Wandering in the Vibrant City... Kolkata... Day 3 Part 1
Day 3 Part 1
For the day trip to Sunderbans we were joined by a young friend of ours who had come down from Farakka … The meeting point for the group was in front of the Indian Museum which was quite close by… a 10 minute walk from the Inn we stayed… We were 12 in the group…
We started by half past five and the low traffic facilitated our speedy departure from the city… From then on it was the countryside with narrow metaled roads... If, the uninitiated to driving in these parts, is at the helm it would be a harrowing experience… Though our driver was a local, we still had those heart in the mouth moments when the vehicles sped by…
As it was a bit hazy dawn, the sun had taken a sort of pastel hue…
We traveled along the road passing through towns, villages and paddy fields…
It was a time where people in towns were just waking up while in villages they were already in the fields. Women folk were seen in front of their yards immersed in cleaning their harvested crops…Our destination was in South 24 Parganas district.
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By half past eight we reached Godhkali… the Gateway to the Sundarbans, we walked down to the Godhkhali Jetty, our point of boarding the boat. Ours was a wooden boat, sort of the one you see in the old movies, similar to one in ‘Amanush’… 
In about 20 minutes we docked in the estuarine island, Pakhirala, an inhabited island in the Mangrove Reserve. We took a Toto (a form of auto rickshaw) to cross it.It had concrete narrow roads cutting through the village which at times gave in to bumpy kutcha roads… Passing through the resort huts we came to the paddy fields and the hutment of the locals.
Here we could see just like earlier in the day, women working in front yards threshing, winnowing and milling the harvested crop…
The quality of water in the island differed from pure to saline to the muddy...
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