Saturday, 11 June 2011

The Sun Shines in Sonargaon

We went on our last sight seeing visit of our time here today to a place about an hour and a half out of Dhaka called Sonargaon. Sonargaon was the capital of East Bengal until the Mughals took power in the 17th century when they moved their capital to Dhaka which they thought was more strategic and easier to defend. The highlight of the day was a visit to Painam Nagar. This used to be a flourishing town, I think because it was a centre of trade for textiles, the area was once famous for producing and selling muslin cloth and for a particular type of weaving called Jamdani. Anyway, I can't find out much about this place but it is fascinating! It was built between 1895 and 1905 during the reign of the British Empire in India. The town is really just one long winding street with about 50 town houses that belonged to wealthy Hindu merchants. You'll see from the photos but these houses are just the most amazing old colonial houses, each one different with loads of decorative features. This whole street of houses remains but no one lives there anymore. It's a ghost town. The Lonely Planet explains why....

"At the time of Partition, many owners fled to India, leaving their elegant homes in the care of poor tenants, who did nothing to maintain them. Most of the remaining owners pulled out during the anti-Hindu riots of 1964, which led up to the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War."

So you have this road, full of incredible examples of colonial architecture and no one is really bothered about it. A few of the houses have people who live in them but the majority are just empty. Unfortunately they were boarded up so we couldn't get in them but you could walk right around the back of some of the larger ones and feel like you were properly exploring them. It is a crime really that the government aren't preserving these buildings as they are beautiful and they would make a GREAT tourist attraction if you restored them and fitted them out as they might have been (I would like that job). You can imagine the tiled floors with big pot plants and curtains blowing in the breeze, with the lady of the house having tea on the veranda! Oh I just want to go back in time and see what it was like! On the other hand, I think it's because they are decaying that they are so beautiful. The rain created amazing colours on the walls and the fact that bits are falling off all the buildings just adds to the charm and mystery of this place. It was really like stepping back in time to a deserted old colonial town. I hope the photos do it justice, it was a privilege to see it.



What must have been a grand hall, now roofless.
One of the grander mansions that has now been turned into a folk art museum.
One of the most beautiful buildings in Panaim Nagar.


Look at the tiles still on the floor! And the amazing pillars!
Chris found some time for a game of cricket with the local boys.
After the wonder of Panaim Nagar, we popped in to see the rather less captivating Bangladeshi Taj Mahal, a small, naf, version of the real thing. Bangladeshi's were asking us all day if they could photograph us, we now feature in many family portraits!?
Chloe
P.S. More photos on FB if you are interested!

Thursday, 9 June 2011

Bright Pink Lychees

We only have two weeks left in Bangladesh! I'm looking forward to coming home, being the home-bird that i am but there are some brilliant things about life out here that I'll miss and I thought I'd tell you about some of them.

