Bardiya National Park is the largest lowland reserve in Nepal, on the Karnali river in the far west of the Terai, in Lumbini Province, a country of sal forest and tall grassland where the number of tigers climbed from eighteen to 125 in thirteen years and guides still track them on foot through the grass. Bardiya is what Chitwan was before the crowds, and the tiger is what people come for: on foot at dawn with a licensed guide and nothing between them and the grass, reading pugmarks in the dust and listening for the alarm calls of deer and langurs, or by jeep along the forest roads and out onto the open phantas, the grasslands, covering far more ground in a morning; the tigers are seen most often at the rivers and waterholes in the hot months of March to May, when the grass has been burned and the animals come to drink. Elephants walk into grass taller than a person where a jeep cannot go, and wild elephants, rhinos and swamp deer share the ground.
The Karnali, wide and glacier-fed, is drifted by raft or dugout canoe to watch for the roll of the Gangetic river dolphin, one of the last rivers in Nepal where it survives, with crocodiles on the sandbanks and the forest coming down to the water. For decades the park was the home of Raja Gaj, a wild bull elephant so huge and so strangely domed of skull that scientists wondered whether he was a living relic of the Ice Age. Each late winter the rangers and the villages cut and burn the grasslands, not to clear them but to renew them, so that the new growth draws the deer and the deer draw the tigers. The communities around the park are Tharu, a people long noted for a hereditary resistance to malaria that let them settle these fever lowlands when no one else could. Bardiya is the tiger forest that Nepal kept quiet, and the tracking is still done on foot.