The media isn’t wrong, but there is another side to Bangladesh. And it’s worth seeing.

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It seems many of my most memorable travel experiences have been slightly spontaneous visits to countries tacked on to the beginning of a trip while I wait for someone to arrive. Such as; Armenia before the Georgia and Turkey trip, Andorra before France, and Hong Kong before the Philippines. Bangladesh was another such trip, just a prefix before India, though it turned out to be a (the?) highlight of the whole three months.



Post master’s degree I wanted to escape as soon as possible. I really wanted a rest and I wanted to travel after being confined to Birmingham all year (apart from the sneaky week in Greece). It was decided that this master’s may lead to a permanent full-time job, rather than the contract work I’d been doing for a few years, thus immediately post-master’s might be the last opportunity for a while to go on a long trip.



I’ve been trying to go to India for years. India is a place that most people couldn’t believe I hadn’t been to, given the random places I have visited, and I felt it was a travellers necessity. If I had a pound for the times I’ve heard: “Oh you really must do India – it’s like nowhere else” I’d be seeing the world from my yacht. Due to friends bailing out at the last minute, I hadn’t been there. Now was my chance.



I would meet Julia at the beginning of September and we would travel in India for 2 or 3 months without having a plan because I was too busy writing a thesis and she was travelling in East Africa. Then all of a sudden, towards the second half of August, I realised I might get my thesis finished early (suggesting you weren’t supposed to put in quite as many hours on it as I had been doing). Therefore, I could begin the trip early. Julia’s plans couldn’t change, meaning I’d have a week and a bit by myself somewhere.



Planning trips just for me rather than with a partner or pal has different priorities. “Where would I like to go that would be completely undesirable to anyone else?” – Therefore saving the universally desirable places to be shared with someone. When considering a partner or pal, potential dangers become more important, long uncomfortable consecutive journeys are avoided, uncertain accommodation and food is taken into account; all those things bother me less when alone. Budget is also critical - would they be happy staying in a $2 hotel to save money and, conversely, would they be happy paying $500 dollars for some particular tour? Such financial contradictions often occur on the same day when I travel alone and are much easier to justify to myself than to others.



So considering I had about ten days prior to meeting Julia in Delhi, where could I go that wouldn’t involve massive extra flight costs and time? Somewhere not too far away from Delhi. The obvious answer was somewhere in India. It’s a huge country with lots to see so why not see more of it than we could see once we meet? Well, because we have talked about going to India together for a couple of years and we wanted to start our experience together and go through the culture shock and wising up process together.



So not India but near to India. Nepal was the next obvious answer, being a place I’ve always wanted to visit. But considering the previous but one paragraph, I shouldn’t visit anywhere famously wonderful by myself – such places are reserved for travelling with others (and I fancy doing a long trek in Nepal and ten days there wouldn’t be enough).



So not India, somewhere like Nepal but less appealing. Bangladesh fitted the bill perfectly. I don’t know anyone who’s been there (an added bonus) apart from two Bangladeshi friends, and whenever I mentioned my plans the common response was “why the hell do you want to go there?”. It seemed perfect.



What did I know about Bangladesh? It appears on the news a lot; usually to show people clinging to rooftops as devastating floods blanket the country; or more recently, to show people frantically digging for relatives through the rubble of collapsed garment factories, poorly constructed and overstaffed with underpaid workers to serve the world’s desire for cheap clothes. If you’d paid a bit more attention to news from Bangladesh, i.e. by clicking on the “South Asia” tab on the news websites, you may also have been aware of frequent hartals - mass strikes and protests that often turn violent; the dangerous and toxic ship-breaking yards where the world’s oil tankers go to die, and; (maybe just for the fellow hydrogeologists) the Dhaka groundwater problem, where the seventh most populated city in the world sits above heavily polluted shallow groundwater overlying deep groundwater naturally contaminated with arsenic – Dhaka will probably be the world’s 2^nd biggest city by 2020, what are they going to drink?



