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Diary - 2009 April (Bangladesh)

2009-04-03

Bangladesh - First Impression

I took the train from Kolkata to Dhaka - which took quite some time, everybody was looking at me like stupid, but for me, it was the perfect decision! As I cannot read in busses (I get sick), this was much better for me and the train was cheap, comfortable, not full and just loaded with nice people.

Border crossing was somehow funny and extra complicated with filling out a thousand forms and queuing up a gazillion times, but hey, I was used to that already! :-) I think I would have missed something without! :-)

The weather was good and so I had a perfect view over the country! Haven't seen anything greener than Bangladesh! Nice rural villages, simple life on the streets and on the fields and just one field after another.

Taking a taxi and trying to get to my hotel was the first fight. Bangladeshis hardly can go with the truth - all the time they have to pretend, that they understood and knew everything to find out later the opposite. Three hard weeks started!

It was a fight to find a taxi, to negotiate the price and then to find the hotel. As I am a 'whitey', everybody supposed I would take one of the super posh hotels in town - which I did not of course! :-) So ignoring my wish to go to a certain hotel recommended in the bible (Lonely Planet) the taxi driver drove me to the Sheraton hotel (a night for about Euro 270,-). When I told him again, where I wanna go it took us another hour for about two kilometers and about three phone calls and finally me insisting to give the commands where to go. It became very late when I fell into my bed and the first positive impression started to fade away!

I was quite lucky that I knew quite some people, who had been there already, so I knew a little bit what would come and where to go.

2009-04-03 to 2009-03-10

Dhaka

Still motivated as I was, I started with a hard core sightseeing day in the capital Dhaka. It's a big shit hole, as Adriana would say (and that's the best description I have heard). It's the dirtiest city I was in my life! After walking around for half an hour, when you touch your skin (especially when you're bald) your finger nails are dirty in a way they never were before! Next to that you get depth within minutes, because the only thing that really works in Bangladesh is the horn!
The 'must sees' were very much disappointing - a simple, hardly renovated city palace of an old rich, which after been in India for 8 months was simple not worth going to.
As the town grew, the city expanded over the river and so each day about 10000 people cross the river in both ways. Some in engine driven speedboats but the majority in small nut shells rushing through the waves and busy water by one side paddling (a special technique)!

The national museum was quite good and above all they had a funny department: The classics of art. Including Klimt’s 'Kiss', Da Vinci’s 'Last Supper', Raphael’s 'School of Rom', Michelangelo’s 'Creation of Adam', Picasso, Matisse, etc. - all copies of course. Hardly any Bangladeshi would every be able to afford a journey to these places or museums! Welcome to the poorest country of the planet!

2009-04-11 to 2009-03-15

Rocket from Dhaka to Khulna and the South

The best I could do (thanks Casper) was taking the Rocket down to Khulna. A 32 hour boats trip with a paddle wheeler through the whole south of Bangladesh with its innumerable rivers, streams and creeks. I had a first class cabin which gave me privacy and just some chitchats with upper class Bangladeshis. Food three times a day (well, it was always the same!) and a deck in the front just to sit, have a soft drink (no alcohol in the whole country - back to Islam!) watch the fantastic landscape and some fishermen and relax! Life was good! I could imagine the life of the colonial rulers! :-)

The arrival in Khulna was a shock! I haven't seen a worse city than that! Just dirt, run-down houses, scruffy cars and restaurants (the ones you don't wanna go in). The bible told me where to sleep but going there was again a fight. It was already dark so the rick-shaw mob knew, that you wanna go home and tries pushing prices. Not with me - let's fight! After hard core bargaining a rick-shaw took me and started driving. Of course he stopped at every hotel where he gets commission and tried to tell me, that this would be my hotel. They always try it the stupid way, which makes you disbelief everything they say - which is very bad! Especially when you meet nice guys! You can't trust them anymore. After checking into a very ugly room, I knew already I will not stay a single night longer! The hotel, the food and just the whole town was ugly!