I love the way you can feel the evening sun in this photo which was taken on one of our rickshaw rides to our favourite coffee shop. The ride is all the better for knowing there is a cinnamon roll at the end of it.
Rickshaw rides in the sun. We've had amazing weather while we've been here. It's normally really really hot here like, 38 degrees but for the whole time we've been here it's not got much past 31 which has been really bearable! It really is a treat to be safely wedged into a rickshaw with my lovely husband, riding down a relatively unbumpy bit of road with the sun on your face! There is just so much to see and stare at and you feel kind of safe and a bit removed from it when you are whizzing by on your rickshaw. They are really just good fun, sun or no sun actually, like a mini fairground ride where you have to hang on or fall off!
Beautiful rickshaw hood. Chris is getting quite good at taking creative shots like this!
Lychees. Now, i always thought i didn't like these. I thought they tasted perfumey and there is obviously the whole looking like an eyeball thing to put you off too, but here, where they grow in abundance for a season, they are amazing! The colour of the skin is a really beautiful pink and they just taste sweet and fresh and juicy. Mmm, will miss those.
Lychees. These are a few days old so the pink has faded a bit but still beautiful!
Retro packaging. A trip around the supermarket is a delight too! There are many unusual things about it, like they don't place baskets at the entrance where you could pick one up and start shopping. You have to start shopping and balancing things precariously in your arms before a nice assistant will come and give you a basket from the secret hidey hole that they keep them in. I have particularly enjoyed the packaging of some of the items that looks like something from the 50s! I have been tempted to buy more, but having heard bad things about food standards in many of the factories here I have resisted.
Popcorn and baking powder. So cool!
The informality. Being British I have a very strong sense of doing as i should,  for example queuing up for things, sticking to the highway code, putting my rubbish in the bin etc. But here, people just do what they like! Sometimes it's a problem and there are lots of traffic accidents which is not good due to people just doing what they want on the roads. But in another sense its cool! Rickshaw drivers just go down the tiniest space and up the wrong side of the road and people just walk out in front of cars, stuff gets sold from the corner of the street and it all seems to work! The funniest example of this informality was today at the Indian visa office. I went in to collect our passports and there was an A4 printed colour photograph of the visa officer that i had dealt with 3 weeks earlier. The note underneath it said, 'Mr. Chowdry (not his real name!) has been dismissed from this office for financial irregularities, please don't contact him for any queries regarding visas'. So, we think he was sacked for taking bribes. Anyway, when i met him he had a smart goatee beard but he obviously didn't have this when he first started work as on this picture someone had added on in black marker a goatee beard! It was clearly a drawn on beard!  Can you imagine anyone doing that in an official passport office in the UK?! We stick to the rules in the UK, but we miss out on the comedy that lies in ignoring the rules and doing what you like!!! Unfortunately you aren't allowed cameras into the visa office so I couldn't take a photo!

The last thing i love about here is the tailors. We have made many a visit to Mr Shahin to get clothes copied for a bargain price. I just love being able to pick the fabric and get things i really like copied! Its such a nice surprise to go and pick up the clothes you've ordered and see what they have come out like!
At the tailors, so much to choose from.
Anyway these are a few of my observations about things i will miss. We're going to Sonargoan tomorrow which is the former capital of the region which was deserted hundreds of years ago, there are lots of cool old palaces to see so I am looking forward to that!

Chloe

Friday, 27 May 2011

Tea Gardens and Near Misses

We took a bit of a break last week and went to Srimongol for a few days. Lots of people here had recommended a visit to this area which is in the Sylhet Division, in the east of the country. It borders India and is quite close to Assam, hence the presence of tea gardens. (BTW I didn't realise that India curved all the way around Bangaldesh like it does; allowing Indian trucks more convenient transit routes through Bangladesh is a hot political topic here). To reach our destination we caught the train again, it was nearly on time which was amazing, and only a 4 and a half hour journey this time.

Outside our eco cottage
Our guide Russel, a Srimongoli (?) born and bred met us at the station with a flower each and showed us to our vehicle, an old but smart Mitsubishi jeep. We had hired our guide Russel for a couple of days as it's the kind of place you need a car and someone who knows where they are going. We drove to our home for the next three days which was an eco-cottage/bamboo hut, located right next to a small waterfall and stream at the bottom of a lime orchard. It was really lovely, very basic, it felt like a nicer version of camping.

This was the stream at the entrance to our cottage. I saw a dead goat floating down the river in the aftermath of some heavy rain! Chris was quite upset that he missed this.

We arrived at lunch time and after a nice Bengali lunch we thought we had the afternoon to chill out but Russel had other plans! He took us out to visit Baika Bill which is a wetland area, where people still fish with really simple methods and there is a nice lake that you can go boating on. We hopped in our jeep with Russel and our driver and after a few miles left the main road for a mud track. So far so good, we passed through a few small settlements, the surroundings were mainly rice fields, flooded with the recent rains. Most roads in this type of area are built up to cope with the annual flooding, so you drive along a raised road and there are marshlands either side of you. There is quite alot of water in these marshlands, about a metre I reckon. Now I am starting to set the scene, as some of the details for this story are important. Another detail, our driver was a nice young Bangladeshi man, I would put him at about 16 or 17 maybe, prime boy racer age anyway. As we were driving along, we started to encounter some muddy patches on the road, it was a bit bumpy but we were coping and the jeep seemed to be coping. It started to get worse though and our driver appeared to be struggling to keep the vehicle straight, he was swerving and correcting his swerves and not making it look easy! I was getting steadily more concerned for our safety, remember we are on a single track raised road with a metre of water either side of us and this jeep is swerving and only just managing to avoid going down the sides of the bank into the water, agh!!!!!! We then hit a patch of road that had been churned up by a tractor and it was MUDDY! That was it, we were stuck. He was revving it and revving it and the cab was getting gradually full of petrol fumes but we were not going anywhere. So Chris and I got out and moved to safety while Russel and our driver tried to sort it out.

