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If you had just one night to spend in Bangkok, what would you do? Make your recommendations in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y

My grandfather's village
By Amy Brill
Searching a Greek island for roots
(04/07/98)

The Chinese friend
By Chris Taylor
Fate brings together an outsider and a foreigner on a bus tour of China
(04/06/98)

Mondo Weirdo
By Brett Harris
A close encounter with a restless ghost
(04/03/98)

The sadhu from Texas
By Anne Cushman
Memorable encounters with a sadhu from Texas by way of Varanasi
(04/02/98)

A pan-Italian feast -- in Geneva
By David Downie
Chez Roberto's culinary delights -- and Swiss soul
(04/01/98)

__TIGER, TIGER, BURNING BRIGHT .|. PAGE 2 OF 2

My second day in the park, Jitu and I set off at dawn. The sun rose like a squashed persimmon over the jungle mists. Aside from the hooting of invisible Indian cuckoos, the only sound was the pulping of leaves beneath the elephant's feet. It was one of those mornings when almost nothing seemed to be awake. I saw no deer, no monkeys, no wild boar or mugger crocodiles; just the inevitable rhinos, grazing dumbly in the long grass. We were following the foot trail back to camp when Jitu, perched on the rear haunches of the pachyderm, quietly signaled the driver to stop. Jitu jumped off the elephant and squinted at the sandy path, reading a pattern in what was -- to me -- unintelligible sandy soil. But Jitu recognized the paw prints of a tiger, along with the telltale drag marks of freshly-killed prey. He climbed back on our mount and we hung a right into the jungle.

What followed was the most amazing example of tracking I have ever seen. Using his sight, smell and hearing -- as well as a sixth sense developed over a lifetime in the Terai -- Jitu traced the tiger's retreat into the bush. He pored through the foliage like a bloodhound, sniffing here, examining a branch there, exploring false leads and doubling back again. After 15 minutes of this, we rounded a corner -- and came within sight of the cat's victim. A young deer lay dead in a small clearing, its hindquarters shredded.

"From the paw prints, and the size of the kill," Jitu whispered, "I can say it is a male, of adolescent age. But we're too late; he went into the grass when he heard us coming."

We moved away slowly, hoping the tiger had not wandered too far from its breakfast. Again, the crunching footfall of the elephant drowned out all but the most strident bird calls. After two minutes, though, Jitu raised his palm.

"I hear chewing," he said.

Jitu sniffed the air, testing for the musky, milky scent peculiar to tigers. Then he turned the elephant silently around, heading back into the stand of grass where we'd seen the deer.

There was a blood-curdling roar, and the tiger leaped at us from the thicket. Our elephant -- a monster among the local pachyderms -- staggered back, but continued forward at the mahout's command.

"Jitu," I drew my feet back into the howdah, suddenly aware of how close the ground seemed, "do tigers ever, uh, leap up onto the elephants' backs?"

"Sometimes." He shrugged. "Not often."

The tiger crouched, snarling, then ran at us a second time. Our elephant trumpeted: a single, ear-splitting note, like Dizzy Gillespie on steroids. I clung to the howdah. Our little safari seemed about as clever as free-climbing into a live volcano.

But a cat is no match for an elephant; the fact is ingrained into every feline brain. The tiger retreated again, this time for good. For a few minutes Jitu engaged in a tense game of cat-and-mouse, trying without success to flush him back out. It's astonishing how quickly this jungle animal vanished into the grass. You'd think a tiger's bold black and orange bands would stand out like an Aspen ski suit. In fact, it seemed to become invisible at will. Though we continued to catch glimpses of his head, body or tail, we never again saw the whole animal at once.

Nonetheless, our brief encounter with one of Chitwan's endangered tigers was unforgettable. The beauty and ferocity of the animal was totally thrilling. His roar had evoked the same response as an earthquake; it made the ground tremble and awoke a primal terror that made my mouth dry and my heart race. The oddest thing, though, was how addictive the experience was. Sighting tigers is a lot like sniffing cocaine; the most compelling effect is to make you desire more of the same.

So I'm home now -- to a jungle of quite another sort. Actually, it's more like a monkey house. Here in Kathmandu, in the dry and dusty season between the last frosts and the monsoon deluge, I sense an emerging current of defeated self-parody. It's as if Nepal has reached a turning point, a juncture where the local intelligentsia is finally so fed up with the rampant corruption and choking pollution that it has decided to pull out the stops -- and begin mocking the system in earnest.

The vanguard of this trend has been the capital's best newspaper, the Kathmandu Post. Over the past few days, the Post has run a series of photos and editorials that have had the local community roaring with glee. On March 30, for example, the paper's front page displayed a snapshot of Prime Minister Surya Bahadur Thapa. The picture, captioned "Shh ... Don't Disturb," showed the PM napping through a meeting on government corruption. The same day, the editorial page carried a hilarious article about public urination. (The practice will never be stopped, the Op-Ed piece claimed, by the current practice of posting "Do Not Urinate Here" signs; such signs only indicate that the spot in question -- e.g., the side of a school building -- is a "traditional" public urinal, and therefore a venerable and cherished peeing site.) But the master stroke appeared on April 1, when the lead photo showed one of Kathmandu's dubious water trucks (ostensibly used to carry kani pani, or pure drinking water, to private homes and hotels) sucking its cargo directly from the Kodku Khola, one of the city's filthy urban creeks. Believe me: This was no prank.

A less amusing example of modern-day foibles, though, came to my attention last night, while I sat having drinks with an expatriate anthropologist named Charles Ramble. Ramble had just returned from his own brief trip to the Terai, where he and photographer Thomas Kelly had covered a much-heralded event. This was the public burning, by Chitwan authorities, of a mountain of confiscated jungle contraband: leopard skins, endangered wild antelope wool, tiger bones and rhinoceros horn (the last two are considered powerful aphrodisiacs by the Chinese, who pay huge sums for the stuff). Tons of this booty was stacked into an enormous pile, then ignited. The local press (working, no doubt, from official releases) treated this as a watershed move -- a bold signal that Nepal would not tolerate the poaching of protected species or permit any measure of trade in illegal animal products.

Ramble and Kelly, who were on assignment for Asia Week, got close enough to the bonfire to realize that something was awry. What the authorities were burning, they discovered, was garbage: moldy old hides, fake rhino horns, painted water buffalo skins, ersatz tiger bones. When Ramble confronted Nepal's minister of forests about this, he was quickly set to rights. The point of the conflagration was simply to clear out the rangers' warehouses, which were overloaded with junk. Who had suggested otherwise?

So what about the good stuff? It is being held in reserve: a king's ransom of top-quality horns and hides, spirited away under cover of a well-publicized smoke screen. The current line: If an agreement with CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) can be reached, the contraband will be sold off legally and the money will be used to fund museums and educational programs.

If you believe that, I've got some pure drinking water to sell you.
SALON | April 8, 1998

Jeff Greenwald is Wanderlust's correspondent in Kathmandu.

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