In an internet cafe I met a nice Moslem who helped me out and offered me a candy - I was already so skeptical and protective that I had to force myself to take it and be nice. It's really a shame, how they treat you and how you get prejudiced - you stop being open for the rare beauty!

Next day I checked out how to book a tour to the famous Sunderbands (the world biggest mangroves forest). Tours really into the forest are extremely expensive, so I decide just to get a glimpse by driving myself to the starting point of the forest.

Next day I arrived in Mongla. A shithole I would kill myself within two days, if I would be forced to life here! :-) Of course I exaggerate, but it's just some houses in the middle of nowhere, just very dirty, the street is not really a street and you don't really want to buy anything to eat - it's just too dirty! The bible tells, that there is a man you can trust! And that's the only gleam of hope! With him I organized a tour to the near Sunderbands station, where you can get a glimpse of the mangrove forest. It was a nice station with dears, crocodiles and a hiking path into the forest. We stayed about three hours there which was definitely one of the highlights of the whole Bangladesh trip!

The best revelation was when the boss of an internet shop, where I was quite often (I still had to organize stuff for my car back home), invited me to his office around the corner. My immediate thought was 'Oh, God, how to get out of this', because normally they just want to show around a 'whitey friend', conversation is always the same and extremely boring (where you come from, what you do for living, how many wives and children, etc.). Well I was lucky, because it came out that the guy was a reporter for BBC and had some friends who were also journalists, so we had quite a good and - at one point, they produces some vodka (which they mixed with water) - funny evening. This really gave me hope, that at least some people here had kind of an education.

The chit-chat with the guys was nice, but nothing could hold me to stay longer. Indeed nothing, because there was coming up a red-status warning, that a cyclone was arriving and people started to move to shelters. I just wanted to leave and so I took a bus back to Dhaka. Of course, that was not a 2 hours joyride, but a 7 hours we-had-to-change-bus-just-once-because-of-technical-problems ride with traffic jams, runs to get on ferries for crossing rivers and alike - to be honest, it was indeed quite a cool adventure. Later in the news on telly I saw that tens of thousands of people were moving back and forth to these weather shelters, hundreds got injured who did not with sixty people dying. Well, NGOs still have a lot to do there - the government will not!

Back in Dhaka I had some nice days with a German NGO girl and her friends, where I always got introduced with 'that's the one who is here for holiday!' :-)

One funny story was, that all the Bangladeshis (as they never leave their country and so do not know better) ask you to vote on an internet page (of course a Bangladeshi one) for Cox-Bazar to become one of the 'new wonders of the world', because it's the longest beach of the world and so beautiful. Well I had heard of that before and this beach is just a substandard beach - but how to compare when you never leave the cave! :-)

2009-04-21

The last impression

The last impression was another very bad one: I booked a flight with Air India to go via Kolkata to Bangkok. It took me four days to organize all the preliminaries like changed money (not money from the ATM) with a statement of the bank, hotel affirmation and alike. But to get the money from the bank who first have to find a bank that does this. There of course you need everything starting from passport and visa, again hotel affirmation, reason for what the money is, etc. Well, for me that was all part of the game to remain a third world country. Fine with me.
But when I got really pissed was, when I finally was at the airport to leave this country and on my boarding pass was the wrong time issued. The displays showing all the flights was showing wrong information either and so I went to the gate to ask, if I can already board - no, I should come back later. Well, a little while later I thought, this could not be right and went there again, just to get the information, that my flight was leaving half an hour ago!
Well, I was so pissed and when they offered me to change my flight to the next one, which was scheduled two days later, I just told them, they should give me as much money back, as they could and I would buy another ticket to fly out right in that moment - I could not imagine staying another two days! It's not worth the lifetime!

It's a hard statement, but it's the truth! Sorry Bangladesh!


	Start: 2008-04-10					Oli on his way from Munich to Hong Kong				End: 2010-05-12