Kaziranga National Park
— — elephant grass tall enough to hide a rhino.
Not only on a wall.
“Floodplain country, mostly tall grass and shallow water, with sal forest at the edges and the Brahmaputra running the northern boundary. The park holds about two-thirds of the world's one-horned rhinos. Mornings come up through mist off the beels. The road from Kohora is quiet before the first jeeps leave for the Central Range. — from the studio
Kaziranga National Park, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Kaziranga covers about 1,090 square kilometres along the Brahmaputra in the Indian state of Assam, a mosaic of tall elephant grass, marshes called beels, and patches of semi-evergreen forest. The park was established in 1905 after Mary Curzon, visiting the area, found no rhinos and asked her husband to protect what was left. UNESCO inscribed it in 1985 for its concentration of one-horned rhinoceros, alongside Bengal tigers, wild water buffalo, and swamp deer. The land floods nearly every monsoon when the river rises.
The park is open to visitors roughly from November through April, then closes for the monsoon when the Brahmaputra floods the grasslands and the animals move to higher ground in the Karbi Anglong hills to the south. The clearest mornings come in late December and January, when fog lifts off the water and the grass is still cold. By March the burning begins, controlled fires that reset the grassland for the next year. April is hot and brown and quiet, the last weeks before the rains return.
Most visitors enter through Kohora on NH-715, which divides the park into the Central, Western, and Eastern ranges. Jeep safaris run two slots a day, dawn and mid-afternoon, and an elephant-back option leaves before sunrise from the Central Range. The nearest airport is Jorhat, about 95 kilometres east; Guwahati is around 220 kilometres west. Permits are arranged through the Forest Department gate at Kohora, and most lodges along the highway can book a jeep and a guide the night before.