In other words, in the eyes of the media, few positive things seem to come out of Bangladesh. This blog is an attempt to correct that because I thought it was brilliant.



A spot of googling suggested the following as things to do in Bangladesh:

Cox’s Bazar - the world’s longest beach at 125 kilometres. Hmmm... maybe.

Dhaka – (almost) the world’s most densely populated and fastest growing city of 15 million people. I’m not really a city person.

The Sundarbans – the world’s biggest mangrove forest at over 10000 km² with the world’s biggest population of tigers. Now you’re talking.



It wasn’t easy to arrange a trip into the Sundarbans. The few companies I could find on the internet either didn’t reply to my emails or replied telling me that tourists didn’t really come until October/November so the boats weren’t running.

Tour company: “Maybe they will run if enough people sign up for the tour. Ask again next week.”

Me: “But I want to go on a tour next week.”

Tour company: “Yes, ask then.”



I found a trip a few days before I flew (via the very helpful Scarecrow Tours). The boat’s itinerary mentioned cruising down the huge rivers, dawn paddles along narrow waterways through the mangroves, and hikes across forested islands. Worryingly, 10am everyday on the boat was listed as “Snake Time”. Clarification was provided at the bottom of the page where potential snakes were listed as biscuits and bananas.



It was an overnight flight to Dhaka via Delhi, easy visa-on-arrival at the airport, taxi into town, a couple of hours in a cheap hotel for a shower and a bite to eat, then an overnight bus to Khulna in the south of Bangladesh. Everyone has a travel story about the most dangerous driving in the world; you are all wrong, it’s here. Sit at the back of a bus and you bounce around so much you cannot sleep; sit at the front near the almost constant horn and you cannot sleep. Under no circumstances should you look forwards through the windscreen as the aims of the bus drivers are to have their right foot pressed to the floor at all times, remain constantly on the wrong side of the road in order to overtake everything and to force oncoming traffic off the road. It’s better to be oblivious. Arrived in Khulna, cycle-rickshaw to another bus-station, another bus to Bagerhat, then hired an auto-rickshaw (a tuk-tuk) for a full day of seeing the sights. Quite a hectic start to the trip but then I thought I should get the latent hecticness (hecticity?) out of my system before I met up with Julia.



Bangladesh is blessed with three UNESCO World Heritage Sites, not bad for a country of its size; one more than Tajikistan and one less than Nepal, both of around the same area as Bangladesh. One of these sites is the Sixty Dome Mosque at Bagerhat. While not spectacular, it is definitely interesting. As you will no doubt remember from geography class at school, the entire country of Bangladesh is a delta formed by some of the world’s biggest rivers (Ganges, Brahmaputra, etc). Consequently, the country has almost no rock, which must be frustrating if you fancy building something big and lasting. However, Bangladesh is fabulously rich in mud, and you can turn mud into bricks; which the Bangladeshis seem to do a lot because you are always passing the kilns and chimneys of brickworks wherever you go. So the Sixty Dome Mosque is built of brick which makes it appear younger than its almost 600 years. It’s probably not worth going to Bangladesh for, but if you were passing, I’d recommend calling in. By the way, as you would have expected, the Sixty Dome Mosque has 81 domes.



There are a few other things to see around Bagerhat; mosques, mausoleums, Hindu temples and similar such ancient stuff. However, the highlights of this first day were rather the scenery and the people. Travelling along the backroads between the sights, I was really surprised just how beautiful the landscape is. Although, very little of it is actually land. The place is as flat as a fart and seemingly 99% water. The whole area (and this turned out to be true for Bangladesh as a whole) appears to be rivers and canals, fish and shrimp ponds, paddy fields and lakes, crisscrossed by roads and paths running on slightly raised embankments of earth between fairly ramshackle villages. The only solid looking buildings were the schools and mosques whose minarets poked up above the ever-present palm trees. And there are people everywhere. Bangladesh has by far the highest population density of any “proper” country in the world (i.e. not including tiny Singapore and Bahrain) with 1034 people per km² (Taiwan is second with merely 634 per km², while the comparatively roomy UK has 262 per km² – hermits should head to Mongolia; only 1.76 people per km²). Considering hardly any of Bangladesh is actually land then that density is amplified further. These little villages are pretty crowded with markets and folk going about their business, even the back roads are busy with packed buses, motorbikes and people herding animals, and the canals and ponds rarely do not contain a few fisherman, a few almost naked blokes lathered in soap suds, and a bunch of kids somersaulting in from the backs of wallowing water buffalo. When passing through these villages, and particularly when at the historical sites within Bagerhat, it became clear that the biggest tourist attraction that day was actually me.



