As you may or may not remember, last Christmas I went on holiday with my family and some close friends to the Sundarbans in India. Well, this week I went again but on the Bangladeshi side. As I'm sure you all recall (…) the Sundarbans is the world's largest littoral mangrove belt split 60/40 between Bangladesh and India, stretches 80km inland from the coast and represents what remains of some of the jungle that once covered the Gangetic plain (or so the Lonely Planet says). So why did I go back?

The obvious answer is that it's a beautiful place to go in its own right with plenty of wildlife to interest the average punter. A second response would be that it's also one of the few peaceful places in Bangladesh where you can truly get away from the crowds of staring locals and just enjoy the countryside. As genuine as those 2 answers are the real one is in fact that Sarah's mum had come for 10 days holiday and there are only so many touristy things you can do in and around Dhaka in temperatures of 35+ degrees and 80 per cent humidity. No but seriously, even hanging out poolside at the BAGHA can loose its charm after a few days.

I should perhaps try to give you a few ideas of what the Sundarbans looks like to better explain the trip we went on. Basically, 3 huge rivers including the Ganges all come together in Bangladesh and make there way to the sea at the Bay of Bengal. It's an extremely flat plain so you don't have 1 single river or body of water heading to the sea but an ever widening network of rivers and creeks that sort of give the appearance of a tree's roots when you look at a map. The land that exists between these different tributaries is totally covered in forest and mangrove swamps, and I mean totally. When you look from the river there doesn't appear to be any way inland short of hacking your way in with a big machete and a lot of sweaty toil. Rest assured we didn't need to do any of that sort of hard work - this was a trip designed for expats!

When I went to the Indian side of the area at Christmas we basically travelled down to a lodge run by the state tourist board and then went out during the day on a boat to look at nature. The Bangladesh side doesn't really have lodges of that standard, though the Indian one we stayed in was pretty basic anyway. It was no doubt for this reason that the travel agent advised visiting in India as they have better tourist facilities. In actual fact they do things a little different in Bangladesh as you just stay on the boat the whole time, occasionally getting off for a walk or to take a smaller boat up a creak in search of tigers and crocodiles. Having done both I'd say the Bangladeshi way is actually better as the boat was more comfortable than the lodge, the food was considerably better, and having the whole thing to ourselves we could properly relax and enjoy ourselves.

We? Well, there was of course Sarah, her mother and I. We'd also asked a few volunteer friends to come along and Gill and Will rallied to our call. That made 5 in our little group, and the tour company had also received a booking from a young Dutch student who wanted to go so that made 6. The boat could sleep 12 in 6 double cabins so we all had our own single cabins and plenty of space so it worked really well. We'd also made sure that we had the essentials so brought 2 bottles of Bombay Sapphire gin, 24 cans of tonic and 3 bottles of white wine to supplement the coke and 7up the boat had for sale anyway. By the end of our 4 days we'd finished the wine and had half a bottle of gin left. Thankfully our bags going home were significantly lighter as it was damn hot the whole time.

Apart from drinking the gin and generally watching the river go by we went on a couple of walks, mostly at ridiculous hours of the morning to have more chance of seeing some wildlife. The animals you see are not stupid as they also find it too hot so only really come out to graze or drink early in the morning or in the evening. I'll put you all out of your misery straight away and say that we didn't see any tigers. To be honest it's so difficult to see one that we weren't expecting to either. We did however come across a spot where one slept and found some tiger fur! To reach this spot we'd had to walk across a muddy Mangrove swamp teaming with crabs in very hot and sweaty conditions (see photo for how Will and I looked at the end of it). Seeing as the forest was so dense, had we actually seen a tiger it would have been only 5-10 metres away so hardly at a safe distance. We did have 2 guys with rifles walking with us, and one of them was distinctly twitchy and always hurrying us along. Our view was that if a Royal Bengal tiger did come along he'd be the first to run away making big girly screams while the rest of us tried to confuse it with the flashes on our cameras. All in all then we settled for the fur.

What we did see was lots of beautiful deer and birds, a few monitor lizards (and they're quite big), some monkeys, crabs, river dolphins with very long snouts, and some strange fish that can crawl along the mud on the river banks and look like the sort of thing you see in books that explain how life on Earth evolved from the oceans. We also saw lots of fishermen catching crabs and shrimps, almost all of them working illegally and paying daily bribes to the very poorly paid forest rangers. They kept their catch in pots on deck or in the bottom of the boat, and I personally cheered the escape of each illegally caught crab as it scuttled its way to freedom while the fishermen were distracted by our photos and questions. As interesting as all that was though, my favourite moments were spent playing Ludo and cards on the ship with Gill, Will and Sarah and generally just talking bollocks for as long as our energy would hold. After all, getting up or being woken up at 5am on 4 mornings out of 5 really takes it out of you, so towards the end we were less interested in doing another excursion and much more in favour of chilling out on the boat. All in all a top trip and I thoroughly recommend it to you the next time you're in Bangladesh with a long weekend to spare...