Mandarmani & Tajpur

 A college friend of mine and me, with whom we have been on numerous ‘bachelor’ trips, discarded our bachelorhood to include our families this time. We formed a WhatsApp group and zeroed in on a place by the sea: Mandarmani. IIRC correctly this was on 5th Jan and we were planning for the 9th Jan weekend. As such there was a dearth of ‘proper’ accommodation. My friend took the responsibility and found a very basic hotel for the night.

We started around 8 in the morning, my friend from the North Calcutta and me from South. We were supposed to meet at Sher-e-Punjab at Kolaghat. I had expected that there will be huge jams at Santragachi/Kona Expressway, but thankfully there wasn’t any such issue and we were able to cruise smoothly. We did face, however a huge queue at the Bagnan toll plaza and lost half an hour.

We ordered Aloo Paranthas and curd for the adults whereas the kids had sandwiches. Needless to say there was a sea of people at Sher-e-punjab. Resumed the journey and faced quite a few jams enroute especially in the Nandakumar – Mandarmani route due to construction activities. Finally we managed to reach Mandarmani at 3 in the afternoon and headed straight to a beach shack.

The next 7 hours was spent in the shack. We started with tea, followed by maggi, fried eggs, fish fingers and numerous other knickknacks. It was also my friend’s daughters birthday and we had a nice, little birthday celebration.  We had packed our dinner from the shack and on reaching the resort we spent a couple of hours engaged in chitchat after which we had the dinner that had gone slightly cold.

My friend had promised to wake me up at 5 in the morning to watch the sunrise. But when we managed to wake up finally it was past 8. Had a cup of tea and took a walk along the beach and reached the ‘mohana’ (confluence of the river with the sea). Also, observed that the Mandarmani beach has become very dirty littered with waste and channels of sewage water. The pristine nature, which was the hallmark of this beach 10 years back is now clearly missing.

After breakfast we headed to Tajpur – a journey for little more than 30 mins and took shelter at a known shack where we had some excellently cooked pomfret (I believe 2 years back). Hoping that the quality would remain good, we ordered our lunch of Galda Chingrir curry, Desi murgir curry with potato apart from the basic thali. While the lunch was being prepared we had some coconut water, ventured to the sea, did some photography of the beach and took photos of the group.

Around 2 in the afternoon the lunch was ready and it was excellently cooked one. Steamed rice, moong dal, sliced lemon, aloo bhaja followed by the prawn and chicken made for a great lunch (which was incidentally the birthday treat 😊 ).

My friend even packed some fresh pomfret to carry home and we packed some crab curry. After a tea break at Sher-e-Punjab in the evening, we reached home around 8.