India: Village Life in Sundarbans

One of the biggest draws for me in Bengal region was getting to the Subdarbans, the world’s largest mangrove wilderness and swamp, and the home to Bengal tigers. It’s a long and bumpy affair getting here – 4 hours in a bus on hectic mildly suicidal Indian roads, then a small boat ferry overloaded way over the tipping point to get deeper into the Subdarbans, then another 50 minutes in a buffalo-drawn cart through the tiny villages on the outskirts of the reserve and finally another boat ride. You get to stop and see the local village life, primitive and simple – growing rice in muddy soils and fishing bottom-feeding bony fish in the muddy water. Everything is deep sticky mud. Life is very different here from the city of Calcutta, and you are only a few kilometers away from Bangladesh here.
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