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COVER STORY


Guy Mansell discovers a rare voyage along the Ganges through the centre of the Sub-Continent


riverboat MV Sukapha from slithering beneath the 2km-long bridge at Mokabeh.


M 70 WORLD OF CRUISING I Winter 2012-13


But then, she is a Goddess, a symbol of life with all its uncertainties. Tours of Patna were on the programme for that day anyway. It simply meant a long, horn-blasting drive to where she was anchored downstream at the Bridge. The place meant nothing not so long ago, just a ferry port that, in the early 1900s, was managed by one “Jim” Corbett, born in 1875 to Irish parents in Uttarkhand. His boyhood had been spent pursuing a passionate interest in nature, which developed into


other Ganges seemed a little cross when I arrived in Patna. The Mon- soon had arrived late and the water levels were flood-high, hindering our


being a hunter and Colonel in the British army. As a boy, I had read his book Maneaters of Kumaon, published in the early 1950s.


He told of his time becoming a ‘Robin Hood,’


even called a Saddhu (saint), pleaded to by terrified villagers to rid them of man-eating tigers and leop- ards. He had lived and worked in Mokabeh before being commissioned by the British administration to cull documented man-eaters, like the ‘Champawat’ tiger, which had torn to death 436 victims and the ‘Panar’ leopard, with more than 400! As a naturalist, he later studied the big cats,


championing their conservation, and was instru- mental in creating India’s first Tiger Refuge that now bears his name. Sukapha was anchored half a mile from Corbett’s


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