Singinawa

 Our stay at Singinawa Lodge at Kanha was unique.  Until the last night, we were the only guests there, so we had the services of a huge staff including a chef and several cooks and waiters, at our service.  Each day, the chief naturalist Vijay and one or two of the naturalist-trainees went with us into the park.  One of them, Tom, was a young English guy doing his gap year and was interesting to talk to.  We left each morning for the park at 5 am (in an open jeep in lower 40s temps), came beck for a lunch break (about noon until 2:15) then back to the park (temps in the 80s at this point) and came back after dark (around 7 with temps back to 40s again).  There were lots of neat things to do at the lodge but we had little time.  We did take a walk around the grounds with naturalist and watched a National Geo. movie on tigers filmed at Kanha.  The last night, the owner of the lodge was there and gave us a slide show and talk about tigers. Nanda Rana is a member of the royal Rana family in Nepal who has studied tigers for 20 years at Kahna and  was National Geographic and BBC consultant on tigers.  His wife Latika is also a tiger expert and there is a documentary on her called "The Tiger Princess".  Anyway, the last night, Nanda R. took just the two of us out on a night drive to look for wildlifew (saw only some spotted deer) and then stopped the jeep and said "you'll be eating out here".  We thougth it was a joke but were taken to a large campfire where, after a very nice conversation with him, he left and four waiters set up a table (linen and fine china) and served us a wonderful dinner by candle-light and firelight.  Surprisringly, Madge was fairly adventurous with her eating on this trip.  Since we were about the only one at both camps, the cooks fixed everything with "no garlic, no onions".  While Indian cuisine is not our favorite, we both found a number of things we liked and certainly didn't starve (or even lose weight).