Trip to Bannerghatta Biological Park

When you grow up, you become "grown up". All the small things you enjoyed as a "lesser grown up" person start to look very silly. But one of the things which never went out of my mind was to visit a zoo. What I get is not the sadistic pleasure of seeing a wild animal which has to be roaming around freely in another part of a world being confined to a small cage - however big the cage is, it is still small for a wild animal. But what I love is to see animals which you see very rarely in a lifetime and which we might never see again in a few years from now. I don't think my kids would be able to show a live tiger to their kids. I heard from my friends that Bannerghatta is really good. So we decided to make a trip to the Bannerghatta Biological Park.

Me and my wife started at around 11 AM on a Saturday and we reached Bannerghatta at around 1 PM with most of the time spent in tasting the traffic "jams" of Bangalore. What I did not understand along the route is that even though Bannerghatta is a very famous spot, there are hardly any road signs to give you directions or to tell you how far you are away from there. But then, this is India where the road signs usually say "You just bounced through a really high speed breaker. Thank you. Visit again".

The first thing on our mind was lunch. We went to a small restaurant and had fried rice (which was good but the quantity was very less), plain roti (I guess, because I do not remember), a curry and lassi (which was close to white water). After the lunch, we made our way inside the park and we waited in a very very long queue for the "Grand" Safari. God knows why it is called "Grand" because I didn't notice anything grand about it - standing in a partially covered queue in the sweltering heat with vommit strewn across and keeping you alert. We thought whether it was really worth going through all this for a safari.

But when the safari started we forgot everything. The herbivores section was the most uninteresting part of the safari. But then we moved on to carnivores section. First came the bears and there were a whole lot of them. Then came the lions which we could see only from a long range. Then the tigers - wow, what amazing animals they are. If you have seen tigers only in TV or movies, I strongly suggest that you go and see a live one. They are incredible and you just cannot take your eyes off them. And they were roaming around freely - a couple were even roaming on the road. Beauty sometimes is not good - they have been hunted down and now we have only a 1000 odd left.

The zoo was next in our itinerary. The zoo was not that big but had a good collection of animals, birds and reptiles. I did not understand why the had the lovebirds there because it is such a common bird (I have a couple at home). The day ended for us with a fantastic dance show by the peacock. A fitting end to an exciting but tiring day. We did not have time to see the Butterfly Park but that is definitely on the agenda when we go there the next time.