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NOTE FROM JONAH: This is the continuation of a photo series from India. If you’re just joining us, here’s what you’ve missed:

1. I’m not alone here
2. People ‘like’ my diarrhea
3. Dancing In(dia) the Streets
4. Indian trains: Contemptibly cozy, crammed and claustrophobic
5. Feeding a City Part II: From Macro to Micro
6. Confusing realities of child labor
7. Enlightined in Bodh Gaya बोधगया
8. Kathmandu — You’ve met your match: Varanasi वाराणसी
9. Varanasi वाराणसी: Full Photographic Spectrum
10. From sea to sand: Welcome to Rajasthan
11. Holy cow!
12. Gender inequality in a Blue City
13. Indian Failwhale Tiger Tracking

And just like that — your back in India (at least in the digitally vicarious sense).

After leaving the sandy deserts of Jodhpur, Rajasthan I figured since I was in the neighborhood, I should probably stop and see the Taj Mahal. However, on my way I decided to split my trip up and stop in Ranthambore National Park — to once again, attempt to track a (alleged) Bengal Tiger.

And once again, I was thwarted by nature. Or perhaps, it’s just harder to find a wild tiger than one would believe based upon the tourist literature to Ranthambore National Park. While in Nepal, I searched for the enormous cats by elephant and by foot, in India, I searched by open air jeep.

As a method of searching for wildlife, the jeep seems highly ineffective to me. I was up at sunrise driving through the Rajisthani park, and its hard to believe that tigers would want to go toward a noisy car.

Hence today’s title “Indian Failwhale Tiger Tracking.” If you are unfamiliar with the Failwhale, you apparently don’t use Twitter. And while its hard for me to admit that everyone doesn’t use Twitter, I will briefly explain the Failwhale with a little help from our good friends at the Urban Dictionary. The Failwhale is:

DEFINITION: The image of a whale being carried by a number of birds that appears when the Twitter website is overloaded or has failed. Failwhale appears to now have his/her own fanclub.

WORD ORIGIN: From fail + whale (probably for rhyming purposes).
i.e.: Sad that Twitter had failed just when he needed it most, he was somewhat consoled by the appearance of his beloved Failwhale.

After this quick lesson in nascent Twitter vocabulary that has moved past the Twittersphere and into the global vernacular, hopefully we are all on the same page now. And although I didn’t see any tigers and I saw no real whales in Ranthambore National Park — I did see some wildlife along the way, including myriad monkeys, bird life, deers and some boars with very human like eyes.

While I didn’t see any big game, the park is known for its leopard, nilgai, dhole, wild boar, sambar, hyena, sloth bear and chital. I’m not sure if it requires some type of skill set or just simply more time and patience to see this stuff but its certainly not easy. In Nepal’s Chitwan National Park I hired a guide and we spent eight hours walking through three meter high grass (in the rain) following an infinite number of paw prints that seemed to simply go in circles.

When the amazonian grass got annoying to the point where there could have been a tiger two feet away from me and I would have had no idea, I rented an elephant (as you do … ) and road around high above the grass looking down for the elusive tiger.

From what I know about cats, be them big ones or small ones they are certainly much quicker than most animals and don’t seem to have the need for attention, unless of course they want it. So tracking these animals seems more like dumb luck than skill, but I’d gladly here the opinion of anyone who actually knows what they are talking about, rather than my circumstantial evidence.

So after my second failure this year to track a tiger, I moved on to the Taj Mahal as buildings seemed much easier to track than wild cats. The India photo series picks up at this magnificent building with some gorgeous light next.