This became a recurrent theme during my time in Bangladesh. Never have I felt more like a celebrity. Everywhere you go, everybody stares. But it isn’t unpleasant, the people are just interested and intrigued. Not many tourists pass through these parts so the incessant “hellos, how are you?s, where are you from?s, and, what are you doing here?s” seem more genuine than in many places. And everyone will want a photo of you, actually a photo with you, then the person who took the photo will give their phone to someone else to take a photo of you with them, then that person will shout someone else to use their phone for a photo with them, etc, it takes a long time to visit anywhere busy.



The next day the Sundarbans cruise began. The chief aim was tiger spotting. It is reckoned that around 500 tigers call the Sundarbans home – a greater population than anywhere else in the world. But the national park is massive, as big as Lebanon, and most of it is inaccessible, thus the chances of seeing a tiger on a three day safari are slimmer than slim.



On the boat were a lovely Dutch family of four and their mate, a crew of seven, and two park rangers – permanently armed to protect us from tigers and pirates. Days involved cruising down increasingly smaller channels with frequent stops to explore the forested islands; usually walking along purpose built and now dangerously rotten wooden walkways to keep you above the mangrove mud.



The water was generally the colour of hot chocolate and seemed to be of about the same consistency. It was interesting to think that that is the remains of the Himalayas drifting past, and in a couple of weeks I’d be up in those mountains where this rock dust comes from. It didn’t look too appealing for a swim and this was enhanced when they told me about the size of the crocodiles they often see.



When the tide is high, the channels take you between the tops of palm trees, but when it’s out, a strange prehistoric looking landscape is revealed. The roots of the mangrove trees reach down spider-like into the water and in other places poke back up through the thick grey mud as odd little stumps. It doesn’t look in anyway hospitable but that is exactly why it is such a refuge for wildlife; because humans have always stayed well away. We regularly saw different types of deer, wild boar, multitudes of pretty birds - all of which would make great tiger snacks - but no tigers. Not a footprint, nor a poo, nor a scratch on a tree, nothing. I bet that’s what the two-hundred or so people killed by tigers each year in the Sundarbans wish they could say as well. The honey collectors are a particular favourite dish of the tigers: These brave chaps wear masks on the backs of their heads when harvesting the wild bees nests because tigers won’t attack from the front. Having two faces would buy you at least an additional two seconds to escape which can’t be of too much use when on foot in the middle of the world’s biggest swamp and a three metre, quarter of a tonne Royal Bengal Tiger fancies having you for lunch. Good luck with that one lads. (I did later try the honey when back in town; it was delicious. Though, despite thinking it’s good to support these riverside communities, buying it felt a bit like buying a blood diamond).



What made up for not seeing a tiger (though the hope never faded until the very last moment of the trip), was the mudskippers. That may sound odd considering we did see a few endangered Ganges River Dolphins leaping around, but I preferred the mudskippers. These little mud-dwelling critters are completely amphibious fish that walk around on their pectoral fins on the mudflats breathing in the humid air and swim back into the river when the tide comes in. Mudskippers are the link between fish and every land-dwelling vertebrate, including me and you. I took a little time out to appreciate the evolutionary struggle they went through that ultimately led to me going on a trip to see them. I passed on your regards as well.



