The park closed at 10am so we were back at the lodge with plenty of time to freshen up and clean our camera gear before our lunch at 12:30pm. The deputy tour leader, Bhanu was with us in the morning and he had managed to misplace his ID after entering the national park. We checked our passports and bags but could not locate it… later in the day we found out Bhanu had lost it in his own bag!

We all met up at 2:30pm for our afternoon drive and after some bird spotting we ended up at the Panderpauni waterhole where Maya was cooling off again. We watched several spotted deer come down to drink from the waterhole, appearing to not see Maya. She looked across at them but did not make a move towards them. One of her cubs came out of the forest undergrowth walked down the bank towards its mother and the deer then stomped, did their warning calls and ran off. Quite a funny sight to see, where they had ignored the real danger but been spooked by the cub!

We watched an egret walk around Maya and her cub, until Maya was sufficiently cooled off to return to the undergrowth. Her cub remained behind for a short while practicing its stalking skills on the egret. No surprises it wasn’t successful and it followed its mother up out of sight.

We spent some time with the gaur herd again and stopped for other wildlife along the way (honey buzzard, sambar deer, Indian roller and wild boar).

On the way towards Jamuni village one of the sub-adult tigers was spotted and we stopped to watch it for a short while before returning to the lodge at 6pm for snacks, shower, checklist and dinner.

Back out in the afternoon we drove straight to Telia in the hope of seeing a group of six tigers that had been seen there that morning (mother, 4 sub-adult cubs and male) and on reaching the area we drove around the trails looking for them and alongside the paved road found one sub-adult tiger in a water tank (tiger number 11 for the trip). We watched it come out and go into the forest.

The paved road running through Telia was built to enable easy access for a bus for local villagers. A safer route through tiger territory.

We waited in the area near the water tank just in case the other family members were around but as closing time approached, we had to head back towards the exit gate.

Our last drive in Tadoba was to be our dullest, after hearing some warning calls we spent what felt like forever sat waiting for nothing to appear.  One of our four vehicles (led by the lodge naturalist) decided to move elsewhere – we had no naturalist with us for this drive and our park guide was going to follow… but we were told to stay put. Later we were to find out Liz & Malcolm / Sandra & John had an awesome sighting of a tiger, it walked so close to them they had to reverse away from it. This was one of the most frustrating things about being on a group tour, feeling like you missed out on something because your driver may have gone on a different route to the rest of the pack… in this case, I felt like we missed out because we were told not to follow, had the naturalist not said anything we may have shared the sighting… equally they may have seen nothing and the tiger we were hoping to see might have come out! It’s all down to luck.

We went for our breakfast and had a quiet word with Linda’s cuddly tiger ‘Lucky’ (a birthday gift from her grandson) to encourage him to give us some more of his tiger finding luck.