Our wake-up call for 5:30 actually comes at 4:45. Ugh.  Don’t know how that happened, but we’re up now, not happy, but up.  After our one room coffee, we head out to the lobby, knowing now to give them our key to clean the room while we are gone. So that handled, we sit and wait.  And wait.  And wait.

Finally, the guy-guide-escort-driver who drove us yesterday comes up and tells us we don’t have a drive this morning. Huh?  Yes, we do.  No, we don’t.  We just have an afternoon today, and one tomorrow morning. But we are leaving tomorrow – how can we do a game drive that doesn’t get back here until 11:30 like yesterday and still have time to finish packing, shower and check out by noon?  He shows us the paperwork – and it clearly states tomorrow.  We tell him to cancel it, we don’t want to be rushed like that – the rest of our schedule is so crazy it isn’t worth it – he goes away, we go back to get our key, the desk guy says wait 5 minutes. Ok.  They actually went and woke up the main desk manager (not the main manager who talked to us yesterday, but the nice manager on the desk in the evenings) and he came over (hair all a mess and barely awake) to talk to us.  Bless his heart. Bottom line – no matter what our paperwork says (and we double checked – it definitely had 2 game drives today), we only have the afternoon and tomorrow morning.  AMT at its finest.  Oh well, nothing we can do about it now – so we have an entire morning to fill – and remember, it’s barely 7am by this point.

Ok – quick, Plan B!  We’ll just walk through the village up the road, what the heck?  What a totally wild experience that turned out to be.  A real, true Indian village – goats, cows, etc., along the road.  People getting ready for the day.  Kids playing outside.  We walked all the way out to the next village, about 1.5 miles, passing lots of different resorts – including the Mowgli! – and turning around at a retail center with a hardware/convenience store, restaurant and general local stuff we’d never get near on any other tour.  Too fun!

But it was getting really hot by that point in time, and it wasn’t even 10am yet, so back to resort we go to cool off and hang out until lunch and the afternoon drive.  In the courtyard of the resort, we ran into our newfound friends who were going back to Mumbai today – on the overnight bus!  The kids have school tomorrow.  Anyhow, long conversation about game drive tomorrow before we leave – the husband kept saying we had plenty of time, we must do it.  He has been right with everything he has said the last day and a half, so we figured we’d take his advice, returning to the front desk to ensure we were still on for the next morning.  The sleeping manager, fully awake now, motions us to wait at the desk, then gets Amit on the phone for us to confirm plans!  Fortunately, the resort guys hadn’t listened to us when we said we wanted to cancel the drive and Amit assures us we will have plenty of time and can check out late in order to freshen up before our long drive to the airport.  We’re going on trust here…..plans are set. 

After that excitement (or not) we just hung out in room for a bit, watching monkeys cavort outside on the patio, then off to lunch before gearing up for our afternoon drive.  The same guy-guide-escort-driver (guess he’s “our” guy!) took us to the National Forest gate again, then shuttled us to another jeep with one Indian couple and a young single female Brit who sat upfront. The guide spoke mostly in English, which was much better for us than the other 2 drives where we had very little English interpretation.  But then again, what do you really need?  The other guys would tell us the animals and their location in English, what else is there really?

The drive was great, just nice and peaceful out in the woods.  We went off on another track, so the scenery was similar, but more rocky.  Same animals.  We watched monkeys playing, saw a couple wild boar, more deer, and lots more peacocks.

Found a big old hawk or eagle (can’t remember which) up in a tree, more big bucks, a water buffalo hiding in the trees and a ghost tree – so named because they are all white and don’t have leaves but grow anyway and stand out like ghosts in the middle of the forest.

Once again, we hardly ever saw another jeep as we meandered along the narrow tracks with the evidence of the all recent controlled burns on the sides of road.  More monkeys, looking so human-like perched on the rock with its arm resting on its knee. 

And then another Leopard.  Wow!  2 in 2 days, that is really amazing.  The photos, as usual aren’t’ that great, but you can see him in the tree in the video.

Sweet.  Our last sighting was of an old Sambar Deer, right alongside the jeep, who obviously has seen better days, with that huge scar along his side.  Poor baby.  Then it was back to the resort for our normal evening activities – shower, dinner, only tonight we have to pack to ensure we have everything ready to come back after our drive in the morning, take quick showers and head out to the airport.