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Published: February 26th 2010
For more of my photos, or to buy my book, please visit www.nickkembel.com Upon hearing ‘Bangladesh’, most people will naturally ponder various images, which come to them primarily from the media. I did once too. Natural catastrophes that take tens, even hundreds of thousands of lives, over, and over, and over again. The most crowded nation on earth. One of the poorest too. The country is viewed essentially as a write-off by much of the world, a forgotten land where human and natural suffering exist on a scale so grand that few of us can handle the burden of even imagining that we could in some way help, or even worse, actually want to go there.
But I want to ignore those ideas, tell you a few things that you probably don’t know about the country (that is, the good things!), and most importantly, I want to give you a short description; the story of what happens when one lone, foreign soul is plunked down right in the heart of it, by choice, and is forced to observe, participate, and react to what he sees, if only for a very limited period of time, and how this can
affect him.
PART ONE: THE MYTHS
Financial poverty equals poverty of the heart and/or soul. The environment of Bangladesh is a lost cause, due to overcrowding, pollution, and natural disasters. Did you know that Bangladesh has recently
a. Banned the use of plastic bags (one of the first countries to do so)
b. Gone on a frenzy of creating National Parks and protected wildlife areas, as well as educating the public about environmental awareness
c. Banned the use of petrol and diesel vehicles in all major cities and soon the entire country, replacing them with CNG (compressed natural gas) vehicles
Poor Muslim countries are unsafe for travel due to the possibility of terrorism or maltreatment of westerners. If you have kept up with my blogs on this journey, you may have noted one point that I have been hammering in, and that is of the absolute and overwhelming hospitality and kind treatment that outsiders experience as visitors in Muslim nations, and Bangladesh is no exception (see Part 3: Love).
There is one particular gesture that comes to mind, common to most Muslim nations, and it is one that gets me every
time. When you are meeting a new person and shaking hands (something that you do dozens of times every day in a Muslim country, because everybody wants to meet you), they will simultaneously place their free hand over their heart, in a manner that indicates something beyond the formality of the handshake, something to the effect of, “I welcome you with an open heart, with love, as a brother”. Many exchanges involve no verbal communication whatsoever. Countless locals just want to meet me, stand by me, or have me come sit with them for a while, without even being able to say a single word, and then when I excuse myself awkwardly to leave and I turn down their gestures to stay longer, they do the heart gesture as we part, and it just melts my heart a little bit.
PART TWO: CHAOS
I have traveled enough that I sometimes forget that I am not immune to the intensity of shock that can come with arriving to a new place. Perhaps it makes sense to note, or perhaps it is merely coincidental, but often these ‘bad days’ occur on my first day in a new country, as was
the case on my first day arriving in Bangladesh.
I was dumped from my 13 hour bus ride from India right in the middle of Dhaka, a city of 15 million and counting which, on the surface at least, has the appearance of absolute chaos. If you have been to India then you can at least imagine, but it is different than India for sure. The feeling one gets from the major streets of India is one that is overwhelming on the senses; and only a vivid and detailed description of the all the colors, tastes, and smells can even hint towards what it feels like to experience that. Cows and various other animals, feces, urine, and exhaust fumes, marigolds, loud music, bubbling pots of hot oil, sticky sweets, and multi-colored temples might find their way on to that description.
In Dhaka those things exist bu are much less prominent. In fact, the whole of the Dhaka experience can be summed up by one single element: the cycle rickshaw. By some estimates, 600, 000 or more of these human powered vehicles clog every single lane, road, intersection and highway of this enormous impoverished metropolis. If Dhaka were a
living body, and the roads it’s veins, then the rickshaws are the blood that pumps through it, spreading vitamins and minerals, or humans beings and their needed resources, throughout the being.
I got to learn for myself as soon as I got off the bus, and some friendly locals I’d met on the bus helped me to communicate my destination and settle a price with one of the huge crowd of waiting drivers. Because, contrary to what I had expected, not one of the drivers I encountered in Bangladesh, not a single one, spoke a single word of English. This is quite different from all the other countries in South Asia, where just about everybody speaks some rudimentary English at the very least.
