of near head-ons cut through red-earth rich land of paddies and palms, a palette of green, small towns built in cement block and bamboo. A flat tire gives us a brief glimpse into a small village.

For the last few miles, the park hugs the northern perimeter of Kaziranga National Park. I glimpse the hulking gray mass of a rhino in the distance. Forty hours door-to-door, and I am in one of Asia’s most amazing wildlands.