Photoblog of a weekend road trip from Kolkata to Bichitrapur Mangrove Sanctuary (Orissa)

Photoblog of a weekend road trip from Kolkata to Bichitrapur Mangrove Sanctuary (Orissa/ Odisha).
Bichitrapur is a huge mangrove swamp, about 14 kms beyond the popular beach town of Digha.
Roadies need to follow SH57 and drive past past Talsari Beach.

Incidentally, Kolkata to Digha via Kolaghat, Contai = 200 kms.

Roadies need to park their cars/ bikes after reaching Bichitrapur and board a motor boat for a 15 minutes ride till the island at the confluence of the river and Bay of Bengal. Motor boats normally charge Rs.1,000 - 1,200 for upto 8 persons. The boat will leave you at the island for 20 - 30 minutes and return to pick you up.

There are no staying facilities in Bichitrapur.
It's best to stay in hotels in Digha, New Digha or Talsari.

Photo credit: Madhumita Biswas Chakraborty. All the photos are from Bichitrapur.

NH6 between Chichira and Jamsola on 2015-04-30

Road update on 2015-04-30 by Kishalay Haldar driving a 2005 M&M Scorpio CRDe with wife and minor daughter enroute to Mumbai from Kolkata:

"NH6 between Chichira and Jamsola is just pure horror. The road is full of craters. Some are so deep that even my Scorpio could not negotiate them. I heard light scrapes and thuds in underbody. At places the entire width of the road is that deep and full of water. I had no choice but get into the crater without knowing how deep it is. The sides were worn out and slushy.
We reached Bahargora, the border chekpost between Jharkhand and Orissa, through that kind of road. As expected the place is madness. It is just a big field with 100s of huge trucks moving in all directions. We got an unsolicited advice from a local to take a bypass through the market and merge with NH6 at Jamsola. Looking at the chaos, we took that advice.
The bypass essentially is narrow village road, some 10km, but much better surface. After merging with NH6 the horror continued till the ghat section. Then onwards till Ghuntur (Near Keonjhar), we found road to be free of any major nuisance.
NH6 soon becomes two-way road and was marked as NH49".

Kishalaya Haldar left Kolkata at 5am and reached Sambalpur at 6pm.
He is thrilled that he could show his little daughter what an Indian village looks like.