It's 4.30am on a cold morning and the tents and grass and the bright pink hibiscus of Corbett Camping are covered in dew. There is adventure in the fresh, raw air: today, we are searching for tigers.
Chai burns down my throat as our six-seater jeep leaves behind the smog of Delhi and we wind through the gloriously sweet air of the vast Corbett Tiger Reserve. All around grows an orange weed which devours the vegetation and camouflages the tigers.
"Tiger is only one of many other charms," warns a wooden painted sign. Who would have thought that going on tiger safari and seeing not a whisker of the great creature could be so much fun, for the reserve is indeed charming in non-feline ways.
The favourite food of tigers - spotted deer and brown deer - wander among gnarled sal trees whose huge branches arch over us. Red-vented bulbuls twitter loudest of the 680 species of birds that flutter through the park. The biggest bird I've ever seen, a woolly necked stork, suddenly swoops across the open sky and perches on the pebbles, wriggles its neck as if to a hip-hop tune, braces its body and then vanishes.
Black-faced monkeys with long white tails clean each other's fur. A lizard slithers over a stone. A yellow butterfly pauses on my leg. A pink flower startles the greenness. Cobwebs are stretched between trees.
From the top of the observation tower I can see the whole of Corbett. But the more you search for something, the more it seems to hide from you. Tigers are largely nocturnal and soon the sun is rising and our chances fading. We see their claw-prints dug into trees, their images on postcards, etched in stones, printed on T-shirts. There are tiger marks where the males have defended their territory, wet footprints in mud. But the great elusive cats stay far out of sight.
In this magical place, where signs insist that "Wild animals have right of way", there is a little restaurant called Tiger's Den Reserve, and under its thatched roof, marigolds and wind chimes I have lunch with friends - lime soda, chicken masala and roti -and watch a man tending to the buffalo in the field near us.
These past few days we've shed the OzBus for Oz minibus, Oz jeep and, as the sun sets on Corbett, Oz elephant, the latter quite the slowest, most ponderous journey yet. (We've also shed two OzBusers - they've decided to escape for a while by sneaking off to the beach in Goa before rejoining us in Calcutta for the flight to Bangkok.) The elephant grows weary as it heaves itself up the hill and keeps stalling in its tracks and myself and a comrade feel quite guilty to be inflicting our weight on the poor creature.
I wanted to be close to nature but did not expect to have nature slapped quite literally in our faces. A friend valiantly keeps brushing away the huge branches as they thwack, thack, thwack our bodies as the Oz Elephant trundles through the forest. The forest plays tricks on us. Spiders seem as if they are crawling in thin air. Tiger footprints glisten in the mud.