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Published: December 1st 2022
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Travelling in to Dhaka from the airport at 1 am, the traffic is horrendous. Three or four lanes of vehicles interwoven; hooting, flashing lights, sirens, belching fumes, dust; road works and half-built structures in the gloom beyond the headlights; dense housing, shops, advertising with the distinctive sanskrit letters of the Bangla language. Welcome to Bangladesh.
The lane to the hotel is blocked by a truck that is unloading bricks … at one in the morning. We discover the next day why: trucks are banned from Dhaka during the day so have to unload at night. The next day we meet the labourers who carry the bricks into the site; each man has 20 bricks balanced on his head on a board; they use one free hand to help them climb the ladder to the second story.
The streets are equally chaotic in the daytime: people, some with a dozen live chickens dangling from one hand, dodge around dogs, motorbikes, cycle rickshaws, handcarts full of fruit and veg, cars, tuk-tuks and more, all vieing for space. Ignoring it all, men sit at the side of the road selling fish, so fresh that it is still flapping,
while clusters of students sit on the kerb and do last minute revision for today's college entrance exam.
After a day around Dhaka seeing the sights we are off on a launch. We learn that in Bangladesh a ferry is a small boat to get you and, perhaps, vehicles across a river while a launch is a big boat with cabins that transports you around the delta. We board our launch for the night to get to Moroliganj; our very small first class cabin has two narrow beds, air con and a TV (one fuzzy local channel) but no washbasin or loo; the 'facilities' are in the corridor. As the launch starts its journey, the corridors outside our cabin fills with bodies; it seems that it is nicer sleeping in the first class corridor than on the third class deck. The bodies make going to the loo in the middle of the night a bit tricky and the locals are doing their washing in the basins.
The next day we are off in a small boat to see floating markets and floating vegetable gardens.The vegetables include lots of different gourds, aubergine, onions, radishes and
turnips. There is also some industry, mainly brickworks and, worryingly, logging. This is life in the Bangladesh delta; rivers everywhere, indeed there seems to be more water than land. Villages face the waterway which is tidal, a 2-3 metre tide, with high muddy banks.
At the end of the day we drive, via a short car ferry, to Mongla where we are supposed to board our second launch. However, the port workers are on strike for more pay - there's a cost of living crisis here too - and the port is closed. So instead, we walk to a passenger ferry, our fourth boat, and then get a tuk-tuk out of town. We are to meet our boat in a creek, half an hour away.
The tuk-tuk ride ends at a village pier where our fifth boat, the village ferry, awaits to take us out to our sixth boat, our private launch and home for the next three days. We're quickly aboard and our launch immediately heads south into the Sundarbans National Park, the largest mangrove forest in the world and home to over 150 Bengal tigers. The launch wanders along wide rivers and
small creeks, to eventually reach the Bay of Bengal. On the way, we take side trips in the rowing boat, well it's a big canoe really, up narrow channels to see the wildlife; no tigers, although we do see fresh tiger footprints on a beach. We see fresh water dolphins, spotted deer, monkey, monitor lizards, four types of crab (one becomes curry for our evening meal) and many birds - black drogons with very long tails, kingfishers, egrets and herons.
We also get off to walk through the jungle.This is where the armed ranger, who is travelling with us, comes in useful keeping an eye out for tigers. Parts are dense with trees and vines, jungle as we expect it, but other areas are covered in tall grasses that grow above our heads, great tiger country. These grasses are used by local people to make thatch, which they cover the roofs and walls of their huts with.
On the coast of the bay, we visit a research station that was damaged by a big cyclone in 2007. Uprooted and decapitated trees are everywhere and some concrete buildings are just ruins. The local people's thatch
huts wouldn't have stood a chance.
After three days, it is time to head back to Mongla where the strike is, luckily, over. It is a huge port 11 miles inland, full of ocean-going ships waiting their turn. We snake in between the ships to reach our quay and soon head off to see the ancient '60 Dome Mosque' which, it turns out, has a 70 dome roof. It is an impressive and lovely building in a serene setting.
On the river banks near Mongla, fishermen catch baby king prawns, just a thick black hair about 10 mm long. These are sold to the prawn farms around the city, where the prawns are grown to full size in huge ponds. There are hundreds of square ponds, it is clearly a big industry. As we head north on the 6:15 am train, the prawn farms give way to rice paddies and, further up the delta, the crops become more diverse: mustard, spinach, gourds, papaya, sugar cane, tomatoes and bananas. The land is intensively farmed and farm workers are busy bringing in the harvest; rice is harvested three times a year here.
Our
final stop of the day is a complex of Hindu temples built of terracotta. Every face of every temple is covered in intricate carvings; they are impressive in the afternoon sun. We are on Bangladesh's western border with India tonight and tomorrow we will start to make our way slowly east across the country to Chittagong.
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