T A B L E_T A L K

If you had just one night to spend in Bangkok, what would you do? Make your recommendations in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y

My grandfather's village
By Amy Brill
Searching a Greek island for roots
(04/07/98)

The Chinese friend
By Chris Taylor
Fate brings together an outsider and a foreigner on a bus tour of China
(04/06/98)

Mondo Weirdo
By Brett Harris
A close encounter with a restless ghost
(04/03/98)

The sadhu from Texas
By Anne Cushman
Memorable encounters with a sadhu from Texas by way of Varanasi
(04/02/98)

A pan-Italian feast -- in Geneva
By David Downie
Chez Roberto's culinary delights -- and Swiss soul
(04/01/98)

T I G E R ,__T I G E R__B U R N I N G_b r i g h t

BY JEFF GREENWALD | I'm licking my wounds, and scratching a constellation of mysterious bites. Just returned from a few days in Chitwan, a huge wildlife park in the Terai, Nepal's steamy southern zone. I reached the place via a combination of vehicles, the most interesting of which was a rubber raft. Spent about four hours going down the rain-swollen Trisuli River, navigating about a dozen rapids (most of them embarrassingly tame) and swallowing several gallons of amoeba-infested river water in the process.

I made the trip to check out Temple Tiger, one of just two resort/lodges within the boundaries of the national park. Over the years I've visited Chitwan three or four times, but this was far and away the prettiest part of the jungle I'd seen. There was a kind of sweetness there, an Impressionist softness to the air and the light. The elephant grass had been cut low by the local Tharu villagers, making it relatively easy to spot the one-horned rhinos who grazed, snorting, by the water holes. I spent most of my time riding through the jungle on elephantback, accompanied by a local guide and naturalist named Jitu.

Someday I'll return to Chitwan and write a book about Jitu. Now 34, he grew up in Sauraha, on the border of the national park. He is a small, muscular man with the perfect features of a Tharu Omar Sharif. Jitu's encounters with the local wildlife are legendary, and I have no doubt they are true. Once -- on a jungle walk, on foot, with a group of hapless Dutch tourists -- he stumbled upon a tiger with its mate. The female charged, but Jitu didn't panic; he knew that running away would be fatal. He stood his ground, smacked his walking stick against a bush, and shouted at the top of his lungs. The tiger screeched to a halt, growling, and Jitu slowly backed the group away. On another occasion, while walking to the lodge he worked at previous to Temple Tiger, Jitu realized that a female Bengal, along with her cub, was stalking him. The cats followed the lone Jitu for 45 minutes, sometimes alongside, sometimes creeping behind. "If I'd run, or tried to climb a tree, they would have immediately attacked," he said. "So I just kept walking, while whistling and talking to myself." Eventually the tigers moved on -- as the unperturbed naturalist knew they would.

"Humans are not the tiger's prey," Jitu told me with conviction. "They will not attack unless threatened -- or unless they have lost the ability to hunt their usual prey."

This has happened. About 10 years ago, Jitu recalled, the only other lodge within Chitwan's limits -- Tiger Tops -- made a practice of baiting tigers with live animals. A juvenile buffalo or goat would be tethered in a clearing, and one of the local tigers would saunter in for the kill. Tourists watched from a blind. This practice was ultimately abandoned -- not out of compassion for the prey, but because tigers fed this way would gain weight and lose their prowess. Finally, the only animals within their range were domestic cattle -- and humans. One of the tigers fed on baited game actually became a man-eater -- and introduced her cub to the taste of human flesh. The two animals were responsible for a number of killings in the area. The tiger cub was eventually captured and transferred to a Kathmandu zoo. The other cat may still be at large -- a fact that Jitu no doubt repressed while he was being stalked.

Jitu didn't sit in the wooden howdah with me. He stood behind, balanced on the elephant's haunches. We rocked and swayed and crunched through the jungle, stopping every now and then as our pachyderm paused to uproot a stray banana tree (which he ate whole, minus the bananas) or drink a stream dry. It was blissful, in that jungle fever way: lush and hot, an ecstatic buzz of chlorophyll and pheromones. The orchids were beginning to bloom, and the air smelled of jasmine, chlorodendron and musk. Peacocks screamed from the treetops, sounding like plaintive Siamese cats. There are 450 species of birds in the park; every expedition is accompanied by the "Jungle Book" soundtrack. The colors were fleeting, but intense. Kingfishers sat on the tree branches, looking like Navajo turquoise fruit. Chestnut-headed bee-eaters swooped above our heads, iridescent gold and green. Our first morning, Jitu and I spied a troupe of white-haired, black-faced langur monkeys climbing through a red-leafed honey tree; a spotted deer, unfazed by our presence, grazed below. It was a scene right out of Gaugin. I imagined, inanely of course, that one of the park's elusive tigers could walk into the scene without raising a stir.

This is the big problem, of course: actually seeing a tiger. Like most visitors, I desperately wanted to do so. But it's tough; at last census, only 66 Royal Bengal Tigers had been counted within the entire 190-square-mile Chitwan preserve. There are perhaps four or five adult tigers within Temple Tiger's 25-square-mile piece of the jungle. They're notoriously reclusive, and masters of stealth and camouflage. It had been four or five days, Jitu told me, since the last good spotting.

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N E X T+P A G E+| A tiger is like an earthquake