I missed the final dinner on the boat, which was a shame because the food and company had been great, in order to attempt to catch the overnight train from Khulna to Dhaka. This involved getting off the boat a little early at the first village that was connected by road to the rest of the country. The motorbike journey to Mongla was beautiful, fascinating and terrifying all at the same time. It took half an hour along small lanes through gorgeous scenery; little villages, fish ponds, rice fields, shrimp farms but all the time at top speed scattering the goats, cows and children in all directions. Then the ferry over the river, a bus to Khulna and an auto-rickshaw to the train station, arriving 40 minutes late but fortunately the train was running almost an hour late so I got it.



I didn’t sleep a great deal being the object of much friendly attention in the carriage and being directly beneath a quite violent fan that showered me with flying-insect parts throughout the night. Arriving at a Dhaka railway station in the early morning is saddening. I suppose the well-lit constantly peopled platforms and bridges provide a relatively safe haven compared to the city’s streets, however, I didn’t imagine having to step over quite so many sleeping bodies sparsely dressed in dirty rags, especially not so many huddled children.



Waiting for a bus up to the northeast of the country, I experienced the Bangladesh I’d seen on the news. It only rained for an hour or so, though it was heavy, and the road was soon inundated with about half a metre of water. If you throw all of your rubbish out into the street, particularly the plastic stuff like bottles and packaging, it washes into and blocks the drains. Obviously. So when it rains, which it often does, the water cannot drain away even though the road may be higher than the land around it. So the streets and the roadside houses/shops/businesses flood. Obviously. The solution: don’t throw rubbish into the streets. Obviously. (Additionally, I’m sure you remember from geography class at school the main reason why Bangladeshi floods are getting worse: deforestation in the Himalayas increasing the sediment load in the rivers thus river level is getting higher, etc, etc).



Sreemangal is optimistically known as the Switzerland of Bangladesh. Admittedly, after travelling in the pancake flat country for a week or so, the modest hillocks of Sreemangal may seem like mountains but none would take you more than five minutes to summit and there is not a cuckoo clock, watch, nor morally dubious bank account in sight. What there is a lot of is tea. The rolling mounds, it is difficult to even call them hills, are covered in carefully manicured tea plantations and the area is lovely.



Nearby is Lawachara National Park. Famous for the rare Hoolock Gibbon as well as leopards, bears, slow lorises, and maybe a tiger or two, the most abundant wildlife I came across were the leeches. Wandering through the dense soggy jungle with a giant leaf as an umbrella and trousers tucked into socks, whenever you paused and peered at the dark damp earth, you could honestly see the leeches coming at you from all directions. Fortunately they were about the size of a candle wick (can you tell I’m writing this at Christmas?) rather than the great fat slugs you see in films. Generally you could flick them off as they raced over up your legs but I discovered a few hours later when I saw expanding circles of red on my socks that the persistent ones can get through the weave of the material. I didn’t see any wildlife but it was still nice to be in the rainforest. Especially to visit villages of indigenous peoples around the edges and to explore the plantations sampling pineapple straight from the bush (recommended), limes straight from the tree (a bit less recommended), and chilli peppers straight from the plant (not at all recommended).



I had another very enjoyable day on a hired bicycle whose incredible weight was matched only by the uselessness of its brakes. It was hired from a cycle-rickshaw mechanics whose proud painters insisted I take a photo of them with their “art” created on the back of the rickshaws. Big-lipped big-breasted women were a common theme as well as, more disconcertingly, gun-toting or bloody-knife-wielding men. Bemused smiles and waves lined the route as I explored little villages within the tea plantations and regularly stopped at the ubiquitous chai stalls for a quick cuppa and to take advantage of the shade they offered.



Sreemangal is the home of the “internationally renowned” seven-layer tea which nobody outside of northern Bangladesh has ever heard of. When you order this magical brew the staff disappear behind a curtain for about ten minutes before serving you up a cup of warm stripy liquid or “tea” as they call it. It looks pretty and the seven layers do magically stay separate even while you are drinking it. However, the top layer consists of boiling water with a bit of cinnamon and the bottom layer is thick sugary gloop, with various multicoloured unknown substances in between. I’d stick to Tetley.



