Dudhwa National Park

Sal woodland gives way to shallow lakes and to grass tall enough to hide an elephant.

It is one of the few places in India where tigers and one-horned rhinos share the same ground. The national park sits at the heart of the wider Dudhwa Tiger Reserve, which also takes in the Kishanpur and Katarniaghat sanctuaries. Rhinos had been gone from the Terai for more than a century until they were brought back from Assam and Nepal in the mid-1980s, and the population has grown slowly ever since. Dudhwa is also a stronghold of the barasingha, or swamp deer, which was close to extinction here in the 1970s and now numbers in the thousands. Birders come for the Bengal florican and the swamp francolin, among more than 400 species.

Dudhwa sees a fraction of the visitors of the big-name parks, so you can sit with a sighting for an hour without another jeep turning up. The park is open from mid-November to mid-June, and we usually pair it with Lucknow, five to six hours to the south.