Amazingly, the weather held for the whole day and our afternoon drive also enjoyed decent weather. The sky was blue and the air was wonderfully clear.
I would have loved to go back and sit near the Broadbill nests but I did not have the only vote and my travelling companions wanted to get out of the jungle onto the plains where they could see some of the larger mammals.
Kaziranga is a lovely park to visit with plenty of water bodies and lots of open plains making it easy to see the wildlife.
In fact, I saw more mammals on my first drive in Kaziranga than I’d seen in a week at Tadoba, and a large percentage of them were One-horned Rhinos. The park has almost 2,700 rhinos, almost twice as many rhinos as Swamp Deer (1,800) Elephants were plentiful too, as were the Water Buffalo.
With tea estates on both sides of the road it was immediately clear that we were in tea country.
For our stay we had chosen a property surrounded by tea plantations called Banyan Grove. In fact Banyan Grove was formerly the residence of the Deputy Plantation Manager for the Gatoonga Tea Estate.
Banyan Grove is one of a small collection of properties owned/operated by Heritage Northeast ( https://www.heritagetourismindia.com/ ). It is a wonderful old building surrounded by lawns, although the original Banyan tree that gave it its name has long since died.
