Last week I visited the Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary also known as Keoladeo National Park with my husband. Before starting for it I thought to myself its going to be a so so experience visiting the place as there has hardly been any talks about the place among friend groups or social networks or anywhere else except when you Google hard to search for places within reach for a quick weekend trip within a manageable distance. And so I packed light and looked for various other sites for a great place to stay to sort of make up for a probable not-so-exciting sanctuary experience.
Well, it turned out it wasn’t so necessary after all. The place is beautiful, serene and very well managed by the forest department. Since the city is mainly famous for the sanctuary, one can find enough to read on birds and in general the history of the place. One can sit here the whole day and read or paint birds if they like to do any of that. What surprised me the most is that the place was managed by the forest department and yet looked like well taken care of which I find a pretty rare thing.
Once you arrive at the park, you can choose to take a walk (11 km in total), have a cycle rickshaw drive you around or hire a cycle for yourself. Although you can go for all of three options in time if you reach early by 7 am. For one, the sun is a bit easy on you, also you can get your pick of the bike which may not be available by 10 or 11 am. There are guides available and binoculars are available on rent with rates quite easy on the pocket.
We stayed at hotels just next to the sanctuary gate as they were the best in my opinion in terms of cleanliness and safety. However, there are all kinds of hotels available on that very road. A word of caution for the ones endorsed by some of the famous travel websites. They turned out to be pretty horrible with torn bed linen, lizards and mosquitoes for a welcome. Needless to say we bailed on them for other options.
Bharatpur is a National Park and a world heritage site and so you can see a lot of foreign tourists hanging around taking pictures of the birds. We are not serious birders, but the variety of birds and the colour and detail we saw with the telescope made it a great experience for us.The most common type of birds that we came across were owl, kingfishers, painted stork, green colored pigeons, ibis, etc. Apart from that there is a ‘Salim Ali Visitor Interpretation Centre’ situated within the park, although the rickshaw wallahs seemed knowledgeable enough for a guided tour of the place as they were correctly able to spot the common as well as the migratory birds which were in large numbers and quite an attraction for their origins.
Lastly, we took the route from Delhi via the Taj expressway which made it a very convenient travel for us. However there are other routes available like landing in Jaipur airport and coming from there as it is equidistant from both Jaipur and Delhi. You might prefer Jaipur route during winters to avoid the very famous Delhi fog and since the best time to visit this place is during January and February.
All in all, it turned out be a surprisingly great experience for us and hope if you are planning to visit this place anytime in future, this blog is able to prepare you a bit for it.
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