Leaving Bandhavgarh we had another long drive to our final resort of Panna Tiger Reserve. Some random photos en route, the majority of which are taken through the minibus window so will be a little soft focussed.
The main road runs straight through the National Park buffer zone and is single track which gives the locals plenty of time to indulge in their favourite pastime of "chicken" - the rules of which are very simple: the biggest always wins. This oncoming truck easily forced the motorbikes off the road.
Do you remember Madonna's conical bra phase? This lady just needs to drop the two blue roses down a few inches and she'd be a dead ringer.
I think I got away with this one without being spotted. Women do mostly all the heavy carrying here and walk wherever they're going.
Goat herding is also a female past time.
Whilst the men mostly sit around chatting.
Or hitching a lift.
Motorbikes are often badly overloaded, which must make them so hard to manoeuvre safely.
And so are pedal bikes for that matter.
We'd been on the road a fair while when the front minibus stopped on the side of the road and so we pulled in too. In the field next to the road were dozens and dozens of vultures and according to Mugdah, several different species which was unusual. They all seemed to be staring intently at something in the distance.
We then noticed a couple of dogs and a carcass; apparently the field is used by a retirement home for cattle and this one, hopefully, had died of natural causes.
Given the size of these birds even I could manage to catch one in flight.
The road we were on followed an ancient pilgrims' way and we saw quite a few religious men walking, probably for 100s of miles.
But his chap took his religious devotion/pilgrimage to another level! Unfortunately the bus was moving too quickly for me to get the whole sequence before we were past him. He was carrying a thin mattress and with each step he placed the mattress on the tarmac and then laid down on it for a brief second before getting up, lifting the mattress and repeating the whole thing. Goodness knows how long he'd been on the road.
We got to Tendu Leaf Jungle Resort just before dark and it was very nice with individual wooden cottages set in lovely grounds. Strangely though they didn't serve alcohol but offered to go and get whatever we wanted. We briefly thought about asking for white wine but, as we are particularly fussy on the grape variety and also who it's made by, we took the simple option and ordered a couple of bottles of Kingfisher beer for the next two nights.