When Dan came back from his visit to the school last year he told us of a visit he had gone deep into the Sunderbans to visit the man who hosts David Attenborough’s teams when they film planet earth episodes about the Ganges Delta. Due to tales that Dan told about precarious boats over ladened with lorries, goats, motorbikes and too many people, and the fact that the native Bengali Tiger have rather a penchant for eating humans it was felt that the risk assessment for the trip would read in such a way that we wouldn’t be able to manage the risk of one of our students being eaten by a tiger. When we arrived in India we were told that the school had found a way of taking us to the Sunderbans in a safe manner.

Our morning started at 3am with the entire contents of the school kitchen being loaded onto a bus along with the school cook and assistant the party from Strode, 6 Mathieson pupils, Sairul, 2 guards and enough food to ensure a small army wouldn’t starve. We collected Anup and a couple of extra people on the way through Kolkata and headed towards the Sunderbans - for the readers in the UK who have been watching the Sue Perkins documentaries about the Ganges you will know where we were headed - the Ganges delta is 3/4s in Bangladesh and 1/4 in India. It is a UNESCO site as it is a Mangrove Forest and is the home of the Bengali Tigers amongst other wildlife. We drove through the most beautiful landscape as the sun was rising and arrived at our destination around 7am.

The entirety of the contents of the bus was unloaded and carried by local porters much of it on their heads) to the quay where our boat for the day was waiting for us. The boat had two decks, the lower deck had the galley, which was almost the same size as the kitchen at the school, and a set of double beds draped with saris. The upper deck was furnished with chairs and tables and plenty of space to move around and see the scenery. As we pulled away from the jetty we were introduced to Shanti our guide. He had grown up in one of the villages in the Sunderbans where he didn’t get the opportunity to learn English but had gone to college in Kolkata and taken the opportunity to learn English.

We spent 8 hours on the boat with a few stops on the way where we could walk along fenced walk ways in the jungle to climb up viewing towers and look out over animals living wild - we were the ones in captivity. We saw wild monkeys, monitor lizards, a herd of chital that came to a watering hole to drink, a 7ft salt water crocodile, wild boar and a variety of beautiful indigenous birds.. dan also got extremely enthusiastic about seeking mudskippers and crabs along the waters edge. The scenery was exquisite and I ran out of superlatives after about half an hour of being there.

We sipped Darjeeling tea, ate like kings and queens and had a truly fabulous day. I think probably the photographs will show better what we experienced but even that will will not match up to the memories that we all have. Our journey home took rather longer as there was a Puja being celebrated for one of the many Hindu Gods so celebrations were happening in the streets and the traffic ground to a halt on a fairly regular basis. We eventually arrived back at the school around 10pm.