Sunderbans

Our boat, the Mangrove Matal

We travelled to the Sundarbans with backpackers, 4 Tottie Lane, Sudder Street, Kolkata. 
Our departure was delayed by the New Zealand bloke forgetting to bring his passport, which entailed a long diversion to his hotel to collect it. As we drove through the city we passed numerous people washing clothes, dishes, themselves by the side of the road where the city taps are opened twice a day for the use of the homeless and all those who do not have running water. Men strip off down to their underpants and scrub themselves enthusiastically right beside the road, as the heavy traffic thunders by. I never did discover how the homeless women manage to wash adequately. We were driving through a part of Calcutta with tree lined streets, the trees leaning over the road to touch in the middle, creating a dappled green canopy. We entered a market, selling garish bright coloured clothes and ground to a halt amidst hordes of people, queues of buses hooting deafeningly, out of frustration, since no amount of hooting made any difference to the traffic jam. It took an hour and a half to get out of Kolkata, into a lush, green area of smelly canals, banana trees, maize, vegetables, trees, coconut palms, villages, lakes and a gigantic rubbish dump. Then we passed a series of fish farm lakes on one side and a whole area given over to brick kilns, belching out evil looking smoke on the other.

After three hours we reached our boat, the Mangrove Matal. We stopped at the first island to buy beer at the request of the New Zealand bloke, who, it seems cannot function without the stuff, but the beer shop was shut, so we continued past rows of pleasure boats anchored and waiting for tourists, but the main tourist season was over. All manner of small cargo ships ply this waterway between Kolkata and Bangladesh.

Originally all the branches of the Ganga and the Bramaputra between them emptied their sweet water into the Bay of Bengal giving rise to hundreds of mangrove islands which thrived on the sweet/salt mixture of water. The area was called by the locals Sundar, meaning beautiful and bans, meaning forest: hence Sundarbans. In the sixteenth century the British East India Company, wanting to create a trading base in this watery swamp, constructed Fort William on one of the islands, then, afraid of being attacked by the Marathis, they began building walls and dikes round the island, eventually blocking off all the outlets of the Ganga except the Hoogli, thus depriving a large part of the Sunderbans of its sweet water source. Fort William was later to become the centre of the new town called Calcutta. The tide continued to flow in and out of the area, so the environment changed to a salt water one, the trees adapted by reducing their size and the animals adapted to drinking salt water when they couldn't find any fresh water. The animals managed to survive long enough to breed but they lived, and live, short lives, eventually suffering multiple organ failure, all except the aquatic ones, such as the crocodiles, which thrived.

Churchill, who hated all Indians with a passion, drew a line through Bengal, determining where the state would be partitioned, thus separating the jute growing area from the jute processing area and so ruining the jute industry at a stroke. Churchill's line cut right through the Sundarbans, granting two thirds of the mangrove islands to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and one third, the salt water third, to India. There are 102 islands on the Indian side, some of which are inhabited, many of which, on the other hand, form an uninhabited wildlife reserve. The Bengal tiger lives in the wildlife reserve, venturing into the inhabited areas occasionally to steal the odd goat or chicken. But should the islanders venture into the uninhabited areas, which they do during the honey collecting season, they run the risk of tiger attack and indeed tigers kill about sixty men a year.

The banks of the Sunderbans, showing severe erosion

I'm sorry that the pictures of the Sundarbans are so uninspiring but our boat kept to the wider channels, well away from any potential attacking tiger, so all we could do was listen to our guide telling us the names (including Latin binomial) of the different species of mangrove, as we went past them: there are 84 different species of mangrove in the Sundarbans and none of them look like the mangroves I have seen in other parts of the world, such as Florida or Vietnam. They do not send down rooting branches but rather drop their seeds into the salty water to send up shoots and grow into fresh trees. But they send up 'breathing roots' which stick out of the mud at low tide in a multitude of different styles, some thick and fierce looking like dinosaur teeth, some thin and fine like hair, some forming stilts leaning round trees like many legged giant spiders. 

The biggest salt water crocodiles live in the Sundarbans, king of the predators, capable of catching a tiger as it swims from island to island. The crocodiles are well hidden below the turbid water and extremely fast moving. Our skipper spotted a crocodile basking on a bank and steered the boat right up close to it so everyone could take photos. There was something primeval about such a massive beast ending in such a huge scaly tail, moving its head from side to side as it surveyed the boat. Then it waddled forwards, jaws pointing towards the water, slid into the water and disappeared. 

On the first day we landed on the island with the eco village, were shown to our rooms then treated to a sumptuous lunch of fish, vegetables and rice.

Eco village

After lunch boatmen poled us in little boats into one of the narrow channels of the mangrove forest, where the trees lean in low over the water and the sun glistens on the muddy banks between the trees. Unfortunately one of the villages across the water from us was celebrating a wedding with bad Bollywood music bellowing forth from massive loud speakers, which drowned out the sound of any birds or animals we might have heard. 

But our guide had other ideas anyway, inviting everyone to step out of the boat into the mud, then started throwing mud. I stayed in the boat, as the boatman backed down the channel, away from the mud fight. This was not what I came for, to watch grown men, including a middle aged New Zealander, behaving like small children, as though they were not interested in the environment they found themselves in. I would have liked to have spent far longer quietly exploring the narrow channels of the mangroves, which were mysterious, cool and leafy.

Bauls singing and playing

In the evening we were treated to a Baul concert. The Bauls were originally Hindus who rejected the rules and strictures of their religion, forming a sect which expressed its philosophy through music. They grow their hair and beards long, sometimes coiling dreadlocks on the tops of their heads, wear necklaces (malas) of basil stem beads. Since they have renounced the world and the pursuit of money their musical instruments are simple, such as the ektara (a single stringed wooden instrument), wooden flutes and drums. They live on whatever the villagers give them, sleeping wherever they can, as they travel from village to village. The owners of the eco village host the Bauls because they love their music, providing them with transport to and from the island. 

Talking to one of the owners of the eco village about Shantiniketan, he introduced me to Souvik, a young man who lives in Shantiniketan and would be travelling there soon. We arranged to meet in two days time to travel together.

Next day we left the island at 6 am gliding through the smooth waters in the early morning mist. It was low tide as we left and the mud banks rose beside us, showing clear signs of erosion. In places the islanders have been planting mangroves in a desperate attempt to halt the erosion. Sadly the rate of erosion is increasing and in 60 years they would be gone, our guide told us, as would all the predators.

We stopped at an island with a marketplace to pick up 2 cooks and a load of food. The two cooks descended into the bowels of the boat and clattered about, shouting merrily to each other all morning. By now the sun was glittering on the water as our guide told us that the Sundarbans contain forty types of mammals, fifty six types of reptiles, including the strange monitor lizard, four types of turtles and two hundred and fifty types of fish, including sharks, sting rays, sword fish and even a unique fish that wriggles around on the mud at low tide.  

We came to an area where the mangrove palms grow, trees without trunks, giant feathery fronds sprouting straight out of the mud in dense thickets. The guide told us that the forest department had tried various ways to carry out a tiger census, such as putting radio collars on the tigers, which cease to function after a few months since the tigers swim in the salt water; placing 300 cameras around the Sunderbans, not nearly enough for such a vast area and lastly using drones.  

The two cooks produced another sumptuous meal at lunchtime, after which a general somnolence took over, many passengers on the shady side of the boat falling asleep on the narrow benches, until we turned a corner and the sunny and shady sides of the boat changed sides.