CORBETT NATIONAL PARK, India — I would rather be on an elephant than in front of one.

It's no fun when a wild tusker is lumbering toward you and you are trapped in a Jeep with no choice but to drive in reverse on a muddy, twisting, hilly road flanked by a jungle on the left and a gurgling river to the right.

A heart-stopping encounter with an irritated elephant occurred barely 30 minutes after we had driven into the Corbett National Park — India's finest tiger reserve in the foothills of the Himalayas — in search of the big cats.

At the wheel was a friend, a city lad whose skills in reverse driving were limited to parking between parallel lines. Still, he did an admirable job of driving us — a shaken party of four — backward to safety behind a curve in the forested hill.

The elephant, apparently bored by our lack of sportsmanship, ambled away after a while. We were lucky. Later at a forest lodge — the staging point for tiger safaris — we saw another vehicle that had been gored the same day by a tusker, possibly the one we met. The vehicle displayed two holes in the metal grille in the front. No humans were injured.

But Rajiv Bhartari, the director of the Corbett Tiger Reserve, which encompasses the national park, later told us that it is common for wild elephants to confront humans, although fatal encounters are unheard of.

Still, he said, we are better off being atop an elephant while in the forest. "Besides, that's the best way to see a tiger," he said.

And nothing can be truer.

Corbett National Park is no Serengeti or Kruger. Unlike those African parks, you won't see hordes of animals under shady trees or watering holes. But tracking and spotting a tiger in the Indian jungle with an experienced guide turned out to be every bit as thrilling as homing in on a pair of cheetahs in the African grasslands.

But more of that later.

Corbett National Park, located in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, epitomizes India's success in saving the endangered Royal Bengal tiger, the magnificent yellow-and-black striped cat found only in Asia.

A victim of hunting, poaching and human encroachment, the tigers were threatened with extinction when the global Project Tiger was launched in Corbett National Park on April 1, 1973. At the time, the tiger population in the park was 44. Across India, only about 1,800 existed, down from 40,000 at the turn of the 20th century.

Under Bhartari's stewardship, the tiger population in Corbett has increased to about 175. Overall, there are about 3,600 tigers in India but other national parks have not fared as well as Corbett and some reserves have no tigers left.