Sunday, November 12 Sunderbans Tiger Reserve Safari

I got up early to meet up with my safari to the Sunderbans Tiger Reserve. I took a cab to meet up with the travel agent, who I have been talking to a lot. She saw me off, and because I was the only one who booked a trip for these next two days, they had one of their employees ride with me on the bus and boats, so that I wouldn’t get lost or confused. Turns out they assigned me one of their new rookies, a Bengali 20-year old college student from Kolkata named Bunty. I ended up becoming really good friends with him, because we’re the same age and he’s a pretty funny guy, and he spoke good English. We first took a cab to the busy crowded Babu Ghat Bus station, and then caught a yellow-and-blue private bus to Basanti, a little town on the edge of the Sunderbans Reserve. It took an hour to get out of congested Kolkata, and we wound our way through tiny alleys, almost nicking old multi-story delapidated buildings on our way. We passed a few slums and the Chinatown. One of the signs said “Wang Chung Bar Cum Restaurant”. I don’t think the owner has been to America. The drive was really picturesque, and painted me a portrait of the real heart of Bengal. Small strips of land sat atop large canals. The land was under cultivation for growing rice, coconut trees, and cauliflour. The canals were fresh water ponds used for washing, cooking, drinking, and harvesting fish and shrimp. Skinny dark men in white shirts and plaid skirts carried produce on their heads, tilled soil, and cast their nets into the murky brown water. Houses with straw roofs and mud siding dotted the otherwise flat and endless fields and canals. Little grass shacks on bamboo stilts stood out from the water, used for fishing. Small towns with rickshaws, bicycles, and teeming amounts of small dark Bengalis and their small bamboo shops sprang up every now and then. We reached the small Muslim village of Basanti three hours later. We crept past the bustling vegetable market to the dock, which was basically a concrete stairway descending into the river. He talked in Bengali to a few people before we stepped aboard the glorious Shah Jahan Houseboat. It was a wooden boat painted blue and white, with a bowed bottom, an outhouse on the back, and an interior cabin. It was cozy; good, because I’m spending the next 24 hours here. It was really comfortable; not too hot and not too cold, it had a nice area to sit and eat, and the bow was great for lazing in the sun and watching life in the Sunderbans. The owner was a Muslim Bengali named Salah Auddin, with big round glasses and smile. There are still Muslims in Indian Bengal, and Hindus in Muslim Bangladesh, but not as many as before partition. West Bengal, the easternmost of the major states in India, contains the largest diversity of landscapes and peoples anywhere in India. The state, population 80 million, is comprised of the watery Gangetic plains and delta, the megalopolis of Kolkata, and the Himalayas including the hill station of Darjeeling. Bengal, on the other hand, is the land that forms the Mouths of the Ganges, and has a unique language, customs, and culture. The Mouths of the Ganges refers to the immense river delta made up of the mighty Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers that flow from the Himalayas and eventually empty into the Bay of Bengal. Most of the delta is located in present-day Bangladesh, but Indian West Bengal also has a considerable portion. The Sunderbans refers to the specific national reserve set up to protect the unique environment. The Sunderbans is, in essence, a large conglomeration of low-lying islands forming the Ganges River delta. The brackish waterways have given rise to a huge mangrove forest, and if you count the adjacent Bangladesh side, forms the largest mangrove forest in the world. It supports a huge amount of biodiversity, and within the reserve, over 60 types of mangrove trees have been classified. It is home to wildlife such as mudskippers, wild boar, lizards, snakes, deer, and of course the infamous man-eating Royal Bengal Tiger. The mangroves are specially-adapted to the brackish canals, and are vital to the ecosystem, holding the loose mud together that forms the islands of this watery world. Because it is such a fragile ecosystem, it has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the Indian government has split it up into three sections; one where the tourists can go, one where locals can forage and hunt, and the other where no humans are allowed. As we set off from the docks, we passed a lot of ferries carrying local Bengalis to and from work and other places. Boats made for 20 fit hundreds. We passed other long wooden bowed boats, on which were fishermen tying their nets, boys pouring buckets of water on the decks to clean their boats, and