A Morning on the Rapti: Chitwan by Canoe

The canoe is a single hollowed trunk, narrow enough that you sit in a line and keep your hands inside. The boatman stands at the stern with a pole. Nobody speaks, because the guide asked us not to, and because the river in the mist does not invite it.

Within ten minutes we pass the first crocodile, a marsh mugger as long as the canoe, hauled out on a sandbank with its mouth open to cool down. A kingfisher cuts across the bow. Further on the guide points without a word: a gharial, the long-snouted fish-eater that Chitwan is helping bring back from the edge.

The rhino comes near the end, when the mist has lifted and we have stopped expecting anything. It is standing in the shallows on the far bank, grey and armoured and entirely unbothered by the boat. We drift past at the guide’s chosen distance and nobody reaches for a camera until it has turned back into the grass.