Suklaphanta National Park

By the time I reached Suklaphanta, in Nepal’s far southwestern corner near the Indian border, I had more or less stopped expecting surprises from the country’s landscape. I was wrong to. The park’s core is an enormous, near-treeless grassland — locally called a phanta — that opens out flat and gold to the horizon in a way that looks far more like an African savanna than anything I associated with Nepal before arriving.

The Deer That Outnumber Everyone

Suklaphanta holds the world’s largest surviving population of swamp deer, known locally as barasingha, and the scale of the herds took me by surprise even after the guide had warned me to expect it. From a wooden watchtower at dawn, we counted herds numbering in the hundreds moving across the open phanta, their antlers catching the low light in a way that made the whole grassland look like it was bristling. A pair of jackals trotted along the herd’s flank the entire time we watched, opportunistic and unbothered by our presence.

Elephants, Wild and Otherwise

The park sits along a corridor used by wild elephants moving between Nepal and India, and our guide pointed out fresh dung and flattened grass trails within the first hour of our jeep safari — evidence, he said, of a herd that had passed through only hours before us. We didn’t see them that day, which he treated as entirely ordinary rather than a disappointment; wild elephants here move mostly at night and avoid the same open ground the deer prefer during daylight. What we did see, late in the afternoon, was a Bengal florican, one of the world’s rarest bustards, stepping through the grass with an almost comic deliberateness that had our guide more excited than anything else all day.

A Park Still Finding Its Visitors

Suklaphanta’s lodges are basic and its visitor numbers a fraction of Chitwan’s or even Bardia’s, which meant our evening at the park boundary was spent almost entirely with park staff rather than other travelers — sharing dal bhat, hearing stories about a tiger that had wandered into a nearby village the previous winter, and turning in early to the sound of something large moving through grass just beyond the fence line.

When to go: November through March for the coolest temperatures and best wildlife visibility, once the tall monsoon grass has been cut back. The park closes to visitors during the monsoon season from June through September, when much of the grassland floods.