Day 124 (Wed 8 Nov) - Sunderbans

We got up at 6am and had breakfast. Although Subayesh had agreed to meet us at 6.30am he did not appear until 7am. He said that we had to leave immediately and that he would explain the remainder of the itinerary as soon as we got on the boat.

Set off and met our naturalist; meant to be in the itin a local wildlife expert.
As we travelled Subayesh decided to explain the changes to the itin. He wanted to squeeze into the third day all that we had missed on the first. We pointed out to him that this seemed rather unlikely and that we would be rushing around. Asked Subayesh to have a rethink and we would talk in the evening as we were missing seeing the Sunderbans drifting slowly by. Subayesh did not speak to us for the remainder of the day.

The naturalist we soon discovered was not such an expert, or if he wasn't he wasn't keen to show off his expertise to us! Soon after we set off some birds alighted at the bow of the boat. We asked the naturalist what they were and he immediately dived into his books to tell us. Each simple question meant that he had to look for the answer in a book. We soon gave up on him and just consulted his books whenever we wanted to look something up.

Despite this the Sunderbans is an absolutely beautiful place. A labyrinth of mangrove choked waterways branches off the main waterways. Our boat unfortunately would be far too large to navigate through these small inlets; not sure if any boat could.

We saw many, many different types of birds and the vegetation of the mangrove forests subtly changed as we traveled round. From rich green vegetation we came across swathes of mangrove that was coloured red, golden and green; perfect tiger camouflage. It seemed hard to believe that tigers roamed these mangrove forests, swimming in-between the many islands as the mood took them.

We stopped off at a couple of watchtowers. The watchtowers are constructed in lush forest and so it would be almost impossible to see anything that wasn't within touching distance. To enable people to see they had cut down the forest in long strips (a bit like bicycle spokes) with the watchtower at its centre. In these strips we saw some spotted dear and closer to even a monitor lizard basking.

We got back to our lodgings at about 5pm passing local boats as we went.

Subayesh came and spoke with Sarb saying that he was going to change the itinerary and that we should leave the next morning at 5.30am as the tides meant that we would reach Canning later than anticipated.

We disagreed as we were still very tired from the journey the previous day and had lost all trust in Subayesh to organise a drink up in a brewery. We said we would not get up at 5.30am, we would however get up at 7am and go straight back to Kolkata as we had to get a train at 8pm and we could not miss it. We all agreed that we would leave the next morning at 7am after we had breakfasted.

We all felt that the tides were being blamed for everything so asked Subayesh a written statement as to why we were so delayed on the first day and an explanation as to why the naturalist was so useless. S promised to have this note prepared for 7am the next morning.

At about 9pm we had a knock on the door and a man we had not seen before, but we suspect from the tourist lodge we were staying at, asked us to speak to someone on a mobile phone. The caller was the North East Indian Representative for Indian Moments. Sarb took the call. The man wanted an explanation as to why the tour was not going well.

Sarb told him that there had been so many mistakes made on the tour that there was no way in which we could communicate our concerns verbally but would write an email when we got back to Kolkata.