My final full day in Bangladesh is worth a proud mention. Usually I find that an icebreaker almost everywhere in the world is football. Here it is cricket. While talking about Bangladesh’s best player and current world number 1 all-rounder Shakib Al-Hasan walking down the street with some local chap, I was overheard and invited to a local cricket match. Upon arrival I mentioned I was from Yorkshire and all of a sudden that fact promoted me to opening batsman. I perhaps didn’t take the match seriously enough, attempted an almighty heave on the first ball, and hit it for four. Pretty good start. Unfortunately it then went downhill. I was out for 11 off 8 balls, caught and bowled audaciously attempting a sweep that went straight back to the bowler off the handle. Though it would have been 19 off 8 balls if two cracking cover drives hadn’t stopped dead in the same patch of foot-long grass right next to the bowler. When it was our turn to field I asked the captain what position he wanted me. His reply (true story): “Next to the cow”.





All in all, Bangladesh was great. It felt like “proper” travelling. The country is very different in every way to anywhere I’ve ever previously visited, and it is fascinating. I saw very few other tourists, nobody tried to rip me off, the food was plentiful and delicious, and travelling here is cheap. Sit at a table in a roadside restaurant and soon there will be six or seven people stood around the table watching you eat or drink or doing whatever you’re doing. Smile and everyone will smile back. Attempt a few words of Bengali and you will have friends for life.

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Photos

Sreemangal
Tea workers on their way to work.

Dhaka
These are the pictures you expected to see of Bangladesh. It had only been raining an hour.

Sreemangal
Young cricket fans who were itching to get a game.

Ranger Station, the Sundarbans
Rangers stay out here for months patrolling the park against illegal fishing and poaching.

Sixty Dome Mosque, Bagerhat
The 15th century mosque is one of Bangladesh's three UNESCO World Heritage Sites and has, you guessed it, 81 domes.

Durga Puja Idols, Hindu Area near Bagerhat
The beautiful idols are intricately created from clay before being carefully transported to Dhaka and ultimately carried into the river during the Durja Puja festival where they dissolve .

Hindu Area near Bagerhat
While looking around the Durga Puja idols I was invited to a delicious, but incredibly spicy (look at the chillies floating in the curry) lunch.

Mongla
The town sits either side of a very wide river. Frequent ferries across to the other side leave from the end of this jetty.

Mongla
Construction of the new port.

Jaymanirgol
The final riverside village we passed before entering the vast Sundarbans National Park - another UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Lunch Onboard the Sundarbans Cruise
Passengers = four and two halves
Crew = seven and two park rangers
Food = plentiful and delicious

Shower in the Sundarbans
Seemingly the monsoon season was not quite over.

Fishing Boats Shelter in the Sundarbans
Fishing is banned in the national park. These chaps had come in from the ocean to escape a storm.

The Sundarbans
A rare patch of blue sky.

Spotted Deer, the Sundarbans
Tiger food.

The Sundarbans
The walkway protects you from the crabs and mud, the ranger with the gun protects you from the tigers and pirates.

Mongla
Paying for the ferry across the river.

Dhaka
If you throw all your rubbish onto the street it blocks the drains. When it rains for merely an hour the water can't go anywhere because the drains are blocked with rubbish. The streets flood. Solution: Don't throw rubbish into the street. Seems obvious really.

Sreemangal
Travelling by bus is free if you go on the roof. Better view, natural air-con, and you get to talk to chaps like this transporting large jars of live fish.

Lawachara National Park
Home to rare gibbons, slow lorises, bears, leopards, etc and 1 billion leeches. Saw none of them (except for the leeches), but it was still nice to wander around.

Lawachara National Park
Organic biodegradable brollies - could sell them for a fortune in London.

Comments

[D MJ Binkley]

Bangladesh
We almost made it to Bangladesh two years ago but our plans changed. Enjoyed your impressions. I'd like to see those mudskippers. Hopefully we will make it there in the near future. Sounds like a great travel experience.