Panna National Park

Panna National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Panna is the tiger reserve half an hour from the temples of Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh, and almost everyone who visits it does so as an add-on to the temples: a morning or an afternoon jeep safari from the Madla gate, twenty-five kilometres from the Khajuraho hotels, sold with the transfer, the permit, the jeep and the forest department's guide. As in all Indian reserves the safari permits are issued online for a named zone and date, the vehicles per session are capped, and foreigners book with passport details, so the tours are mainly a booking service and well worth it for that; private jeeps take six, and the shared safaris in a jeep or the larger canter are the cheaper seats.

The morning safari, from sunrise for about four hours, is the better for cats; the afternoon has the light on the river. No one can honestly guarantee a tiger, whatever a listing says, though Panna's chances are now fair. Boat rides on the Ken river from Madla, for gharials, muggers and birds, the Pandav falls and caves inside the reserve, and the Raneh falls canyon in the Ken Gharial sanctuary nearby are the other outings, and the night safaris run in the buffer zone. The two-day trips from Khajuraho and the four- to six-day tours from Delhi, with the Golden Triangle or Orchha on the way, give two or three safaris, which is what a reasonable hope of a tiger needs. Khajuraho has the airport and the railway station.

Visiting Panna National Park: what you will see

The park was created in 1981 and became India's twenty-second tiger reserve in 1994, covering about 543 square kilometres of core on the Vindhyan tablelands of northern Madhya Pradesh, along fifty-five kilometres of the Ken river, which has cut gorges and waterfalls through the sandstone plateaux; it is the last large block of wildlife habitat in the north of the state, at the northern edge of India's natural teak forests, with dry deciduous woods of teak and kardhai, grassland on the plateau tops and ravines of deeper forest. Its modern story is a fall and a recovery that conservationists everywhere know. In 2009 it was admitted that Panna's tigers, thirty-five or so a few years before, had all been poached, a scandal second only to Sariska's.

That year two tigresses were flown and driven in from Bandhavgarh and Kanha and a male from Pench, the male walked home for a month through villages before being brought back, an orphaned, hand-raised tigress was released and learned to hunt, and under the field director R. Sreenivasa Murthy the founders bred; the reserve now holds seventy to eighty tigers and sends animals to others, the most successful big-cat reintroduction on record. The visitor drives plateau and river tracks among chital, sambar, nilgai, chinkara, four-horned antelope and wild boar, with sloth bears, leopards, which are often seen on the rock ledges, wolves, hyenas and the rusty-spotted cat as the rarer prizes. The gorge of the Ken holds gharials and mugger crocodiles, and the cliffs at Dhundwa Seha are one of the best places in India to see vultures, seven species, since the collapse of their numbers. The Ken–Betwa river-link dam, under construction, will drown part of the core.

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

The core zones are open from 1 October to 30 June and closed for the monsoon, with safaris at sunrise and in the mid-afternoon, and closed on Wednesday afternoons. Winter from November to February is cold at dawn in an open jeep, green and best for birds; March to May is hot, above 40 degrees by May, with the forest bare, the water scarce and the tigers easiest to find at the river and the pools; October and June are the edges of the rains. Book the permits as far ahead as the dates allow. Allow two safaris at the least, with a day for the temples. Khajuraho is half an hour away, Bandhavgarh five hours south-east, and Orchha and Jhansi four hours west on the way to Agra.