My driver, like every single other rickshaw driver in the country, was a miniature little man, frail, about a head shorter than me, wearing a loose button up shirt which hangs over a plaid
lungyi, or sarong, and disintegrating remains of sandals. His miniature little legs would pedal myself and my four heavy bags (the things one accumulates at the tail end of a long journey and you allow yourself to start shopping…) across a
significant stretch of city for over 20 minutes at the cost of approximately 30 cents.
Deal made, head waggles side to side, goodbye to new friends from the bus, thank yous and exchanges of e-mail addresses, and we take off. And we are immediately sucked into the vein, or rather we became a part of it, this living, breathing, viscous mass of metal, wheels and people that flow together as one on the streets of Dhaka. The carriage that is dragged along behind the bicycle is miniature, and with every heave and bump of the potholed pavement I clutch to all my possessions so they do not fall off. There is no order to the traffic, and while it generally flows in one direction, there are frequent near-collisions of fellow rickshaws coming at you from all sides or even head on.
There are many actual collisions too, but the pace is slow enough that most of them don’t cause damage to the vehicles. But some do, and every rickshaw, as well as every other form of motorized vehicle, is lined or sometime completely covered with scratches, dents, holes, and bumps. The traffic is so dense that you sort
of all bump along together, and the driver navigates around each oncoming obstacle in our immediate vicinity.
At our first major intersection the driver slows, but it is only in collision with the rickshaw in front of us that we come to a complete stop. There is a sort of metal bumper on the back of each rickshaw for this purpose. And then comes the bump from behind us. The first time it scares you, but then you learn to expect it. But still after many times, fellow rickshaws sometimes bump you a little harder than expected and it shocks you into full attention.
I look all around me and there must be at least one hundred other rickshaws in our small mob waiting for the light, all pressed together in the space that would normally accommodate 6 or 8 cars. There are few engines, like those that form the collection growl characteristic of most major Asian city roads, so that at this intersection we sit together in relative silence, given the density and size of our form. I could reach out and touch many different people at any given time.
We turn a corner and collide
with a man on a scooter who, based on the status-derived ego dictated by his more expensive form of transportation, decides to start slapping my driver aggressively as they argue, and then just as abruptly the confrontation ends and both drivers take off in different directions.
Off again and then we turn on to a smaller street with more obstacles (mainly people and the occasional animal cart) to navigate. My driver reaches out with his hand as he drives, physically pushing people out of the way so that we do not hit them. I watch in disbelief, and he grinds down on the pedal with the full weight of his tiny body at each turn of the wheel, to get me to my destination. He does not sweat, nor does he sigh. He sings and whistles merrily the entire way.
But he takes me to the wrong place.
For the tail end of my trip, my last major frontier on my journey, I had decided for once to treat myself to a higher end hotel. Perhaps on par with your average hotel back home, but for about one fifth of the price, the mere thought of having
a hot, properly functioning shower, a toilet that does not require a bucket of water dumped from face level in order to flush, and a bed with sheets that do not visually display the history of their recent and not so recent occupants was enough to entice me into spending the extra cash.
And so, having disembarked at the wrong hotel well after dark, I maintained my determination to find the one I had carefully selected beforehand. I paid my driver (he had no change of course so I gave him more than double the agreed upon wage, instead of fighting for my 30 cents change) and flagged down a new one. But without any shared language, communication attempts were standstill.
So I tried a new tactic, which would quickly become a part of my everyday survival in this country: wait for a passing man on the street who is dressed in neat, western clothing (and therefore more likely to be educated and speak at least some minimal English), and ask him for help to communicate with a driver. And without exception my tactic was successful, for the people I would approach would quickly realize the hopelessness of
my situation and immediately and proudly assume full responsibility of my well-being.
And so I am off on a new rickshaw, and it quickly becomes apparent that the driver actually does not know where my hotel is, even though he had said he did and we’d agreed on a price. He is shouting the hotel name to random other drivers as we pass. After some time I become more and more frustrated. I pay him and get off, hauling my bags on to my back, one at a time. I will walk.
I walk, for a long time, and I actually do somehow find my magical hotel, which by this point in my exhaustion, stress, hunger and the need to urinate, has been elevated to the status of heaven in my mind.
