Page 41 - ELITE PLUS MAGAZINE VOL6

A lone bull elephant walks past a flock of woolly-necked storks.During the 10 years of my new career as a producer and host of a TV documentary program on world heritage sites, I’ve made several filming trips to well-known safari destinations in Africa such as Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, Etosha National Park in Namibia, Chobe National Park in Botswana, and Kruger Park in South Africa. Then one day while researching on the natural world heritage sites of India, my attention was drawn to Kaziranga National Park in the State of Assam, a UNESCO world heritage site since 1985. My interest grew when I discovered Kaziranga was one of the world’s best reserves for the Bengal tiger, one of my targets as a wildlife photographer.I decided to take my filming crew to Kaziranga, a trip which turned out to be one of the most adventurous and rewarding safaris of all. Although Kaziranga is much nearer to Bangkok, my home base, than eastern and southern Africa, it took about the same amount of time to reach. I flew two and a half hours from Bangkok to Calcutta, India, arriving at midnight. The next morning I took a domestic flight to Jorhat in Assam and after a two-hour drive through villages and tea plantations arrived in the late afternoon at the Wild Grass Lodge, located opposite Kaziranga National Park, which was to be our base for the next four days.Kaziranga National Park, declared a tiger reserve in 2006, occupies an area of 378 square kilometers of tall elephant grass, marshland, and forest, intersected by four rivers including the famous Brahmaputra. While Africa has its Big Five, namely African elephant, lion, rhinoceros (black and white), African buffalo, and leopard, Kaziranga features its Kaziranga Five: Asian elephant, Bengal tiger, greater one-horned rhinoceros (Indian rhinoceros), Asiatic wild water buffalo, and swamp deer. The International Union of Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has classified the Kaziranga Five as threatenedElite+ 39