The day before I took my daughter to the Sunderbans in northeast India, the Times of India reported: “A 21-year-old resident of Patharpratima was killed and partly eaten by a tiger in the Sunderbans ... Buno Bhakta was part of a five-member group that had gone into the Chulkati forest to look for crabs. The tiger attacked when they were returning with their catch later in the day.”
I discreetly tore the article out of the paper and hid it. Imogen, who is 11, was already alarmed enough about going to an area where the local wildlife regarded mankind as supper. I was more worried about getting Delhi belly and whether Imogen would be overwhelmed by the poverty she would probably see.
We were going on a volunteering and wildlife holiday in the Sunderbans to test whether children and conservation work mix. Very few travel companies allow children to do volunteering work: most children don’t have the strength, skills or patience to do practical jobs, and a lot of the places where volunteering help is needed are physically challenging.
Hands Up Holidays, which aims to blend sightseeing with “meaningful volunteering experiences,” can tailor trips to suit the traveler, so children can be included in the plan. I had been lured by the picture of a gorgeous tiger walking out of a forest towards water on the Hands Up Holidays Web site, although it stressed that seeing this elusive animal was pretty unlikely. Even so, Imogen still had concerns after reading about the Sunderbans in Lonely Planet India: “Thanks to strategic perimeter fences near villages, the number of human deaths attributed to tigers has dropped from an estimated 200 a year to about 34.” “Hmmm — nearly three a month,” she said.
The Sunderbans form the biggest area of tidal mangrove forest in the world, spreading from West Bengal in India to Bangladesh. The Indian part of the Sunderbans covers 4,262 km2, with 2,585km2 given over to a national park and tiger reserve. It is only about 90km from Calcutta, where we had spent the first three days of our holiday taking in markets, temples and exhaust fumes. But the journey to the Sunderbans Jungle Camp on Bali Island where we were staying takes five hours — two-and-a-half by car through dusty villages and endless salt water pans to Sonakhali and another two-and-a-half by boat.
Bali Island has some 25,000 people, but no mains water, electricity, roads or cars. People live in homes built from sticks, mud and straw, they burn dried-out cow pats on their fires, and the cows, goats and chickens live in the front yard. After Calcutta, it’s heaven. The Sunderbans Jungle Camp is one of 20 run by Help Tourism, a Calcutta-based organization that channels at least 75 percent of its profits to the local people, who share ownership and help run its projects in the northeast and east of India.
Although small — it has six basic, but clean cabins sleeping a maximum of 20 people — the Bali Island camp employs 19 people, provides a water pump for people who previously had to walk a couple of kilometers to collect clean water, helps fund the local school and supplies a medical service. Solar electricity is supplemented by a generator in the evening, and if you want a bath, you ask for two buckets of hot water instead of one. But the food is amazing. Huge vats of vegetable and fish curries, chapatis, rice, and chutneys are made fresh every day.
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