When I was growing up, I was addicted to nature documentaries. Nothing would catch my attention while channel-surfing quicker than hearing David Attenborough’s voice or the phrase “...soon, the [insert poor helpless creature here]’s struggle were over.” Even these days, I still find Blue Planet and Planet Earth to be some of the best shows on TV in years. Places featured in these shows, like the Galapagos Islands, the Sundarban swamps, and Borneo, seemed as remote and wild as any place on Earth, almost mythical. So when I started thinking about what I really wanted to do while traveling, and I realized that I had the time and resources to get almost anywhere I wanted, I decided that I wanted to see some of these wild places up close, to live like I was in a nature documentary. I came up with a list of places that are most recognizable in the canon of wildlife shows, what animals I wanted to see in the wild, and started plotting my routes to intersect. I've been incredibly lucky in that so far, I've visited all of the places and seen all of the animals I've been looking for, but it’s not quite been the same experience I was expecting. Like I've said before, what’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me is simply daily life for a lot of people and what seems like a legendary far-off destination on TV is a daily tour site when you get closer.
Before I get into the specifics of the trip to the Sundarbans, I’ll also mention that while volunteering in the Maldives, a documentary film crew from China came to film whale sharks, and watching the filming and hearing about other times film crews have been there was a real eye-opener. Even as a kid, I could recognize that nature documentaries were edited and assembled; clips were re-used, places didn't match up, and in some cases, I could tell different animals were portrayed as the same one. However, seeing the level of staging going on in the Maldives, and the level to which a script was followed was entertaining. Even the premise of the show, trying to “find out and film” if whale sharks would feed at night, was already well-known to the locals. In some of ways, nature shows are about as “documentary” as reality TV shows, but with less cursing and tattoos.
One of the major goals of going India was to see a tiger, which I didn't manage in September, so I really wanted to go back and try again. In addition to the India and Bangladesh’s Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove swamp, I also found out that there was an amazing national park called Kaziranga in Assam, in India’s north-east regions, which had both tigers and one-horned Asian rhinos, so decided I would try to visit both and increase my chances to see a wild tiger - something everyone agrees is not an easy task even in India. I flew into Calcutta, now called Kolkata, booked my 3 day tour to the Sundarban national park, and gritted my teeth through the time before I could leave. Kolkata makes Mumbai look clean and organized in comparison and I won’t say much more about it other than I will happily sleep in a hut with mosquitoes and no electricity than in downtown Kolkata...in fact, that’s exactly what I did.
 |
| Rice fiends in the Sundarban at harvest time |
 |
| River cruise tour boats in the morning |
The tour was excellent and run by a trio of young Indian men who obviously really care about the Sundarbans and giving their guests an authentic rural Indian experience, but getting to the start of that experience was quite a journey in itself. My group (four Germans in their 60s and 70s, a Brit, and four Indian engineering students taking a break after exams) loaded into a van and drove two and a half hours out of Kolkata. The first hour is nothing but tent slums, landfills, rivers black with sewage and tannery waste, and smog, but thankfully after that the air begins to clear and the villages get more spread out and picturesque. It was round about this time that our driver, who had been driving aggressively even by India’s standards, clipped a construction truck while passing and took a piece off our rear bumper. This was a major issue because, while I have found Indians to be warm welcoming wonderful people in almost every way, you do not (NOT!) want to be involved in a traffic accident in India. Within two seconds of pulling over, the construction truck had pulled in front and cut us off, five men got out and started yelling. Within one minute of stopping, there were about 20 people surrounding the vehicles (which was amazing, because we had been on an empty road), and from there, it got fairly ugly. Almost everyone was yelling and gesturing, everyone was showing off the damages, and the construction crew was preventing our driver from getting back into the van. The worst point came when the other driver reached into his truck and came back with a length of metal rebar, which he brandished at our driver as if he was going to hit him in the head. As you might imagine, the 10 of us in the bus were trying to decide if we were ever going to make it, if were going to see a mob fight break out, and whether it was better or worse to stay in the van or leave. Finally, thankfully, after about 15 minutes of yelling and arguing and more people arriving to get the story and people obviously trying to broker some sort of peace, the whole thing suddenly broke up and our driver got back in and we left - leaving me still wishing I had a translation of the whole experience. Not knowing the language is one thing, but not knowing any of the social cues and body language means it was impossible for me to know if this was the equivalent of Italian conversational gesturing or if the driver was at serious risk of being assaulted, which about as lost in translation as I've felt since I left the States.
