Forest Permits Handled
Core-zone entry passes, registered guides and passenger manifests filed before you leave Kolkata. You never queue at a forest office.
Royal Bengal Safar
Explore The Wild Beauty
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Royal Bengal Safar
Explore The Wild Beauty
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In 2009 Sanjoy Mondal was ferrying day-trippers for a Kolkata agency and watching them leave disappointed — rushed through two creeks, fed cold food, told nothing. He borrowed against his father's boat and started running trips his own way.
Sixteen years on, Royal Bengal Safar operates six licensed launches, a riverside eco village on Satjelia Island and a team of thirty-one people — twenty-eight of whom were born within forty kilometres of our office. We are not a booking desk that resells someone else's boat. The boat, the cook, the guide and the cottage are ours, and so is the responsibility.
Sundarban — literally “beautiful forest” — is where the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna finish their journey and break into a thousand tidal channels before reaching the Bay of Bengal.
It is the only mangrove forest in the world that holds a tiger population, and the animals here have adapted in ways found nowhere else: they swim between islands, drink brackish water and hunt in waist-deep mud. Alongside them live estuarine crocodiles, Gangetic river dolphins, fishing cats, water monitors and 248 species of bird.
Roughly 4,260 square kilometres of it lies in India, across the South 24 Parganas district of West Bengal, and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987. Visitors travel by boat, because in the Sundarbans there is no other way.
Anyone can put you on a boat. Here is what sixteen seasons on these waters actually buys you.
Core-zone entry passes, registered guides and passenger manifests filed before you leave Kolkata. You never queue at a forest office.
Licensed launches with clean toilets, a life jacket for every seat and a kitchen on board — not hired at the last minute from the ghat.
Every naturalist we send out grew up here. They read tide charts the way you read a clock, and they know where the deer drink.
Bhetki paturi, crab curry, gobindobhog rice and mishti doi, cooked fresh on deck. Vegetarian and Jain menus on request.
A standing arrangement with the rural health centre at Gosaba and a first-aid trained crew member on every departure.
Permits, guide fees, meals, stay and transfers are all in. What is excluded is published just as plainly.
Not a call centre. These are the people who will meet you at Godkhali jetty.
Born in Gosaba to a family of boatmen. Sixteen seasons of guiding, and still the first one up on safari mornings.
Can name every one of the delta's 248 recorded bird species by call. Runs our birding departures in winter.
Twenty-two years on these waters. Reads the tide tables so precisely we plan safari times around him.
Runs the galley on the Classic and Luxury departures. Her crab curry is the reason people book again.
We saw the tiger on the second morning near Sudhanyakhali — but honestly the boat itself was the trip. Our guide Sanjoy knew every bird call, and the kitchen on board fed us better than most Kolkata restaurants.
I have been on safaris in Kaziranga and Bandhavgarh. The Sundarbans is a completely different animal, and this team understands that. Permits, tides, timing — all handled, so we could simply watch.
Travelling with two small children, I was nervous. The cottage was clean, there was a doctor on call, and someone was always keeping an eye on the kids near the deck rail. Thoughtful people.
Our college took forty students for a mangrove ecology field study. The resident biologist ran a proper session on pneumatophores and salinity gradients. The students still talk about it.
Tell us your dates and group size. Our Sundarban travel desk will build the itinerary, arrange forest permits and hold your boat — usually within two hours.