Ghatshila, Chandipur, Bhitarkanika

Aficionados – I know there are a few – will be happy to see a new travel post after ages.

With every passing year I enjoy Durga pujo more and more by giving it the miss – in which sense I belong to the second class of Bengalis, the first being those who stay at home or come home from all corners of the world to live it up amidst the crowds and noise and sweltering heat. This time I decided once more on a longish road trip starting on the morning of ‘shoshthi’. I had asked several old boys to come along, but in the event only Swarnava could manage it. So my mother, Swarnava and I set off with young Firoz (the older version has vanished) at the wheel at about seven in the morning of Monday the 11th October. For me this was after an unusually long hiatus: I had last gone on a proper trip in December, and never been out of Durgapur if you leave out two day trips to Kolkata except for the two weeks in Delhi in end-February.

We headed towards Ghatshila, just across the border in Jharkhand on the Subarnarekha river, once famed among Calcuttans for its salubrious weather and drinking water with ‘medicinal’ properties. Passing through Bankura, Manbazar and Banduan, and being casually stopped at a border police post to register ourselves as travellers and confirm that we had all been vaccinated (they didn’t bother to check the certificates), we took about five hours to arrive. There was an unfortunate mix-up over accommodation, because booking.com had uncharacteristically defrauded us by sending us to a third-rate hotel, after which we checked into something halfway decent (but good and cheap food), Hotel Akashdeep in the marketplace, freshened up, had lunch, then set off to see the local sites, starting off with Burudi dam, one of the earliest built by the British. One warning to future travellers: though the lake surrounded by misty hills is as scenic as you might wish, the forest road that takes you there is actually a nightmarish apology for a road, and if you are driving anything less than a high-clearance off-roader, you might seriously damage your vehicle, even if you don’t get stuck. It took very long and gave me a scare.

By the time we got back to the highway the sun was near setting, which, people had told me, was the best time to stop at Raatmohana over the river, close to the Hindustan Copper works, and the view was good, though nothing spectacular for someone much travelled like me. On the way back to the hotel we stopped briefly at Bibhuti bhushan Bandyopadhyay’s well-restored house, Gouri Kunja, which now serves as a little museum recording the life and times of the great author. Standing before the glass panels that housed some of his clothes, handwritten manuscripts and covers of first editions was a sobering moment. All Bengalis owe a big thanks to the committee currently headed by Tapas Chatterjee, the author’s son’s son in law, which has taken great pains to preserve the memory. As the newspaper article says and we found out for ourselves, they are desperately cash strapped, so every Bengali-literature lover should come forward to help (are there many such left?).

On Tuesday morning we drove off towards Chandipur, passing through Baripada and Balasore, arriving at the sea beach at just about lunch time. It was a trip down memory lane. I had last visited in the winter of 1994, long before my daughter was born, with an elderly friend and yet another old boy from the St Xavier’s ICSE 1991 batch. Only the OTDC-run Pantha Nivas had existed at that time, and it was a pretty down market place then (which suited our budget!), surrounded only by sand and casuarina forest. Now it is a bustling seaside resort, albeit still on a small scale compared with Digha and Puri, with private hotels everywhere, and none too expensive. Mercifully some of the peace and quiet still remains – one major reason being that the beach is a rather disappointing thing unless you appreciate its uniqueness: you can walk for half a kilometer at low tide before you reach the water, and almost that much again before it comes waist high, the very antithesis of Puri and Gopalpur and Vizag. Pantha Nivas was entirely renovated and upgraded in 2008, and now it’s good, though it doesn’t quite match up to Digha standards (one for you, Didi!). We nearly walked away because of the blaring loudspeakers at the pujo right in front, on the beach itself if you please, but the lodge manager virtually dragged us back, promising to ask the culprits to turn down the volume (which they did, though only for a while, but at least they stopped completely after 9 in the evening, so we could sleep in peace). Again, the food was good – and much less expensive than in WB tourist lodges. I sat for as long as I could on the steps on the seashore, but ultimately the ghastly mugginess of the air drove me back to the cool comfort of my air conditioned room and my vodka. They had got me a beer in the afternoon, but couldn’t supply me with ice, hard luck.

On Wednesday morning we headed for Bhitarkanika wildlife reserve. We had booked cottages at the Estuarine Village Resort on the edge of the Brahmani river. I had planned the trip in such a way that we wouldn’t have to drive more than five to six hours at a stretch on any one day, but this one took a little longer, first because Google made us lose our way and sent us to a ferry which carried only people and motorbikes, so we had to come back eleven km to the highway, and then, at Pattamundai, where we left the highway once more, some over-zealous policemen diverted us on to a bad village road to avoid crowding a pujo site without giving us proper alternative directions. Still, we didn’t have to eat a very late lunch. On the way we crossed the Baitarani river, and when I say my worldly ordeal ended thereby tradition-literate Bengalis, I hope, will get the joke. The resort was nice though not fabulous. Given the horrible heat and humidity, what I missed most was the air conditioner – they hadn’t bothered about the extra expense ostensibly because the forest is closed to tourists during the three hottest months of the year, and most visitors stay only during the winter. In the afternoon, we visited the natural park nearby, complete with crocodile hatchery and museum, and the walk would have been idyllic in cold weather. My mother coped bravely, despite her age and creaking joints. Thank God she so loves to travel… the evening was spent lazing away, something I enjoy immensely. Just having nothing to do in particular and nowhere to go out of necessity remains as welcome after long months of rigid routine today as it used to be a quarter century ago.