“How much is a single room”? I ask to the ultra professional suit & tie behind the desk. (My guidebook tells me that these higher end hotels are so desperate for customers in Bangladesh that they will almost immediately offer you 50-70% discounts at the slightest inquiry).
“2100 taka Sir (30$). But I am sorry Sir, we are full.”
The uniformed bellboy at
the door must have felt at least some of my absolute heartbreak from the look on my face as he opens the door for me to leave, and opens the second door so that my excess cargo of backpacks strapped to my body can squeeze through.
“I am deeply sorry Sir”, and he seems to really mean it, but I sense an underlying hint of pleasure in his tone, knowing that he will never in his life sleep in a room so lavish as the one that he guides guests to every day of his life.
I walk and I walk. I step through mazes of people sleeping on the sidewalks and roads, and dart through late night traffic jams, holding my hand out as the locals do, palm facing oncoming traffic, as if to say, “please don’t run me over”. I try another posh hotel, with the same response. And one by one, I try every single hotel in the neighborhood, and they are all full. Finally, at the last one, where they stop me before I even get up to the door, I demand, “Why?! Why are you all full?”, as I glare up to building
in the sky. There must be hundreds of rooms in each of these places, and I have not seen a single other foreigner in the city.
“Because of the South Asian Games, Sir. These hotels have been booked for weeks! Didn’t you know”?
I didn’t know. But what I did know is that this felt like ultimate defeat. I hadn’t eaten in ten hours, I‘d been up since 5am, I was ready to piss my pants, it was getting late, my back hurt from carrying all my luggage for so many blocks, and I was prepared to hand over any amount of money for the luxury of a hot shower to clean my now filthy body and a soft bed to lie in. And for once in 6 months I wanted to splurge, after fighting off hundreds and hundreds of touts trying to lure me into their nice places, and now that I actually wanted some luxury, it seems that fate wanted otherwise.
I walked back to the street, unstrapped my bags one by one and set them to the filthy ground, sat down, and almost started to cry. For a moment I actually contemplated getting my
blanket out and setting up camp with all the street-dwellers, of which this city might possibly have more than any other in the world. Would they even notice? It was so dark because there were few streetlights, so probably not. Would I sleep? No. And even if I did, would I wake up without a camera and laptop? Possibly.
A small group of men, mostly from the hotel, came out to see what I was doing. “Do you know anywhere that I could sleep”? I asked. “I think all of the hotels in the city are full, Sir”. “What about in the Old City?”. “Well, you can try, but maybe it is not safe at this time, Sir”. “Can you help me to get there”, I asked, sheepishly. And so, they guided me like a child to another rickshaw, and told him to get me to a hotel in the Old City. Across the city again, into the poor(er) district, the driver leaves me at a dark stairwell, I walk up three flights of stairs to reception, and it is full. I walk to another, and it is full.
The city’s forgotten ones, the homeless, diseased, and the
beggars, are sprawled out and chatting amiably around little campfires on the streets. Groups of men are huddle in impossible little spaces, in the dividers in the roads, in front of overflowing garbage dumpsters, each with a basket displaying one type of fruit lit by a single candle in a jar, still hoping for that end of the night sale.
And one final ride on yet another rickshaw, with the assistance of a man who GUARANTEES that this Muslim hotel he knows of will have a room and FINALLY they say yes. “The LAST room”, the unsmiling man at the desk tells me, and I check in around midnight, after three arduous hours of wandering Dhaka with all my luggage. My hand starts to shake as I dig for bills in the side pouch of my bag. I hadn’t changed much money at the border, and I am left with exactly enough to pay for the room and that’s it.
Step 1, accomplished. Steps 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, consecutively: urinate, find an ATM, find food (read: find a vegetarian meal in a meat loving Muslim country, in the middle of the night, in the poorest neighborhood
in the city), have a cold shower to get all the black dust off my body, and then sleep.
Having accomplished everything up to step 5, and falling on to my stained sheets, to the sound of horns outside and men hacking and spitting in neighboring rooms, I ask myself, “Why not Thailand, where my friends are sitting on the beach right now”?
