Indian Wildlife Safari Corbett Traveller Reviews

Where to start? Landing in Delhi we were met by a rep from Perfect Travels who gave us both a book about tigers and an itenarary for our tiger tour. The rep came with us in the transfer taxi to explain everything to us. We were then transported, stopping as we wanted, 6 hours to Tiger Camp, which was very comfortable. The highlight here was being able to go down and sit at the river and watch life go on - washing clothes, scrubbing pots and 3 domestic elephants with their handlers came down and the elephants also had a good soak and a scrub. The scenery is stunning. We had 2 safaris in Birjani region of Corbett. Our driver for the whole time both in Birjani and Dhikala was Alam and we couldn't have asked for better. There was loads of evidence of tigers but we had to wait until the second outing when a tigress and her 2 Cubs came out of the long grass walked a good way up the dry riverbed and disappeared into the grass again. Truly amazing! We then moved to Dikala for a 3 night stay. This was a bit more primitive but adequate accommodation and the food was good. We had safaris both morning and afternoon, in the morning we would come in for breakfast then go back out. The first safari we saw a tiger in the long grass, but not a good view. We had an elephant safari which made us feel a bit like explorers as our elephant seemed to chose her own path. The wild elephants and all the other wildlife would have been an amazing holiday. Alam knew we were there to see tigers and arranged for us to have a stay in one of the towers while the park was closed in the middle of the afternoon. We did see a tiger come silently out of the jungle, cool itself in a waterhole, look directly at us and disappear silently back into the jungle. We did come across another tiger lying in the shade on a road and then imoving into a waterhole for a soak.. When it got up and left the waterhole we watched its, again from a tower, walk into the long grass, lie down and disappear from view except for the swishing of its tail. As you can probably guess from this we had a fantastic holiday and couldn't possibly choose one highlight, there were so many and only a few mentioned here!

We emailed Wildlife Trails, told them what we wanted and they organised everything exactly. We didn't want to spend anytime in Delhi, because we had been there before, and we wanted to optimise our chances of seeing tigers, which we knew wasn't going to be easy, so we had an extra safari. We didn't want to travel to Corbett by train so a road transfer, stopping as we wanted was arranged. The companies used in India were Perfect Travels, who were in contact with us by phone checking that everything was going well and Tigerland Tours and Safaris took care of our safari package. We cannot fault any of these companies or their service. We know there was a certain amount of luck in having had so many tiger sightings but the scenery and the elephants would have made the trip. We gave Wildlife Trails the names of 2 or 3 parks and we were given information on each park for us to make the final decision on where we travelled. Kirsty and Allan Blanchard along with the other companies mentioned all went the extra mile to give us a fantastic holiday for a fraction of the price of some of the other big tour operators.