After feasting like Mughal royalty, you’ll need an early night—especially as the most popular activity here is a visit to Panna National Park, a tiger reserve known for being quieter and more tightly controlled (meaning, a greater likelihood of a spotting and fewer large canter vehicles with bigger groups to disrupt the experience) than its better-known competitor parks like Ranthambore or Bandhavgarh. You’ll be picked up at the hotel entrance early in a Jeep to make the 15-minute trundle over to the park gates, then begin your journey through the dramatic landscapes of dusty red fields—then deeper into the jungle, where the park’s waterfalls and gorges lie. And, of course, its animals: we spotted deer, gray langurs, and vultures in quick succession, but what everyone really comes here for is to track down a Bengal tiger, so we traversed the rocky riverbeds and waterholes deeper inside the park in order to do just that. (There’s a cheering backstory here, too: after the entire tiger population was wiped out in the late 2000s due to poaching, they’ve carefully managed the reintroduction of tigers over the past decade or so to bring the population back to around 100.)
As the morning drew on, however, the chances of seeing a tiger seemed to dwindle by the minute as the sun rose in the sky, and they retreated into the cooler shadows far from sight. Then, we heard the roar of another motor vehicle that had been informed of a sighting, and began a hair-raising chase down the park’s roads to find it—with the help of a pair of binoculars, I finally spotted it, loitering in the grasses by the river. It might not have been an up close and personal sighting—those are, after all, never guaranteed—but even just a glimpse of those iconic gold, white, and black striations from a distance was enough to deliver a jolt of the true thrill of the wild.
Photo: Courtesy of Oberoi Hotels & Resorts
Given Oberoi’s sprawling reach across the Indian subcontinent, you’d be remiss not to tack on a stop at one or two of their other properties while visiting—as a result, I opted for a few nights in Delhi and Agra at the beginning. The Delhi property is housed within a colossal building from the 1960s nestled within the lush, tree-lined fairways of the Delhi Golf Club, directly overlooking the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Humayun’s Tomb; the journey to get there, chugging through the traffic-clogged streets to a deafening chorus of blasting horns, may feel a little chaotic, but once you step inside its revolving doors, all you’ll hear is the gentle hum of chatter and clinking teacups, or a piano tinkling in the background.