I have all of the next day to accomplish a new set of goals: eat again, find functioning internet to check my e-mail, find my tour company to pay for the tour I will be taking, and then check out the sites of Dhaka! Except that the first three goals take me the entire day to accomplish, in a manner not unlike my arrival to the city, the main difference being that in broad daylight my presence on the streets of Dhaka is met with the same level of staring that a naked alien might get if he walked into a courtroom. Except that the stares in Bangladesh are merely curious and benign in nature, and often accompanied by a barrage of hellos.
The point that I hope comes across is that when traveling
a country like Bangladesh, the ‘sites’ are practically irrelevant. It is the adventure, the thrill of being so out of your element that your life and safety is in the hands of random strangers, and above everything the CHAOS of it all that forms the vast majority of your experience. Whether it sends you running, makes you write a blog to complain about it (and then as soon as you leave you wish you were back there and spend months planning your return), or you absolutely love it, is a matter of individual taste and experience.
I have chosen to elaborate on only one point, which is not a myth, that the country of Bangladesh IS extremely overcrowded, and this is felt in Dhaka in a manner that I don’t think can be experienced anywhere else on earth. But in my description I deliberately left out some of the more beautiful aspects of the experience, in the same manner that newspapers only tell you about the tragedies that befall the nation.
PART THREE: LOVE
After many more rickshaw rides and a few hours of searching, I do manage to find Internet the next day. But there is
a power out, and I have to wait for about 30 minutes. I smoke
beedees (Indian hand rolled leaf cigarettes) with a young Bangladeshi man who studied in Malaysia. The Internet gets running again and he insists on adding me as a friend on facebook.
In my e-mail inbox, the first message I check is from one of the random Bangladeshi men who helped me out on the street last night. He is quite concerned about my welfare and wants to make sure I found a room last night. The second is from Lovely, a young woman from Kolkata who I met on the bus coming in, who is in Dhaka for her uncle’s wedding. Unfortunately I will miss the wedding day itself, but she wants me to come over and meet her extended family.
I arrive at Lovely’s relative’s place on an hour-long rickshaw ride. She greets me and sits me down in the living room, and then proceeds to bring in each of her 26 family members who are sleeping in the relatively small but upscale apartment building for the wedding. The groom himself is wearing a heavy metal t-shirt, and tells me he lives in
Boys, Local Bus Ferry
The one on the left worked on the bus I tookLondon. His parents chose his wife at home in Bangladesh, and he has just flown here to meet her, marry her, and then take her with him back to London. I accept tea and snacks from the family, and then when I propose a group picture, the women all run off to fix themselves up. We pose and the youngest child shrieks with every flash, setting off rounds of laughter. I depart and take another hour-long cycle rickshaw back to my hotel. At one intersection I feel something touching my leg, and I look down to see a man with no legs, propped up on a small board with wheels. I give him some change and his face erupts into an enormous smile.
The next day I am off on a day-long bus ride, about half of which consists of local ferry rides where you can get off the bus and mingle with other passengers. The young boy who works on the bus is delighted to show me around the ferry. He takes me to the captain’s room, to the snack bar, and to the top of the ferry for a panoramic view. Groups of people lounge on the
ferry floor in the tiny spaces between vehicles, and they all beckon for me to come sit with them when I pass. Nobody speaks any English.
I arrive at night to the city of Khulna, where I will begin a three-day boat tour into the heart of Sundarbans National Park, in the southwest corner of Bangladesh. It is here that the Padma (Ganges) river from Tibet and India breaks into a network of canals and then mixes with seawater to form a unique and extremely remote mangrove environment that is home to a higher concentration of tigers than anywhere else on earth. On average the Sundarban Bengal Tigers eat one person every three days, mainly shrimp and honey farmers who work in the mangroves with little to no protection. Our boat houses 20 tourists, mainly educated and wealthy Bangladeshi families, and a scattering of foreign NGO workers, as well as nine local staff members (including two armed escorts). At night the boat docks in a bay with a handful of other tour boats. We are told that they stick together to prevent armed attacks from bandits.
