Tadoba
Dry teak and bamboo in eastern Maharashtra, hard summer light, and a tiger population unusually comfortable with vehicles.
Mame Male walks towards the road whilst stalking a Gaur
The park, mapped
How Tadoba sits
Tadoba earns its density from water — the lake and the river drawn on the map hold animals through a summer that is not a figure of speech, and the drives are built around them. Core and buffer both produce here, unusually, so a camp on the buffer side is not the compromise it would be elsewhere. The markers are the camps; the gates spread down the edge.
The place
The park that rewards going in the heat
Tadoba Andhari is drier and harder-edged than the Madhya Pradesh parks: teak and bamboo, pale trunks, strong shadows. It is the reserve people are pointed at when they want the highest chance of a long, unhurried tiger sighting rather than the prettiest forest.
Its reputation rests on two things. The tigers here are genuinely habituated to vehicles — not tame, but unbothered — which produces behaviour rather than a departing rear end. And in high summer, when the smaller water bodies dry out, animals concentrate at the remaining ones in a way that makes May and June extraordinary and physically hard.
We run Tadoba as a three-night stay with our naturalists, and as the first park on the Tiger Thali Tour. Tell us your dates and we will confirm the zones and gates for the season you travel.
The essentials
Tadoba in numbers
- With a naturalist
- Enquire now
- State
- Maharashtra
- Nearest airport
- Nagpur (NAG), about 3 hours by road
- Terrain
- Dry deciduous teak and bamboo, lakes
- Season
- October to June; the core zone closes in the monsoon, buffer zones can stay open
- Peak sightings
- April–June, at the water
- Best light
- Early and late; the middle of the day is hard and contrasty
- Also here
- Leopard, sloth bear, dhole, gaur
From our own drives
Tadoba, photographed
Every frame here was taken in this park, on our trips — Maya, Sonam, Nano in the tree, and a leopard crossing the track.
