OK, so now I’ve gotten way ahead of myself and I’ll have to compress a month’s worth of blogging into one post and probably the easiest way to do that would be to post a few pics – a picture says a thousand words doesn’t it?!

The trip so far has been a blur as most trips tend to be…

I started the trip with Dr. Kamal Bawa, my co-author and Founder/President of ATREE. Spent a week in Arunachal Pradesh after which he had to get back for meetings and such. I spent a few horrible days in smoggy, mosquito filled Guwahati getting the vehicle ready for the rest of the journey. Soon after that I headed to Pakke Tiger Reserve on the border of Assam and Arunachal. This little-known and least visited place has very little in terms of tourist infrastructure but the place is a haven for hornbills.

This wreathed Hornbill is coming back to its roost site late in the evening where it joins a flock of over 30 hornbills that roost together on a tree. Later in the year once the females and young emerge from the nests these roost sites can have nearly a hundred of these birds together on a single tree!

This little tree frog was not from Pakke but there were some other herps that were really cool. Caught two snakes here – a White-lipped Pit Viper and a Cat Snake. I can only imagine what this place might be like during the monsoon.

Hopefully I’ll be making another trip here just when the rains begin. The Cat Snake was caught in the little hut above the old ladies bed…It was probably living a good life there feeding on geckos and such… but i had to move it… didn’t move it too far away and it’s probably back above the bed by now.

After an exciting and busy week at Pakke I traveled south to Kaziranga where the story of the deer and the tiger took place. But Kaziranga was a lot more than that – saw some beautiful Rhinos like this one emerging from the water at dawn.

Among the other highlights at Kaziranga was this enormous inflorescence that had freshly emerged after the recent rains.

From Kaziranga drove 15 hours solo to Darjeeling and spent two nights there. Caught up on email and work, cleaned up and then headed up to Bhutan…