 |
| The walk down to the tour boat dock |
 |
| Macaques searching for food in the mud |
After that excitement, we continued driving (more conservatively, I’m happy to say) for about 2 hours to a small riverside village where we took our luggage and boarded an open ferry boat for 20 minutes to cross the river to another village… where we got on tricycle rickshaws for another 20 minute ride over broken roads… to get on another open ferry boat to take us for another 20 minute ride to get to the village… which we finally arrived at after another 10 minute walk from the dock. “Getting away from it all” certainly applied after all this, but it really was worth all the travel when we got to a beautiful camp in a local village on the river’s edge, with no mobile service and no electricity, just great views, friendly locals, and amazing food. We spent two nights here, listening to local musicians, getting up incredibly early to go on river cruises, and walking through the village having translated conversations with the locals. My favorite quote came from a women from the village who told the Brit that she loved her blonde hair and wanted to go to England “for a month” so her own hair would lighten to blonde. And of course, the only thing I like better than wildlife spotting is eating, so every day we ate three enormous meals of delicious curries and grilled fish and rice and bread and ginger tea.
 |
| A small salt-water crocodile on the banks |
 |
| Local fishermen on their way to town |
The Sundarbans are essentially a set of mangrove forest islands, some of which have been surrounded by levees and drained for agriculture, with rivers weaving in between them that expose mud flats with the tides. They are one of the world’s largest wetland, mangrove, and estuary systems with an incredibly diverse ecosystem incorporating wildlife from the land, rivers, and Indian Ocean. It has one of the largest tiger populations in the world and also one of the only places that tigers are known to actively hunt people. Since the only way to really see any of it is by boat, we spent a lot of time cruising the river in a beautiful narrow boat with questionable stability. In two days I saw dozens of bird species (five kinds of kingfishers alone), several types of deer, a species of endangered dolphin, salt water crocodiles, monitor lizards, wild boars, and for one brief instant, a royal Bengal tiger sleeping in the mangroves. Anytime the guides get excited about something, I know I’m seeing something rare and good, and judging by the guides reactions to the tiger, it’s not an everyday occurrence (twice a month is the average, apparently). Too soon, it was time to get back in the bus - after the walk/boat/rickshaw/boat reverse trip - and endure the accident-free trip back to Kolkata. The next day I hopped a short flight to Assam and a long car ride to Kaziranga, which I planned on including in this post, but am now thinking I've ran on long enough for today, so I’ll leave it for later.
 |
| Sunset near the border with Bangladesh |
 |
| Mangrove trunks in black and white (which isn't much different than in color - gray trees, gray water, gray mud) |
Going back to the point I was making at the beginning of the post, it was an interesting experience to be thinking “I’m in the Sundarbans, someplace I've been hearing about since I was a kid, and thinking it was near the ends of the earth.” On the one hand, it was thrilling and rewarding, and I did see my tiger, but on the other, it wasn't nearly the mythical place I had grown up imagining. There is incredible wildlife, but there are also thousands of people scattered throughout living their daily lives, and numerous tour operators, and a peaceful “eco-camp” that made me delicious meals every day (I’m not complaining). In other words, much more than what I saw on the nature shows, and in some ways an even richer experience than what those shows led me to expect. Everywhere I go, this trip challenges and contradicts my expectations, and only in rare cases does it confirm them. A lot of the time, I’m not even aware I had preconceptions until I realize the reality is different than what I was expecting and I think, overall, that is one of the most consistently rewarding parts of the traveling.
 |
| One of the numerous kingfishers |
 |
| A much larger salt-water crocodile, on his way to the water |
No comments:
Post a Comment