Hasan Mansur (Milon-da), the tourism entrepreneur of Bangladesh, has lovingly built a boat to the specifications of his own experience and his deltaic country. The M V Aboshar has 20 cabins with a wrap-around passage and a top-deck providing a common space for dining and viewing the scenery. And yes, Bangladesh has scenery to blow the mind. We set out from near Dhaka and were soon on the Meghna, which joins the larger Podha (Ganga), the latter itself having joined the Jamuna (Brahmaputra) earlier on. Unlike the upstream tributaries, which lose their identities to the mainstream, here in Bangladesh the larger river is subsumed within the smaller arrival.
As we proceed south on the Meghna, it becomes so wide that the far bank nearly dips beneath the horizon. We swing away to the west and slip into distributaries heading southwest, always in the company of flotillas of floating water hyacinth. There are many fishing boats, but the scene before our eyes is not one of a sea of sailboats, as the travel guides have prepared us for. Diesel engines, large and small, have taken over the delta.
As evening comes on, we pass dozens of huge ferries fetching up from Khulna, making the overnight run to Dhaka's Buriganga terminal. Taking on more than three hundred passengers each, these ferries leave destablising waves in their wake, as they pass fishing dhows, jet boats and launches. The ferries use their dazzling searchlights to probe the darkness ahead and indicate the intended direction to oncoming boats.
The Sundarban, or Shundorbon, can mean either 'beautiful forest' or 'forest of the beautiful tree' (the Shundor). Whichever of these interpretations one prefers, it remains a ravishing region indeed, a dense network of water capillaries spread over hundreds of square miles in deltaic Bangladesh and neighbouring West Bengal. The western part of Sundarban that lies within Bangladesh is the richest and most unspoilt, and that is where we are headed on the M V Aboshar. Satellite imagery clearly shows this large patch of green standing out in the midst of the all-pervading brown.