Chandpal Ghat

Kolkata’s primary passenger ferry terminal, a concrete pier of waiting areas and ticket booths handling tens of thousands of daily crossings. Arriving here from Howrah is cinematic: the Kolkata bank assembles itself before your eyes, with the 18th- and 19th-century facades of the Customs House and B.B.D. Bagh’s old trading estates coming into view: the riverfront from which the East India Company once administered its trade. Lord Cornwallis landed here in 1786; the ghat itself is named, in a 250-year-old joke, after an ordinary local shopkeeper.