India: Ranthambore National Park – Khem Villas

🐯 Khem Villas, Ranthambore — Tigers on the Doorstep

We’d decided, as part of our rather ambitious tour through Northern India, to spend a few days doing a tiger safari in Ranthambore National Park. Now, Ranthambore is not exactly a hidden gem — it’s one of India’s most celebrated wildlife reserves, covering roughly 1,334 square kilometres of rugged Rajasthani terrain. It was designated a wildlife sanctuary back in 1955, became a national park in 1980, and then joined the prestigious Project Tiger scheme — India’s flagship tiger conservation programme, launched by Indira Gandhi in 1973 — shortly after. These days it’s one of the best places on the planet to actually see a Bengal tiger in the wild, rather than just staring hopefully into a lot of trees.

As you’d expect with somewhere this popular, a number of rather swish resorts and hotels had sprung up around the park. Tourism brings money, money brings luxury, and apparently luxury brings people who are perfectly happy paying handsomely to sit in the back of a jeep at five in the morning. We were among them.

We stayed at Khem Villas, which had the rather unusual distinction of being located within the boundaries of the tiger reserve itself. This, we discovered, was not merely a marketing claim. Fresh tiger pugmarks — actual pawprints, substantial ones — were found among the resort’s villas during our stay. We thought this was absolutely brilliant. Others, we suspected, might have immediately requested a room transfer and a stiff drink.

The thing is, there is no fencing around Ranthambore. The tigers are free to wander wherever they please, and occasionally they please to wander through your accommodation. This is, when you stop to think about it, exactly as it should be — though perhaps not something they’d lead with in the TripAdvisor listing.

Khem Villas offered a range of accommodation — cottages, rooms, and tents — all of which were comfortably and tastefully done out, without any of that aggressively rustic nonsense that sometimes passes for “eco-chic.” We were in one of the tents, which sounds considerably less appealing than it actually was. These were proper, well-appointed canvas affairs; a far cry from anything involving a sleeping bag and a suspicious-looking groundsheet.

The small touches were what made it, really. Turndown service in the evenings, which always feels faintly absurd and yet tremendously civilised. We were visiting in late December, and once the sun dropped, the temperature in Rajasthan fell away sharply — not what many people expect from India, but the region regularly sees near-freezing nights in winter. So when the staff turned the beds down each evening, they tucked a hot water bottle in as well. Getting into a warm bed after a long, cold day was, frankly, one of the small joys of the entire trip.

Our tent’s shower was technically indoors but had been designed to feel almost entirely open to the elements. We loved it. It felt mildly transgressive in the best possible way.

The food was excellent throughout. The restaurant offered a generous spread of traditional Indian dishes, and our firm favourite was the thali — that glorious assortment of small dishes, breads, rice and chutneys that manages to be both entirely filling and somehow also leave you wanting more. The kitchen team were also admirably accommodating around our schedule: they kept the restaurant open when we rolled in late on our first night, and laid on packed breakfasts for the early morning safari departures, which given the hour was nothing short of heroic.

There was also a spa on site. After spending several hours being vigorously rattled around in the back of an open-topped 4×4 on Ranthambore’s less-than-smooth tracks, a massage was not a luxury — it was practically physiotherapy. Reasonably priced, too, which was a pleasant surprise.

And then, of course, there were the safaris themselves — the whole reason for the exercise. The tour vehicles collected us directly from the resort, which was handy. Late December mornings in Rajasthan are genuinely cold, and an open-topped jeep doing a fair lick along a dusty track does not improve matters. The wonderful people at Khem Villas, clearly well-versed in the fragility of their British guests, provided us with blankets and — again — hot water bottles for the journey. This, we can confirm, made the experience significantly more enjoyable. Warm, comfortable, and scanning the treeline for one of the most magnificent animals on earth. There are worse ways to spend a morning.