Just to the west of the central town of Ramnagar is what is perhaps the most popular tourist zones of the Corbett National Park. Here, the Dhela and contiguous Jirna zones offer excellent wildlife viewing with good roads and tracks throughout.

Our hub for the next two nights is the expansive and quite luxurious Golden Tusk. It’s a well-appointed, modern resort complex with all the facilities that anyone could need. The food is excellent and a little more varied than we have had to cope with for the last few days. They also have a bar and we can finally get our first gin and tonic of the trip.

We have little time to enjoy these facilities, however, as we have four four-hour drives planned and the first one is this afternoon. So, a quick lunch and then it is back to a gypsy and off to the park gate before two.

JP seems to know exactly where he wants us to be and, even as we are driving along, he can somehow still hear the faint alarm calls of the small mammals as we search for a tiger.

Miraculously, on a road alone and less than an hour into this first drive, that most elusive of creatures is found. We round a corner where’s there’s a small forest ranger post and literally metres past the end of their fence, JP calls a sudden stop with that breathy word – “tiger”. I still don’t know how the guides see what they see. He sees the tiger, a large male, before he comes out onto the road in front of us.

You never get close, so this is about as good as it is going to get. The tiger comes out onto the road and walks across, angled towards us by about thirty degrees, finally giving me the chance to get shots of a tiger from the front. Again, within just a few seconds, the encounter is over and the striped form steps off the road and vanishes into the trees.

“He’ll cross the other road,” JP suggests, urging the driver to turn around and head back to the crossroads. Strangely, we are still the only vehicle on the road. The road south of the crossroads, the one we are now watching so intently, is out of bounds to tourists and we have to content ourselves with sitting at the crossroads and waiting for an agonising five minutes.

When our tiger reappears, he’s a bit too far away for good photos, but we make the best that we can of another few seconds of crossing the track. Everyone in the park wants to see a tiger and the drivers do help one-another when they can. On any given session there are perhaps twenty or thirty vehicles at most and sometimes it is quite comical to see them all lined up – us included – across both ends of a regular crossing point because nothing has been seen for the rest of the session.

Our first session ends like this, but not because of a tiger. There’s a family group of elephants who want to cross the main road and get to one of the waterholes. About a dozen vehicles have gathered to watch this event and they are a little too close, making the elephants nervous. When they do settle and finally emerge, their nervousness is apparently explained by the presence of a very young infant among the group. Once they get to the waterhole, there are plenty of photo opportunities for me. They don’t seem as playful with the water as their African cousins, but there are still great photos to be had.

For the full day of our stay, the morning session is, for the most part a bit of a bust. We see very little, apart from one or two really nice birds and the usual smaller mammals. The tigers are just not playing today.

For the afternoon, we head deeper into the park, to the Jirna sector. Here, we leave the flatness of the plains and explore the edges of the escarpment that marks the true beginnings of the park. The forest here is more natural, but that also means that it is more densely overgrown and viewing is more difficult in proportion. Once more the drive descends into a couple of long waits with others for the possibility of a tiger crossing.

A brief chat with a works vehicle has us racing back the way we have just come, for a sighting of a sloth bear. Miraculously, when we reach the assigned spot – which we do in just a couple of minutes because of some superb driving – the bear is still there. For the second time in two days, we are the only vehicle and manage to actually take a few photos before the bear wanders into cover. They aren’t great, but they are unexpected and unusual. Sloth bears are seldom seen and even less so in the late winter or early spring.

After a very good dinner, I decide that I’ve had enough hours in the gypsy for one trip and opt to skip the final morning’s drive. I wish the guys every success and hope they find a really good tiger. I’ve seen four in total and managed to get more than that original 51 frames. I’m not sure that I’ve met my expectations for this part of our trip or not, but overall, I’m pretty happy with the results.

In the end, they come back with some bird sightings and very good photographs, but no big game sightings of note. They were apparently on the track of a leopard, but unable to see it and they also heard two different tigers but didn’t see either one. Sumantha, the organiser of this part of the expedition joins them for the drive and then joins us all for breakfast. It’s good to meet him properly and have a chat about how much we’ve enjoyed ourselves overall so far.