103 - R.B. Emma & Shere Khan (Chandpai, Sundarbans, Bangladesh)
TWO REASONS FOR MY FORAY INTO BANGLADESH: I was drawn to the unknown; I wanted to see a tiger in the wild while there are still tigers in the wild. The Sundarbans (“Beautiful forest” in Bengali) has the highest concentration of orange kitty cats in the world, somewhere between 100 and 500. (Numbers are all over the place and after some research, I lean toward the pessimistic end.) If estimates are correct, there are more captive tigers in the United States than indigenous ones in nature. This was my best chance. Tiger-spotting was the impetus for my trip, but I doubted I could spend two months (visa length) hyper-focused on a single aim. Financial and logistical restraints forced me to explore, much to my edification.
I arrived in Dhaka a week before meeting my safari pal, Alex. I had but one mission: find a boat and book passage to and throughout the Sundarbans with an emphasis on tiger tracking. There were obstacles. The first was a lack of robust tourist infrastructure. I mentioned previously a poster in the embassy in Kathmandu that read, “Come to Bangladesh before the tourists do.” Well, I beat them there. Now what?
The archetypical outing for tourists and ex-pats alike was a 12-40 person/4-day boat excursion with a set itinerary, which amounts to a cheap facsimile of a Caribbean cruise. No thank ya, sir. Alex and I were willing to spend more to get more. The Lonely Planet recommended Guide Tours as an outfit that could help. I made initial contact soon after my arrival.
Respect: I couldn’t get none. Throughout my vagabondage, I often found asking to find a tiger was like asking to find a unicorn. Few take it seriously, especially if you’re perceived as Johnny Dipshit Tourist. This goes double in Bangladesh for two reasons. First, sightings are rare. Best not to feed expectations. Second, tigers in the ‘Dhesh have a reputation as man-eaters. Even if you want to see a tiger, the locals sure as hell do not.
So, I perpetrated a fraud on the owner of Guide Tours to cut through the bullshit. I told him I was in the planning stage of tiger research and would like to make a preliminary incursion to prepare for a complex expedition. My assistant (Alex) would be arriving in Dhaka, and I needed to organize a boat.
Enter karma. Imagine my surprise when the owner informed me an English gentleman named Adam Barlow, a tiger expert studying for his Ph.D. in conservation biology from the University of Minnesota, was staying at his house. He asked if I'd heard of him, to which I replied in the negative. Awkward. And then you have his son and daughter-in-law, both experts on the flora and fauna of the Sundarbans… also living at his home. Oops.
I wasn’t unmasked. Adam was in England for the holidays, and the owner's son and daughter-in-law were away. Score. My secret was safe. The following morning, with my “assistant” in tow, we returned to Guide Tours for the bad news. The R.B. Emma, a three-person houseboat normally reserved for researchers and journalists, would only be at our disposal for a maximum of nine days. (I’d asked for fourteen.) We tried to quell our disappointment… wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
This was a victimless fraud, and in the end, probably an unnecessary one. I wasn’t sure they’d charter a boat for just any two yahoos from abroad, so I fibbed my way to the swamp. We paid the regular price and supported a local business dedicated to conservation. Nine days on our own private boat wasn’t exactly cheap at $1500 between the two of us. (It was worth every penny and had me wishing for those extra five days.) I did feel a little guilty about the ruse, but my intentions were pure. We just wanted to see a fucking tiger. Is that so wrong?
The R.B. Emma departed Khulna with six souls aboard to include guide, cook, porter, and captain. Just outside the harbor, we made an unsuccessful attempt at boarding two gigantic cargo ships—one from Ukraine, the other from South Korea. Apparently, letting random goofballs on your cargo vessel to look around is against regulations. Who knew? So, we sailed on.
En route, we checked in at a forest ranger station in Chandpai for paperwork validation and verification. Bureaucracy equals delay, so we disembarked for a look-see. We met a local man who’d grown up in the Sundarbans and spent many years guiding inside the magical mangrove. He told us most man-eaters reside in the western region. Why? No one knows for sure, but experts theorize higher salinity levels drive prey (deer, boars, monkeys, etc.) to fresher waters and may even affect a tiger’s brain chemistry, making them more aggressive. Add encroachment/poaching by local villagers, and you have a recipe for conflict. Less food, hungry tigers. Enter sluggish (relative to Tony) fisherman, woodcutters, and honey collectors. Humans are simply a convenient alternative. Cyclones may play a part in the carnage. Powerful storms leave mayhem and death in their wake. Corpses are an easy meal. And once they have a taste for human flesh…
Though the west harbors the majority of attacks, eastern villages aren’t unscathed. By sheer coincidence, I happened upon a BBC documentary featuring Adam Barlow in our Khulna hotel the day after returning. It featured Chandpai in a piece about tiger/human discord. Livestock represents an irresistible temptation. Come for the cattle, stay for the sapiens. The tiger in question switched targets mid-hunt, settling on a defenseless old woman sleeping inside a wood hut. It crashed through the flimsy outer wall and dragged her outside. Her son came to her aid and scared the cat away, but the damage had been done. She succumbed to her wounds, a fractured skull.
