“There’s a walk to get to the lodge,” Fred tossed out casually just a few days before our departure. “Vanghat is down by the river and about a couple of kilometres from where the car can go.”

Well, if the drive from the Dhikala Gate north into the hills is anything to go by, there is the promise of spectacular landscapes at the very least. These are mere hills, the very beginning of the foothills of the Himalayas to the north of the Ganges, but even with peaks of only 600m or so, they are still stunningly beautiful.

Our very narrow and, from the back of an open Gypsy, quite terrifying road twists and turns alarmingly as it climbs from valley to valley. It is steep, twisty, of variable quality and filled with too many vehicles. Every meeting with an oncoming truck is an immediate answer to one simple question – do we have enough room here?

Finally, after about twenty kilometres, we turn off down a narrow dirt track into an open space at the very bottom of a valley so deep that it could rightly be called a gorge. A group of suitably younger and fitter men are waiting for us and our baggage, destination unknown to us. In front of us is one anchor of a huge steel-wired suspension footbridge across the river. Apparently, this is our path and it looks like it might be hard work.

We walk for about 600m, across the bridge and along the far bank. The path is a series of up and down sections that lead us around the first bend downstream. It is hot, steep and difficult footing, but leads us to a rickety and somewhat rusty Gypsy that is barely big enough for us and our luggage. We drive the remaining kilometre or so down to the very bank of the Ramganga River.

Sitting in the shallows at the near bank of the river is what can best be described as a makeshift raft. It’s a seemingly hastily tied together collection of bamboo and blue string. Flotation is provided by four large inner-tubes filled with some air. There’s a sturdy anchor wire across the river to the far cliff and a pair of ropes in the water to pull the raft across.

Apparently, this is our way to get to Vanghat. It is about as far from what I expected as it is possible to get and still be in the real world. The luggage goes first, followed by Fred and Chris on the next crossing. Finally, it is my turn to make the journey across, sitting on the raft as we rope away. I snapped a couple of stills of their crossing, promising myself to get the phone out and do video on the way back in three days’ time.

Our destination is deeper into the gorge of the Ramganga than I ever expected it to be. Towering valley walls reach perhaps a hundred metres up on either side of the river and Vanghat Lodge is situated on a flat area of land at the base of one of these walls, safely ensconced behind some substantial electrified fences.

It is a garden oasis of mature trees and planted gardens that hides a group of four small chalets and their associated infrastructure. There’s no internet and to get even the most rudimentary of phone signal you need to walk back down to the river by the raft. Walking down there alone is apparently not recommended because of the tigers. Splendid isolation.

Once we are settled in and have taken our late lunch, we rest for a while before going out for a brief walk as the sun begins to go down. It seems like every tree has a different new bird in it and, knocking rocks into the water from the cliffs on the far bank, Himalayan Brown Goral can be seen climbing the almost-sheer ground. It takes a minute or two to get your eye in for them, but they are very well camouflaged being brown against a brown background. Only their sure-footed scrambling across seemingly sheer rock faces gives them away. There are signs of wild elephants all around the valley floor and our guide points out recent tiger footprints in the sand as we walk along.

Back at the lodge, the main common room is open on three sides and overlooks a reclining statue of Budda who keeps watch over a bird feeding and bathing station in plain sight. Here, an endless parade of spectacular birds presents themselves for our photographic pleasure. Barking deer wander through the grounds and lesser fish eagles screech as they soar above us.

This is the perfect spot for us to relax for a couple of days with a gentle itinerary that merely involves a couple of hours walking along the riverside and looking for birds. Sure, there are goral and deer on the steep hillsides, but it is the birds that are at the centre of this stunning place.

It can’t help but bring out the landscape photographer in me, capturing amazing vistas along the river at both sunrise and sunset.

I’ve become quite accustomed to having at least two of my three camera-equipped devices with me at any one time, switching between them as the need – or the mood – arises. It’s such an effort to take the 150-450mm lens of the SLR that I now seldom do so. When I need a shorter focal length, I shift to using the pocket Canon that’s capable of 28mm. For the truly wide-angle I can then switch to my phone which has a roughly 10mm equivalent at the wide end and can be switched to doing panoramas in just a moment as needed.

Realistically, the important stuff is still taken with the DSLR and the long telephoto, but at average print quality it can be difficult to tell the difference between the three of them. I have, however, said several times on this trip that I should have bought myself a teleconverter. I’m finding 450mm (about 700mm in 35mm film terms) is just a little lacking. Sure, cropping and using Topaz AI can make a big difference, but I need to see for myself if a 1.4x increase in focal length is worth the stop of light-gathering power that you lose and the inevitable small loss of quality that more glass introduces.

Vanghat brings this mixed-device usage to the extreme, switching from trying to see a goral across the gorge one moment to trying to catch the setting sun’s colours on the rocky cliffs with the phone the next. The results are, however, well worth the juggling. Some of the birds are stunningly good and the scenery is amazing.

Although my target for this trip was always to see some mammals, it really is primarily a birding-orientated itinerary. Luckily for me, wandering the forests getting a sore neck is always optional. There are really nice places where it is easy to relax and I’m coming to the opinion that I simply don’t have to work so hard. The fact that I cannot actually make the physical effort plays its part, but much of it is a conscious decision to do a little less and chill out. A daily timetable that involves just a couple of one-hour bird walks each day suits me pretty well. That still leaves two or three hours for writing and working on photos and a couple of hours to do absolutely nothing.

So, Vanghat also brings me a chance to simply relax. For me, now that I’ve found something that I enjoy, this mostly involves sitting with my laptop and writing. I was hoping to work on my current novel, but that seems the be a little hard to get into at the moment, so catching up on this journal is more manageable. The large dining table is at a good height for typing, there are birds fluttering around the feeding station and it makes a very good writing place. It’s perhaps not quite as good as on the veranda at Speke Bay Lodge, but pretty good.

Not that my writing at Vanghat has been easy. I found myself quite a way behind on the trip, having done very little on the long road-trip days and even less during the hub-bub of 4-hour safaris in Dhikala. When I’m writing fiction, I get really caught up in my own narrative, very much as if I was reading a really good novel written by somebody else. Strangely, writing this non-fictional stuff can get to me in exactly the same way. What I had managed to keep to a single tear in the back of the gypsy in Dhikala all to easily turned into a flood sitting quietly in Vanghat.

It’s a good job that I was sitting there mostly on my own, as my friends would have been somewhat confused and the staff would probably have been in a bit of a panic. If writing down your thoughts and feelings is a good way to help deal with grief then I think I might be on the right track. I might not be totally back on a level keel by the time we are ready to leave Vanghat, but I’m surely better than when I arrived and that is high praise for any traveller to say of a resting place.

All that remains is to get back on the ferry and be hauled across the river for one more time. Bounce around in the back of the crowded gypsy for a couple of minutes then make the walk back to the bridge on a path that is much more downhill than up this way round.

JP is waiting for us once more, car ready to go onward. He brings the sobering news that a local woman was killed by a tiger just a couple of kilometres downstream from Vanghat. On the heels of the news that the staff heard a tiger roar in the night, it brings many things into renewed perspective.