Let's be straight about it from the start: nobody rides a motorcycle into the Sundarbans. The national park is a maze of tidal channels, mudbanks and mangrove islands at the bottom of the Ganges–Brahmaputra delta, and the last solid tarmac gives out at the jetties around Gosaba and the villages beyond Canning. The ride is about getting to the edge of the land, parking the bike in a village yard, and stepping onto a wooden boat for the part that matters.
The run down from Kolkata is flat, hot and busy, a long ribbon of road through paddy fields, fish ponds and brick kilns, with buses that treat the centre line as a suggestion. Leave before dawn and you get the soft light over the water hyacinth and the cooler air before the humidity settles in. The last stretches narrow to embankment roads barely wider than a cart, with ponds on both sides and children waving from every doorstep. Fill the tank in Canning or the bigger roadside towns on the way; after that, fuel is sold out of bottles if at all.
What waits on the water is one of the strangest landscapes in Asia. The mangroves take their local name from the sundari tree, and the forest breathes through spiky aerial roots that poke up out of the mud at low tide. Twice a day the sea pushes in and the whole place changes shape. This is the home of the Bengal tiger in a setting no other tiger shares, swimming between islands and living on fish, crabs, deer and wild boar. You are far more likely to see a crocodile basking on a bank, a monitor lizard, kingfishers by the dozen and spotted deer at the treeline than the cat itself, and that is fine.
People here live alongside the forest in a way that will stay with you. Honey collectors, fishermen and crab catchers go into the mangroves knowing the risk, and before they do, many pray to Bonbibi, the forest goddess honoured by Hindus and Muslims alike, who is said to protect those who enter with respect and take only what they need. The national park and its wider delta were inscribed by UNESCO in 1987, and the Indian side runs into the even larger Bangladeshi Sundarbans across the border.
Go between November and February, when the air is drier and the boats run comfortably. Bring water, sunscreen and patience, arrange the boat and the permits through a registered operator, and leave the bike somewhere you trust. The ride back, with mud on your boots and the smell of salt and diesel still in your nose, feels like rejoining a different century.