The Sundarbans

Why the Sundarbans is different

Mangroves grow where fresh water from the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna meets the salt of the Bay of Bengal. Twice a day the tide redraws the map — channels that carried your boat in the morning are mud by afternoon, which is exactly why local boat crews and licensed guides are not optional.

The trees themselves are doing something no other forest does. Sundari, gewa and keora push breathing roots up through the mud in fields of pale spikes, because there is no oxygen to be had below. Walk a forest trail at low tide and you are stepping between thousands of them.

The forest is also a working landscape, and this is the part most itineraries skip. Honey collectors go in each spring under seasonal permits, following wild bees to hives in the canopy. Fishers work the channels with nets strung between poles. Crab catchers wade the banks at low water. Their villages ring the buffer zone, and a good trip shows you both the wildlife and that human edge — because the forest has been feeding people here for as long as anyone can trace.

Wildlife you can realistically expect

Tigers are present but rarely seen. Around a hundred of them range across six thousand square kilometres of dense mangrove, and they are strong swimmers that cross channels at will, which is precisely what makes them so hard to find. Treat any sighting as a bonus, not a plan. What you will almost certainly see instead: spotted deer stepping out onto the mudflats at dusk, rhesus macaques working the tideline, monitor lizards, mudskippers hauling themselves across the flats on their fins, armies of fiddler crabs, and estuarine crocodiles laid out on the banks like driftwood.

Birdlife is the real reward, and it is the reason serious naturalists keep coming back. Six or seven kingfisher species work the same stretch of canal — collared, brown-winged, black-capped, the tiny common kingfisher — along with brahminy kites overhead, lesser adjutants stalking the shallows, herons of every size, and if you are lucky and quiet, the masked finfoot, one of the rarest waterbirds in Asia.

Bring binoculars rather than a long lens if you have to choose. On a narrow canal at dawn, the difference between a good sighting and a missed one is usually magnification, not shutter speed.

• Spotted deer and wild boar at Katka and Kochikhali
• Estuarine crocodiles on the mudbanks near Dublar Char
• Irrawaddy and Ganges river dolphins in the wider channels
• Tiger pugmarks on almost every forest walk

What a typical trip looks like

Most itineraries run three nights and four days from Khulna or Mongla. You board in the afternoon, cruise overnight through the wide channels, and wake somewhere the map has stopped meaning much. The days settle into a rhythm: out at first light in a rowed country boat into creeks too narrow for the mother ship, back for breakfast, a forest walk with the armed guard, an afternoon on deck watching the banks go past, and a watchtower visit at Katka, Kochikhali or Hiron Point before the light goes.

Food, bedding and permits are handled by the operator. Cabins are simple and you will not spend much time in them — the deck is where the trip actually happens, and where you will end up eating, reading and watching for movement on the banks.

Two-night trips exist and are a false economy. A full day of the itinerary is spent simply reaching the interior sanctuary zones, so cutting a night cuts the part you came for.