Ranthambore National Park, Jaipur

	Ranthambore National Park, Jaipur
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In no Indian nature reserve are you guaranteed a tiger sighting, but at Ranthambore National Park, 10km west of the rail junction and market town of Sawai Madhopur, the odds are probably better than anywhere else. This has less to do with the size of the population, which is perilously small due to a recent spate of poaching, than because the tigers themselves are famously unperturbed by humans, hunting in broad daylight and rarely shying from cameras or Jeep-loads of tourists.

Combine the big cats' bravado with the park's proximity to the Delhi-Agra-Jaipur "Golden Triangle" (Bharatpur is only 180km northeast of Delhi), and you'll understand why Ranthambore attracts the numbers of visitors it does. For anyone accustomed to the tranquillity of the tiger sanctuaries in Madhya Pradesh, the crowds here, crammed into open-top Canter buses and fleets of nippy Gypsy Jeeps, can be off-putting, to say the least.

However, even if there were no wildlife, the landscape alone would make the park worth a visit. One of the last sizeable swathes of verdant bush in Rajasthan, Ranthambore is fed by several perennial rivers that have been dammed to form lakes , haunted by crocodiles and dotted with delicate pavilions and decaying, creeper-covered Rajput palaces.

At sunset or in the mists of early morning, these can be ethereal, while the ruined tenth-century Chauhan fort, towering above the forest canopy from atop a dramatic crag, is straight out of Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book.

The fort was conquered by Ala-ud-din Khalji's army in 1031, and Akbar in 1569, but for most of its existence Ranthambore has been controlled by the Rajputs, and was set aside by the rulers of Jaipur for royal hunting jaunts. Soon after Independence the area was declared a sanctuary, becoming a fully fledged national park under Project Tiger in 1972. Over time, Ranthambore became world-renowned for its "friendly tigers", who were the subject of some memorable wildlife documentaries in the 1980s (the most famous of which featured remarkable footage of a young male hunting sambar in the shallows of the lake).

Its reputation as Project Tiger's flagship operation, however, took a severe dent a decade later when it transpired some of Ranthambore's own wardens were involved in poaching , and that, as a result, the tiger population here had plummeted to single figures. Since then, rigorous policing is said to have brought the problem under control, and numbers have recovered to somewhere between sixteen and twenty. more...