We spend all of day one cruising downstream to the sea. Civilization
Brahminy Kite, Sundarbans National Park
These giant birds were constantly following our boat fades and then disappears entirely. Giant birds follow our vessel all day, feasting on the fish killed by the propellers, and river dolphin jump in the water beside us. I pass the hours sitting on a cushion on the roof of the boat. The passing scenery and constant hum of the boat is highly conducive to contemplation. Alone for hours with my thoughts, my mind starts taking over, recalling the heartbreaks of my past, drama and jealousies, stress and uncertainties. I fall into a trap of thinking and worrying and over-analyzing. The sort of thoughts that creep up when you isolate yourself from everyone and everything you know for an extended period of time. What am I doing and where am I going?
All the while I maintain a façade of serenity and pretend to read my book. In the midst of my mental anguish, a Bangladeshi woman from across the boat approaches me. She knows what I am doing.
“Close your eyes and breathe in 5 times”. I don’t say anything, but I do as she says, and she guides me through a meditation.
When open my eyes several minutes later, the world has changed. The sun
is setting. My mind is blank and free. I look across the boat and the woman is sitting cross-legged with her young daughter, facing one-another and meditating together. Another daughter is sitting in lotus pose and bowing to the sunset, palms pressed together and head falling down to the boat floor.
On day two we go on a variety of mangrove tours. We observe white spotted deer and giant tree snakes. We walk through the bush to a deserted clay beach where the Padma reaches the sea and deposits its Himalayan sands. We stray into the luke warm waters of the Bay of Bengal and sink to our knees in clay. We spot giant Bengal Tiger paw prints in the sand. Our group becomes more and more acquainted and conversations become more interesting and revealing.
As time passes I become closer and closer with Saadia and Saeema, the two daughters. I feel an overpowering sense of kinship with them, perhaps derived from my feelings of solitude from my own family and two sisters. We become inseparable. At 18 and 14 years old, they are the most intelligent and spiritually aware teens I have ever met. They tell me
that age is a mental illusion, anyways. Under the guidance of their mother, who practices meditation and massage to heal the terminally ill, they explain to me some of the ins and outs of Ayurveda (traditional Indian medicine), meditation, and healing. They read my palms, my elements, and diagnose my emotional illness. They tell me things about myself that are true but that I hadn’t told them. They give me advice that I have spent over a decade of traveling and education trying to figure out.
Mother, daughter and daughter sit together, embracing each other in the way that Asian people of the same gender unselfconsciously tend to do. I tell the Mother she is a Buddha. She says, “I know. But actually, I am not the Buddha, because I stay in this world to help people”. I tell her that she is a Bodhisattva, because she chooses to stay. “It is not a choice, it is just my duty”. The father joins and we all meditate together.
Day three passes in similar manner, as we cruise peacefully back to the overwhelming crowds of populated Bangladesh. I emerge from the frontier a new person. I realize that seven
months of intensive, uncomfortable, hardcore travel to some of the most disputed and unvisited corners of the world has all led me up to this experience, meeting this family. This is why I came to Bangladesh, and this is why I had to have those horrible first days. Everything culminated in this encounter; all of my baggage, uncertainties, and lonesomeness were undone in this single meeting, and the result was an overwhelming sense of emotional release. Perhaps part of it was just timing, at the tail end of my trip, at my loneliest point, after seeing so many unimaginable things and traveling unimaginable lengths, but I learned more about myself from that family than I can possibly explain.
My time comes to get off the boat. It does not feel real. I will never see them again. I leave a note with the family that says I love them. I cry and cannot speak. I stumble with my packs onto a little paddleboat, which takes me to the shore. It is full of fisherman, but they cannot see my tears in the dark. I get on an overnight bus back to the chaotic capital, Dhaka. I wonder how it
is possible that this family can find so much serenity, love, and time for peaceful practice while living at the core of this immensely chaotic and overcrowded place. Perhaps the two extremes cannot exist without the other.
Several weeks have passed since this experience, but the full weight of exactly what happened has still not hit me. I feel extremely emotional when I recall our conversations and the times we shared, and when I look at the pictures I start to cry. I still communicate with Saadia and Saeema, the two daughters, and they continue to give me advice and guide me. They also confirmed their mutual feelings about the experience. They await my return in Bangladesh.
For more of my photos, or to buy my book, please visit www.nickkembel.com
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Andrew Stacey
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These blogs are great! Keep 'em coming..