Have Feet Will Travel

In retrospect, it’s the geography lessons in school that fuelled my nomadic sensibilities. This was before I’d reckoned that my travel bug mutated to develop tentacles of its own. Soon I was drawing from my ‘tentacles’ to take me around India but the east remained unexplored. The world’s largest contiguous mangrove forest home to the royal Bengal tiger in the Gangetic delta plains remained an idée fixe until recently. I was finally going to the Sundarbans.

It took us about 4 hours and 4 modes of locomotion – including a 1960 vintage Ambassador with questionable brakes - over land and water to reach the Sundarbans from Calcutta city. En route we ferried our way through the island of Gosaba - which I learnt, is where locals come from all over the islands in the Sundarbans for all their provisions. It’s the Big Bazaar and Walmart here.

That same night soon after dinner, the tour organizers threw open the idea of setting out for a night safari.
Through the mangroves
In a boat
Over the water that was home to the saltwater crocodiles
If I’d survive any event to live to tell a tale, this would rank real high. And just exactly how high, I was about to find out.

In what felt like poetry in motion, I entrusted myself to the oarsman under the star lit night sky, slightly shifty every time something trembled at the surface of the water.

It felt ethereal. But this was before the oarsman deftly motioned the boat and with it my already jumpy-self somewhere further into the mangroves where he was still for a while. A moment later, he took his oar out and then nimbly traced it over the water which now radiated a florescent green. At that moment it dawned on me that we were right above the bioluminescent microorganisms that dwelt in the waters beneath us. The effect was the same when I let my fingers linger over the waters.
Crocodiles be damned!
On second thoughts, maybe not

I wish I could paint – starry skies above, bioluminescence below.
Surreal
I wondered what it would look like on a full moon night. Even if I’d had any luck spotting either the crocodiles or the royal Bengal tiger during the safari the next day, I’m certain it wouldn’t top this experience – even so because I’d been oblivious to this phenomenon’s existence here!

Although I’d change my odds of spotting animal life by visiting Sundarbans during winter
If nothing else, I wouldn’t at least experience the sun at its infernal best!