Way down south (18/01-20/01)

This last weekend I went on a jolly to Mongla, a port town in the south west of Bangladesh, perched on the edge of the Sunderbans with a great view of the Bay of Bengal. The Sunderbans are the world’s densest concentration of mangrove forest in the world, two thirds of which are in Bangladesh (the other third being in West Bengal). There are many legends about the Sunderbans (literally meaning, beautiful forest), featuring tigers and devils and a great forest protectoress called Bon Bibi. Recently, the forests have been getting media attention because of the growing number of tiger attacks on villagers who are, due to rising tides and a growing population, increasingly forced to venture into tiger habitats for food and firewood. Needless to say, it was with some trepidation that I ventured south to see what this mysterious tide land was like…

I should probably say that my visit had a purpose higher than checking out these natural wonders. Officially I was there for a VSOB study visit, to learn about an initiative of Rupantar, a large local NGO, aimed at improving the accountability and responsiveness of Bangladesh’s lowest level of local government. It was a fascinating visit, and gave me lots of ideas about potentially transferring these structures and practices to the north. Although there was, as ever, a lot of sitting dazedly as a heated debate flew directly over my head (it being entirely in Bangla), I still learned an awful lot and got to meet a lot of really interesting people (more on this later).

However, despite all that, it was the landscape that excited and enthralled me most. As you travel south here (bear in mind this was four full days of driving for two and a half days of visiting…), the landscape gradually changes. Where I live, it’s quite dry and although there are trees, they are much more familiar looking and somehow more controlled. As you go south, two things happen: it gets more watery and more wild.

Probably it’s is to do with the greater presence of water here, and the friendlier climate, but the further south you go, the more verdant and febrile the vegetation becomes. The trees seem taller, thicker. The greenery seems denser and more energetic somehow, exploding upwards everywhere you turn.

As you drive down roads miraculously raised up on sandy dykes, a lattice of fields rolls out around you in myriad stages of growth, studded with coconut and banana trees. There is the shocking lime of the rice seedlings, the milky green of the transplanted shoots, and interspersed between these, the flooded fields that await planting, gleaming dove grey and misty blue with the haze of the sky.

The raised causeways of tarmac are lined with trees that curve above, forming a lulling, luring canopy as far as the eye can see. Houses and shops, singly or in small, stretched settlements are precariously perched on oases of raised land, but you know that when the rains come, this will make little difference. Narrow paths atop dykes, or spindly bridges of single bamboo poles, are all that connect these abodes to the world.

This is what is means to say that Bangladesh is a delta country. Given the sure knowledge of rain and flood, you know that this land is really on the edge, fighting a constant battle with nature. The fact that this is also cyclone alley begs the question: how does any of it survive? The ramshackle buildings lean crazily over the water, made from corrugated iron, thatch, bamboo weave and banana leaf, and propped up on stilts. All of it seems worringly impermanent, as if the people here know they are living on borrowed time.

The land in the south is beautiful, but brutally so, a constant reminder that it has no sympathy for the thousands of people who cling to it.

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The Sunderbans themselves

We only visited a tiny edge of the Sunderbans, and very briefly, but it was wonderful to see this so-much-spoken-about forest. It is all rivers and tides. Rivers and tides and trees.

The Sunderbans are where the huge rivers that flow through Bangladesh join the sea, and this is where the distinctions between river and sea, water and land, cease to have meaning. All the waterbodies in the area are saline, for example, and getting fresh drinking water is a constant concern for locals. This also causes huge problems for growing crops, which do not take to salty soil very well.

The land is dissected into islands of trees that rise out of the water at low tide, showing their muddy underbellies to the world, and slide beneath it at high tide, until the water laps the trunks of the trees.

Where the land is protected from the hunger of the tides, where you can walk even at high tide (which is in forest reservation land or in the precarious villages of those who dwell here, which are encircled by fiercely maintained dykes), the forests sing with wildlife. Deer, crocodiles and Royal Bengal tigers are just some of the hundreds of species that reside here, amongst the seemingly impenetrable protection of the forest.

The denseness of the forest and the trials of the weather make you wonder how anyone could possibly live here, and yet live here people do. The litre of wild honey I bought is testament to that: honey which, according to the Lonely Planet, is the most dangerous honey on the planet because of the dangers (tigers, crocodiles, bandits, the police…) collectors brave in order to collect it. It’s just one example of how the people here are forced to battle nature in order to survive.