Nepal's Royal Chitwan National Park is home to wild tigers, domesticated elephants and an abundance of the Indian One Horned Rhinoceros. Occasionally, it needs to unload rhinos on Bardiya, Nepal's other major tarai reserve.
Long before it was demarcated into nation-states, the Indus-Ganga-Brahmaputra belt that constitutes the northern half of South Asia was one long, wild tract where the rhinoceros ruled supreme. Indus Valley civilisation court seals indicate the presence of the rhino in today's desert-like Pakistani Punjab, and dense jungles and riverine forests all the way across to the Lohit in Assam, provided ideal habitat until the human population became sedentary and needed to clear the jungle. And clear it did, from before the time of Siddhartha Gautam (Buddha) more than 2.5 millennia ago, through the rise and fall of various indigenous dynasties, through the Mughal years and down through the imperial times to the modern era. What remained by the 1950s of this great South Asian jungle swath were tracts in the Nepal Tarai and in Assam, and these were the only two places on earth where the South Asian rhino continued to exist in significant numbers. Even today, these forests are a fraction of what they once were, and now what is left of rhino country is protected as national parks.
This is where the Royal Chitwan National Park comes in, a former hunting preserve of the Ranas of the Kathmandu Durbar, which in the last quarter-century has earned a name as one of the best managed wildlife preserves of South Asia. So successful has it been, through erstwhile royal patronage, that the Chitwan rhino population is larger than its forested flats and grasslands can handle. The park needs to 'export' them.
I was sent to Chitwan to learn about the rhino relocation programme for a Kathmandu newspaper whose over-worked regular staff was stretched that weekend. The trip to Chitwan involves a 'four hour' bus ride from Kathmandu to the park. I use inverted commas because that estimate assumes certain ideal conditions, none of which applied to our trip. After leaving from Kathmandu's Thamel neighbourhood an hour late, a truck accident delayed us for another hour before we even reached the Trisuli-Narayani River Valley, which constitutes the principle leg of the Kathmandu-Chitwan journey.