That was only the beginning. A now emboldened tiger ramped up attacks on livestock, further agitating and frightening the villagers. Cats may have nine lives, but this one was running low, soon to become the victim of vigilante justice. Enter the Sundarbans Tiger Project with a novel idea to enlist the help of a renowned dog trainer from Montana. Her mission? Create Bangladesh’s first dog defense plan to stop tigers. Local conscripts (i.e. stray dogs) would fill the ranks.
With only three weeks to complete the nascent program, the task was daunting. Puppies were screened. Candidates chosen. The training delivered promising results with the aim of teaching graduates to act in unison to repel feline invaders. Alone, each would be ripped to dog biscuits, but field-testing at a local zoo suggested a lone tiger is much more hesitant about engaging even two barking dogs.
As I’m watching the documentary, I recognize the area where they’re filming as the schoolyard and cyclone center (a haven during storms) we visited. You’d think someone would’ve mentioned this given recent history. Not a peep. Though I believe doggy defense squads still patrol the village swamps, I’m at a loss to confirm sustained efforts.
He reminded us (again) of the “snowball’s chance in hell” likelihood of seeing a striped marauder. Best way to improve our odds? Live bait. Permits allow scientists to use bovine “volunteers” in the name of research, but we were one permit and one volunteer short. (You might recall my attempts to plan a similar expedition in Bukittinggi, Sumatra. Goat was the “volunteer” of choice there.)
Tigers weren’t the only dangerous game in town. The mangrove is (was?) home to modern-day pirates. At the time, the three most well-known groups were Rustom, Raju, and Zulfikar. (Don’t hold me to the spellings.) They were guilty of the standard pirate fare: intimidation, murder, robbery, and kidnapping for ransom. Their favorite targets? Woodcutters and fishermen. We wanted to know more and were thus instructed to inquire at the seasonal seaside village of Dublar on the Sundarbans’ southern edge. Guide Tours did mention pirates, but I was assured we were safe as long as we docked near a ranger station. I learned later pirates steered clear of foreign tourists to avoid blow back and military reprisals.
With our interview complete, we made a final stop at the local school before shoving off again. Though not in session that day, the faculty was enthusiastic about our visit, offering a tour and an informal meet and greet with other faculty members. They treated us like celebrities. Smiles proliferated. Hearts filled with gratitude.
In high spirits, we headed south. Destination: Dublar Island, specifically a fishing village on the Bay of Bengal. This required a full day of travel, so we settled in for a pleasant river cruise. The sun shone. The wind refreshed. Yeah, you could say we were content with the world. I was relaxed but bubbling with anticipation. And then…
I was under the foolish assumption our location upriver in a populated area in broad daylight was antithetical to tiger-spotting. Wide channel. Heavy boat traffic. No way Tony the Tiger would be sunning his ass riverside at two in the afternoon, right? Was not Tony a creature of the night, preferring to conduct covert activities under cover of dark?
I’m a moron.
What does a moron do? He sits on deck trying to absorb a few words of Bengali from a book while his camera sits out of reach. The moron’s “assistant” lounges below deck reading a novel with video camera out of reach. When I heard our guide scream, “Tiger,” the significance didn’t register. There wouldn’t be a tiger here, not a tiger tiger anyway. Sure enough, I looked up and saw a large feline lazying away the afternoon on a muddy riverbank. I had to decide—dive for my camera or seize the moment and appreciate. I went with the latter. Wise choice. The moment didn’t last long. Kitty was unperturbed by the boat motor but decided our guide’s exclamation warranted relocation. His or her highness rose slowly, sauntered to the edge of tall grass lining the bank, and looked back with indifference before disappearing, as if to declare, “There, you saw me, asshole. Now, get a fucking life!”
I almost pooped a little. No pictures. No video. The windows below deck were open, so Alex also caught a glimpse. We deserved to be flogged. The boat edged closer, but the crew balked at the suggestion we go ashore. I garnered every ounce of self-restraint to avoid jumping into the mud for recon. It wasn’t easy. One of the larger Guide Tours boats was in the vicinity, and within five minutes a member of the staff came aboard. (He’d been alerted via cell phone.) When I saw he had no reservations about having a gander, I was in the mud faster than two shakes of a lamb’s tail. We all stood where the kitty lay not ten minutes before. (Our crew made vast amounts of noise to keep kitty at bay.) The truth is, for the most part, tigers are wary of humans. Man-eating is the exception, not the rule. Still, the number of attacks is unsettling. And I had a tiny voice in the back of my mind quoting Adam Barlow from the BBC documentary. If he was concerned…
Although hoping against hope the beast would reappear somewhere along the bank, we were disappointed. We lingered a bit and then continued on. The crew found endless enjoyment in the fact we failed to get a photo. I heard no less than four individuals on their cell phones discussing our incompetence. Even in Bengali, I got the gist. “Blah gah nah buju gonho nanna photograph hanah baba ganna.” Loose translation? “Yeah, I know. We see a tiger and those stupid bastards don’t get a picture. You should have seen the look on the tall one’s face. I think he shit himself.”
Shere Khan from Disney’s The Jungle Book. That’s what I remember. I can almost hear the voice of George Sanders introducing himself. “Helloooo, Richard. It’s me. Shere Khan. I’d like a word if you don’t mind. Come this way.” The image is so overwhelming, when I look back on the encounter, I can’t separate the real tiger from the cartoon version.
So, we blew it. Still, this was only day one. Auspicious start, no? Would we get another chance?