Sundarbans mangroves contain nature’s treasures

We thought we were going to see tigers. We were very excited.

Photographer Melanie Stetson Freeman and I were based in a small Bangladeshi town at the gateway to the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest, to cover the Observer magazine’s Climate Power project. To prepare for the trip, I read all about this lush land in Indian author Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide. I also heard that seeing the rarely visited Bengal tigers in the reserve was a major attraction in Bangladesh.

We scheduled extra time for reporting, not realizing that any attempt to spot the tigers would take days, which we didn’t have in our tight schedule (and money in our budget). So our local assistant booked us a day trip to the edge of the forest, which straddles Bangladesh and India.

OK, it wasn’t a five-night cruise. We still loved every second of it – the breeze on our colorful boat deck, the rhesus monkeys gorging on bananas at the Kalamgarh Forest Station, our stroll along elevated wooden platforms topped by ancient mangrove roots that help protect the coastline from storm surges. We even saw a playful porpoise – also featured in The Hungry Tide.

Then it started to rain heavily, so we went down to the lower deck, almost to the surface, and as the boat chugs along, we got a full view of Bangladesh, a country whose culture revolves around hundreds of winding waterways, like the stripes on a tiger.