There’s a moment, somewhere on the slope above Tumling, when you stop being a tourist.

I had been climbing fast — faster than I’d planned to — because the call had come in over the radio and the spotters were already moving. Bamboo thickets on either side, mud underfoot, the kind of mud that holds the shape of your boot for a second before letting go. I got to the viewing spot before the rest of the group. And then, the strangest thing: I could hear my own heart. Just that. My heart thumping in my ears, and somewhere ahead, Amardeep’s camera shutter going off like a small machine, and the rest of the forest doing nothing at all.

Singalila National Park sits on the border ridge between India and Nepal, and it doesn’t give you anything for free. There are no jeep tracks here in the way you’d find them in Kanha or Bandhavgarh, no morning lineup of vehicles, no driver who knows exactly which tree the leopard sleeps in. The red pandas of Singalila live in steep, thickly forested terrain. To see one, you walk. Sometimes a kilometre, sometimes three. Sometimes you walk and find nothing. The park’s panda-tracking protocol is well-organised — small groups, regulated viewing windows, plenty of private time once a sighting is confirmed — but the operative word, always, is walk.

And so what you build, over five days at Singalila, is patience. Not the polite patience of waiting for a coffee. The kind of patience that comes from cold air and wet leaves and a guide raising one hand to slow you down because something is moving in the canopy that you cannot see yet. The kind that, when it pays off, leaves you a little breathless. Sometimes from the climb. Sometimes from the animal itself.

I had thought, before this trip, that I knew what a wildlife sighting felt like. I have spent years in tiger country, in jungles where the sighting is the gift and everything else is the wait. Singalila taught me that the wait can become the gift. There were stretches on these trails — the trudge through bamboo, the long, quiet pauses where the only sound was the guides communicating in low voices — where I felt more present than I have in years. The forest pulled my attention into the present tense and held it there.

There were other sightings too. Yellow-throated martens flashing through the trees, weasel-quick. The unmistakable call of the satyr tragopan from somewhere we never saw — a bird that refused, every time, to show itself. Yellow-billed blue magpies. Sunbirds. The forest at Singalila is layered in a way few Indian forests are; you have to learn how to listen before you can learn how to see.

But the red panda was the centre of gravity. When we finally settled in to watch one — a small, russet, almost cartoonish creature with the most extraordinary tail — the silence on the ridge was complete. Twelve people, all holding their breath, all aware that this was an animal that did not have to be here, and that we were borrowing the moment.

This is not a park for the impatient. It is not a park for travellers who like their wildlife organised, their sightings guaranteed, their schedule predictable. Weather changes. Trails change. The animals do what they want. What Singalila offers, instead, is a slower, harder, more honest kind of wildlife travel — where the effort and the encounter are inseparable, and where the red panda you finally see feels, somehow, like yours.

You walked for it. You waited for it. You earned it.

That, more than the photograph, is what I brought back.