Reserve a December departure to Kaziranga, nine nights

You can reserve a December departure to Kaziranga through this office, and there is one date. The group's first night is 6 December and it does not run a second time this season. Nine nights: one in Guwahati at the start, six at a twelve room lodge a mile from the central range gate at Kohora, and two at the end on a tea estate outside Tezpur. Six consecutive mornings inside the park, one range at a time, in a private jeep with a naturalist who rides with you rather than in the vehicle ahead.

The flight is yours to arrange and forms no part of this. You land at Guwahati; from the terminal doors onward the days are written down. A car meets you at whatever hour you come in, because the eastbound road is not a night road. It leaves at eight the following morning and takes about five hours to cover 121 miles, which reads badly until you have driven it. The route runs through Nagaon and Jakhalabandha and past a dozen villages that have each laid a speed table across the asphalt, and the final 25 miles cross the park itself, where the posted limit is 40 kilometers an hour, about 25 miles an hour, and the animal crossings are painted onto the road surface.

The first morning fixes the pattern for the five behind it. Tea outside the door at a quarter to six in the dark, at about 46 degrees. The central range gate opens at half past seven in December and not earlier, because until then the fog lies in a layer you cannot see the hood of the jeep through, and the forest staff will not send vehicles into it. You spend the first twenty minutes past the gate hearing the park rather than seeing it: a wild buffalo moving water somewhere off the track, hog deer barking twice and stopping, and perhaps two hundred birds you cannot yet place.

If a tiger is the point of the trip, reserve something else. Kaziranga carries them at a density nobody argues about, and in six mornings a jeep will still more often find a pug mark pressed into the sand of a dry channel than the animal that made it. This reservation is built around the one horned rhinoceros instead. The last full count returned more than 2,600 of them inside 166 square miles, and they stand in the open, at a distance you can measure, for as long as they care to. People who came for the cat and got the rhinoceros are usually content about it a week later rather than on the day.

Nine nights, 6 to 14 December, two people sharing one room. Six morning drives across three ranges, no range used more than twice. Two walks at Panbari on foot. One naturalist for the whole stretch. Every transfer by road, including the five hours in from Guwahati and the four hours back out at the end. From $4,318 per person on two sharing. This office lodges the reservation with the company operating that departure, and that company bills you directly.

The grass, and what it keeps back until February

The grass is the reason the place looks the way it does and the reason December is hard work. Elephant grass and cane stand 13 to 20 feet through the winter and are not burned back until the end of January, so a 6 December morning gives you a wall with animals inside it. The jeep works the raised tracks and the old flood banks, a few feet above everything else, and from those you look down into the stand rather than at it. A rhinoceros crossing 200 yards of grass shows first as a wake, the way wind shows in wheat, and then the head comes out onto the track and the whole animal is at thirty yards in the open with nothing between you and it. Two hours of that turns out to be a great deal more than most people expect from a wall of grass.

Ten hours of light, and the twenty five miles of highway

The country keeps one clock and it is set about 660 miles west of here, so Assam takes its daylight early and loses it early. On 6 December the sun is up a few minutes after six and gone by twenty five past four, and the middle of the day sits at roughly a quarter past eleven. That is why every drive is a morning drive, and why the lodge serves dinner from half past seven with the kitchen closing at nine. It is also why you want a flashlight in your pocket from the second afternoon onward: the path from the dining room to the rooms is gravel, unlit past the first fifty feet, and the generator carries the lodge through the two or three cuts a week the grid takes.

The park's southern boundary is the highway, and the animals cross it. Nine corridors are marked along that stretch, and in the wet months, when the river pushes the animals up out of the grass, traffic is stopped for them; in December the crossings are quiet and you notice them mainly as gaps in the tea. The tea starts on the far side of the road and runs south to the hills of Karbi Anglong, which rise to about 3,000 feet and hold the high ground the park does not have. Between road and hills the plucked bushes are kept at a table height of about a yard, so from any slight rise the whole thing reads as a green floor with shade trees standing on it and nothing else at all.

Water, and what is standing on it in the first week of December

Kaziranga is not only grass. The beels, which are shallow sheets of water left behind where the river changed its mind, run to a few hundred yards across, and in the first week of December they are filling with birds that have come over the mountains: bar headed geese in ragged lines, pelicans working twenty at a time, storks that stand five feet tall in the shallows and do not hurry for anything. Eastern swamp deer feed in the water to the knee, and this is effectively the only ground left where a thousand of them can be seen at once. Wild buffalo, of which the park holds something over 1,500, come down to the same edges and will not move for a vehicle, which is a thing to remember before anyone asks the driver to go closer. On one of the six mornings the naturalist will probably put you at the Sohola water before the fog is off it, because the birds are on it before the light is.

Two nights in the tea, and the bridge on the way out

The last two nights sit 40 miles the other side of the river at a six room planter's bungalow on a working estate, and the point of them is the change of pace after six early starts. You cross the Brahmaputra at Tezpur on a bridge about two miles long, and in December what is under it is not one river but four or five channels with pale sandbanks between them, half a mile of dry sand where in August there is brown water and nothing else. On the estate the day begins when the plucking begins, and if leaf is coming in you can follow it through the withering troughs, the rollers and the drying, which takes about eighteen hours end to end and smells for the first six of them like cut hay and for the last six like the thing you drink. Nobody will ask you to do anything. There is a chair on the veranda and the last of the light at half past four.

Third Coast Dispatch is the name used by Third Coast Dispatch Bookings LLC, a booking office at 600 SW Jefferson St, Suite 302, Lee's Summit, MO 64063, a Missouri limited liability company with its place of business in Lee's Summit. This office lodges the reservation with the company operating that departure in Assam, and that company bills you directly; no money is taken here at any stage. It does not advise on entry documents or on vaccination, and it will not fill anything in on your behalf. To hold the 6 December date, call +1 (816) 525-2846, write to bookings@thirdcoastdispatch.com, or send the form below; a correction to anything printed on this page goes to corrections@thirdcoastdispatch.com.