That night the clouds burst. Thunder and lightning began their eternal mesmerizing drama from around 1:30, and then from around 2:20 it began to pour. It was still drizzling early in the morning, there was a blessed freshness in the air, and the garden was awash. That day we enjoyed ourselves immensely, going on two successive motor boat rides, in the first half and then again in the second, first through the creeks (Bhitarkanika is the second largest mangrove forest in India after the Sunderbans), tracking deer and monitor lizards and crocs, from little babies to fifteen foot monsters which can tackle tigers, when the migratory birds nesting thickly on one particular island strongly reminded me of Ranganathittu Sanctuary, and then down the Brahmani river as far as the Dhamara port where the river empties itself into the sea. For Swarnava and Firoz it was the first river trip ever, and for me the longest yet, a large part of it in driving rain, which was thrilling. In the evening I simply sat out on the porch, luxuriating in the rain which was pouring again, while Rudro from Bangalore kept me happily engaged in conversation, despite phone and net connections being rather patchy.

We left the resort at 7 next morning, found a much better road to Pattamundai, and arrived at Baripada much before expected. From there we ventured 25 km to Lulung, where you enter the vast Simlipal National Forest, but, though the drive was lovely, they turned us back before we could reach the resort, the Park not yet having opened fully to tourists. This too I had visited during that ’94 trip, but it could not be fully repeated. So we headed back to the highway at Baripada. The dhaba where we briefly halted served a basic but wholesome meal, but it was blazing hot by then, despite a spell of rain on the way (very strange weather we have been having this whole year round!) The town being absolutely devoid of interest (the circuit house beckoned, but it was closed for repairs), we drove on to Jhargram – back in West Bengal – before deciding to call it a day and checking in at a very ordinary sort of ‘guest house’, without a/c again, alas! Though there is a lot of greenery before and after, Jhargram itself is literally nothing to write home about. This morning, Saturday the 16th, we set out late, and arrived in Durgapur just in time for lunch, at Rannaghor off the state highway in Sagarbhanga, which Subhadip Dutta had spoken highly of. After a satisfactory biryani, we reached home at about 1:30. Thus ended a 1200 km, six day journey, entirely without mishap. My mother, I am glad to say, is content and in good shape, while both Swarnava and Firoz have assured me they hugely enjoyed themselves: I distinctly heard the former already musing aloud about the ‘next time’.

Now for a few observations. The roads were good to very good all through, but nowhere excellent by my standards: even on the best stretches of highway you have to keep slowing down for diversions where endless repairs and new constructions are going on, and remain on permanent high alert for everything from dogs, goats, cows and idiots crossing to sudden deep potholes which can shear your car’s bottom off and wild drivers with absolutely not a care about their own lives or those of others, so that your average speed never exceeds 50 km an hour, however many times you accelerate to 110. In Odisha and Jharkhand, apart from the language problem, the men in the street seem to revel in confusing you with contradictory directions, when they deign to respond to your queries at all. In both those states, the numbers of cows (and even more notably, bulls), goats and dogs ambling or dozing in the middle of the highways both irked and amazed me. We apparently ‘care’ too much to hustle them off, but apparently not much about maiming and killing them, especially the dogs. In Odisha they write most posters, banners and road signs only in the local language, which can prove to be a headache for out of state travellers. Hotel service on the whole was nice everywhere, though we must remember that the whole industry is licking deep wounds after Covid, and desperately trying to recover. Oh, in Jharkhand, hardly any biker cares about helmets, and in neither state were many people, barring policemen, wearing masks. About which I can only exclaim with relief, ‘Thank God. It’s been long enough’.

On this trip I drove twice over long stretches, and found it most exhilarating. I haven’t lost either the touch or the interest, really, and I would have indeed done it far more often if only road travel in India had reached American, or better still, German standards. Distance, as I keep saying, hardly matters, road conditions are everything: on bad roads a Merc can become a Nano, and on really good roads, my humble Dzire drives like a dream. Indeed, I enjoyed myself so much that I started inwardly dreaming about making long solo trips again, despite my age. All that I need to do is to convince myself that nobody would really care if I even died on the way in an accident or a heart attack at the wheel. Anything short of that, like a breakdown on the road, and I should simply lock the car, leave it in the hands of Fate, go find some food and shelter for the night nearby, come back with help the next morning, and all would be fine, so long as I didn’t have to do anything to a strict deadline…

Durgapur, dammit, is still hot and damp, though it’s mid-October. Classes resume tomorrow, my 58th birthday.

For a few photographs, click on this link.