Kanha National Park

Kanha National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Kanha, in the Maikal hills of Madhya Pradesh, in the very centre of India, is by common consent the most beautiful and best managed of the country's tiger reserves, and one of the better places to see a tiger, though it is a long way from anywhere. The nearest airports and railway junctions are Jabalpur, 160 kilometres and about four hours by road, Raipur and Nagpur, five to six hours, and everyone arrives by car, generally as part of a circuit that includes Bandhavgarh or Pench. The park has two main gates, thirty-five kilometres apart by road: Khatia, on the north-western side, which serves the Kisli, Kanha and Sarhi zones, and Mukki, on the south, which serves the Mukki zone, each with a cluster of lodges of every grade, from forest department huts to some of the finest jungle lodges in India, and visitors should stay near the gate for which their safaris are booked.

All visits to the core are by open jeep, carrying up to six, with a driver and a compulsory park guide, on fixed routes within a given zone, for about four hours from dawn and three in the afternoon. The number of vehicles is limited, and seats are reserved on the state forest department's website, which opens bookings months ahead and sells out for the popular zones and holiday periods, so that most people let their lodge or tour operator arrange it; a few places are released at the gate the evening before. Tours of three days or so, including those that combine safaris with visits to the villages of the Baiga and Gond people, are a common way of doing it. Walking is allowed only on a short nature trail at Khatia and in the buffer zone, where cycling, birdwatching walks and night drives are also offered. There is a good small museum at Kanha village inside the park.

Visiting Kanha National Park: what you will see

The Banjar and Halon valleys were reserved as game sanctuaries in the 1930s, a national park was created on 1 June 1955, and Kanha was one of the nine original reserves of Project Tiger in 1973; its core now covers 940 square kilometres, with a buffer of more than a thousand. The landscape is what sets it apart. The park occupies a horseshoe of flat-topped hills, reaching about 870 metres at the plateau of Bamni Dadar, from which the sunset used to be watched, enclosing broad valleys, and the forest is principally of sal, a tall, straight, evergreen tree that grows in cathedral-like stands, mixed on the slopes with bamboo and, higher up, with other hardwoods. Scattered through it are wide grassy meadows, called maidans, which are the sites of villages and their fields, moved out of the park from the 1960s onwards, a policy that was painful for the Baiga and Gond who lived there and remains controversial, but which created the open grazing that supports the huge numbers of deer on which the tigers depend. Here the American zoologist George Schaller carried out, between 1963 and 1965, the first scientific study ever made of wild tigers and their prey, published as The Deer and the Tiger.

Kanha's special pride is the hard-ground barasingha, a subspecies of the swamp deer with splendid many-tined antlers, adapted to firm grassland and found nowhere else on earth; by 1970 only sixty-six remained, all in this park, and a programme of fenced breeding enclosures, habitat management and the control of predators has brought it back to about a thousand, some of which have been moved to found new herds at Satpura and Bandhavgarh. It is the park's mascot. The reserve holds something over a hundred tigers, and sightings, while never certain, are frequent, particularly in the Mukki and Kanha zones, along with leopards, sloth bears, packs of dholes, for which Kanha is one of the best places in India, jackals, jungle cats, herds of gaur, the massive wild cattle, chital in thousands, sambar, barking deer, four-horned antelope, blackbuck, which have been reintroduced, langurs and wild boar. Some three hundred species of birds include the crested serpent eagle, the changeable hawk-eagle, the Indian roller, the racket-tailed drongo, the Malabar pied hornbill, the painted francolin and the red junglefowl, ancestor of the chicken. The park and its neighbour Pench both like to be known as the setting of Kipling's Jungle Book; Kipling never saw either, and drew on the accounts of others.

Kanha National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open from the middle of October to the end of June, and is closed throughout the monsoon; like all reserves in Madhya Pradesh it is shut on Wednesday afternoons, and on the festival of Holi. From November to February the forest is green and lovely, mornings are very cold in the open jeeps, sometimes near freezing with mist over the meadows, and the barasingha rut in December and January; tigers are seen, but less predictably. March and April are warm and the undergrowth thins.

May and June are fiercely hot, up to 43 degrees, but as the water dries up the animals concentrate round the remaining pools, and this is the most productive time for tigers. Book safaris three to four months ahead for the winter holidays. Bring warm layers, a scarf against the dust, and clothes of neutral colour. Allow three nights and four to six safaris. Jabalpur, with the marble gorge of Bhedaghat, is four hours away, Bandhavgarh five to six, and Pench four.