Our trip to Digha beach

I have had the greatest time when I spent 10 days with my sister in Calcutta, when we went to present a paper we had co-authored at Jadavpur University.

Now Calcutta is a very sooty city. A large layer of black covers almost everything. But it is a quaint city. It used to be the capital of the British empire till they shifted their headquarters to Delhi in 1911. There are a lot of old British monuments that still dot the city, and you should take a walk around to see the old mercantile buildings that still stand in the city square.

I'm going to talk about trip I took to Digha beach with my sister and one of our friends. We were supposed to go to Shantineketan, but my friend got late so instead we took a bus down (6 hours one way) to the popular tourist area of Digha beach which is on the shores of the Bay of Bengal.

Our bus was one of those rickety types - and the roads in West Bengal were absolutely atrocious. I must say, infrastructure was really lagging. My sister can sleep most of the time in moving vehicles - no matter how rocky - but I can't. So I kept my nausea at bay and tried to get through the journey!!

We reached Digha and it was nothing like what we expected. The beach was muddy and overcrowded. There were people everywhere and it was not that clean. I don't think we even ventured near the water. Because we were starving we did have lunch somewhere - I still don't remember the meal but I do remember it was pretty basic.

Since we were already on the coast, we decided to try our luck and go to another beach - any other beach that was not so crowded. So we found a taxi and told him to take us to a nice beach - that wasn't so populated. We must've driven 15 kms and we came across one of the nicest beaches anywhere in the world.

It was bordering a quaint little hamlet and had boats docked on the shore.

But that wasn't the reason I remember it.

We didn't know it but we had come at a time when these red crabs come out from the sea to lay their eggs on the beach. The beach was a sandy light brown, and the crabs were shocking red. There were thousands of red crabs dotting the beach. It was the most beautiful scene. And we came upon it unintentionally. I tried to take pictures but everytime you approach, the red crabs just vanish inside their little nesting holes.

You'd think there weren't too many mysteries left in the world.

But you'd be wrong.