Of course, what this means is that you’ll be sharing the park not just with tigers but with plenty of other visitors, all equally intent on catching a glimpse. If you’ve been on safari in Africa, the raucousness of a Bandhavgarh Jeep packed with Indian tourists can come as a bit of a shock. But no matter how busy it gets, there’s still nothing like the adrenaline rush of seeing tiger cubs playing at the water’s edge, or an adult taking down a sambar deer. These once-in-a-lifetime sights are almost mundane in Bandhavgarh.

Let’s pretend for a moment that there are no tigers (they do have a tendency to steal all the glory). There’s still plenty to see here – not least the setting itself. Bandhavgarh is beautiful. Hilly and rugged, valleys filled with mixed deciduous forests and sal trees, interspersed with dry grasslands and open marshes – all watched over by a ruined fort, circled by wheeling vultures and dating back to the Middle Ages. It’s a totally unique landscape, and harbours a huge diversity of wildlife for so small an area.

On any given day you might see jackals, hyenas, four-horned antelope, langurs, macaques, jungle cats, porcupines, or muscular gaur. Most unusually for a northern Indian park, it also has a herd of wild elephants, who migrated here of their own volition from Chhattisgarh in 2018. And the bird life – where do we even start? The list of species runs into the hundreds, and sounds like a roll-call of mythical creatures. Red-vented bulbuls, black drongos, white-rumped vultures, Tickell’s flowerpeckers, long-tailed shrikes and common snipes, to name a few. Bring your binoculars.