people taking the Sunday afternoon to just relax. Ten-foot tall dikes were all that separated these brackish waterways from homes and villages. At high tide, the water level reaches three feet from the top of the dikes, which is dangerously close. Many years, the Ganges will flood, reeking havoc on the people of these small fishing villages. Their lives bend to the will of nature, and many times, they are hurt. The thousands of canals that make up this land isolate and threaten them. Since these canals are brackish and have dangerous sharks and crocodiles, the local people can’t even use them, and must use boats to cross. They live hard, but also very simple lives, with few material possessions and a lack of infrastructure. Nevertheless, they are all friendly and smile and wave when we passed. We had some fresh fruit, followed by a home-cooked Bengali lunch on board. It included cucumbers, spicy runny potato, prawn, and fish curries, all served over long-grain rice. There were no utensils, so I had to eat with my hands, mixing the rice with the sauce with my fingers in circular motions, and then shoveling it into my mouth, devouring my hands. Bengalis don’t like bread, so every dish is exclusively complemented with rice. They do love fish, though, and West Bengal is the largest producer and consumer of fish in India. Brahmins, who are usually pure vegetarians, even eat fish. The food was great, and different from any other food I’ve had thus far in India. We stopped for an hour in the tiny fishing village of Gosaba. It had a main road with a little market and some little shops, including some guest houses for tourists traveling onwards to the Sunderbans. A man selling bright green coconuts sliced open the top with a machete and poked holes in the top, so I could drink the delicious coconut water. Further into the village, many freshwater ponds were constructed around little paths and mud huts. The fresh ponds are used for bathing, cooking, cleaning, and drinking, because the water in the canals is salty and useless. Walking through the town was like a time-warp, it was so rural and unmodernized, it’s exactly what I pictured India and Bangladesh to be. This is exactly what the entire country of Bangladesh is like, except Muslim, more rural, and more impoverished. But it’s the closest I’ll probably ever be to Bangladesh. I was taking some pictures, and a small Bengali man took me into his mud home to show me his sculptures of Jesus and Mother Mary. He showed me his small house, which had a small kitchen with some pots and built-in mud stove. The beds were little bamboo platforms with sheets and mosquito nets. The walls were made of wicker, the walls of brick and mud, and the roof of dried palm leaves. He showed me his chickens and church, and we took a bicycle rickshaw with a wood platform on the back to the boat. We pushed off, and headed out towards the Sunderbans as the sun set over the wide rivers that once flowed as the Ganges. The tide started to rise, bringing the water level right up to the vast root networks of the mangrove trees. The mangrove forests seemed to float atop the blue rivers that flowed in and out of them; it was beautiful, and unlike anything I’ve seen before. We got to Sajnekhali to the park entrance, with a big sign saying Welcome to Sunderban Tiger Reserve. We paid a bunch of fees, and had a look at the pens with alligators, sea turtles, and monkeys. The museum was really interesting. It featured lots of maps of the watery world of the Sunderbans Reserve. It had pictures of all the birds, monkeys, lizards, snakes, and of course, tiger. In the park, the tigers number about 250, and are being relentlessly protected despite the fact that they often attack humans and livestock. They had a whole exhibit about “living with tigers”, and showed pictures of Bengali honey-collectors and fishermen, wearing masks on the backs of their heads to protect against the predatory cat. They pray to a certain goddess for protection against tigers, and there was a shrine outside the museum, with an idol to this goddess. There was also a watch tower, with little pathways so you could sit atop and spot wildlife. After a while Salah Auddin anchored the boat at a spot in the center of the river. They set up lights on the deck, fueled by thermal power, and had swarms of bugs around them. Bunty and I talked for a long time about everything, and then we were served a really good egg and fish curry. Bunty made the mistake of giving me drinking water, which turned out to be unboiled local water. Great. Our beds were set up inside the cabin downstairs, on some boards. It was actually mildly comfortable and really cozy. There was absolutely no light pollution, and I could see the cloudy Milky Way and thousands of stars brilliantly. I can now say I slept on the Ganges River.