The jeep surrounded by interested on lookers
There was about half an hour of futile efforts to get the truck out of the mud, in the meantime Chris and I were stood on the track, watching a steady stream of fishermen, farmers and school children go by. We were equally being stared at as we were staring at the passing show. There was so much going on! Water buffalo and cows went trotting by, giving us an unplanned but brilliant insight into rural Bangladesh.



Eventually Russel and the driver decided to go and get some rice grass that had been discarded to try and give some traction for the wheels.



  
It worked and we were off again! But only for about another 100 metres until we encountered another muddy patch and we got stuck again! We all piled out again, provided great entertainment for another group of villagers and the rice grass was again brought in to bale us out. By this point it was getting dark, the thunder clouds were rolling in, I could see fork lightening in the distance and we were the highest thing for miles!! Could this get any worse?!

Looking worried as the sky becomes dark and we are getting nowhere fast
It was on this second pit stop that Chris noticed why we might have been struggling so much to make it through the mud. The two back tyres, on our two wheel drive vehicle were completely bald! Only in Bangladesh!

BALD   
This was too much for me and with 2km still to go I persuaded Chris that the sensible thing to do would be to turn back. We missed our chance of a boat ride which was a real shame, but we are alive to tell the tale! To settle our nerves we went and had a cup of tea. Seven layer tea no less. This is a delicacy of Srimongol, the secret recipe of which is guarded closely. We reckon that each layer had more sugar in than the last making it sink and stay separated. It was nice to start with but so sweet by the end, yuk.

Seven layer tea at a roadside cabin
The next couple of days were thankfully slightly less adventurous than the first. We did loads, too much to talk about now. In summary we toured a tea factory, I saw a snake outside our cabin, we visited a tribal group, trekked through rain forest, came face to face with MASSIVE POISONOUS spiders, watched monkeys swinging through the trees, ate egg curry and rice twice a day, saw an elephant, had a hairy jeep ride in the pouring rain, watched tea pickers hard at work, visited a pineapple garden and watched 3 episodes of The Wire. We had a really nice holiday!

Tourism here is really raw! You get a real adventure experience, but not that it's designed to be like that. It's just so unplanned, not very well set up and receives little investment from the government that you are just guaranteed that something will not go as planned and you will have an adventure and see the real Bangladesh! This we certainly did in Srimongol!

Chloe
The shabby chic tea tasting table in the tea factory.
A steady line of tea pickers bringing in their 20kgs of tea in the pouring rain. They get paid about 50 taka a day which is about 50p, they get a bit more if they pick more.
Weighing the tea leaves
Carrying really heavy weights on their heads
Beautiful tea gardens
At Madahpur Lake, Chris says thank you Soph and Carl for the rain coat! It came in very handy!
We bought some Bangladeshi tea in town on the way home
Spot the monkey?
Trekking through the rainforest; at times there were paths, at times there weren't. Chris got bitten by a leech eeugch!
Pineapple gardens
An elephant moving logs

Saturday, 21 May 2011

Beautiful Nilphamari

Nilphamari is a district in the very north of Bangladesh and we have been trying to get up there for a few weeks now. The first planned trip had to be cancelled because we were both sick but we finally managed to board the train for the 8 hour journey last Wednesday. We chose the train because the buses aren't that safe out here, they go quite fast down really narrow roads and I wasn't really up for that kind of adventure! The trains are a lot slower but safer so that's what we went for. They are cheap as well, i think our tickets cost £10 return each and we had AC first class seats and a cabin for sleeping in on the way back.

Example of some craziness at the station, just feel free to walk all over the rails!
The purpose for our trip was to visit the factory where the bamboo coffins are made and for Chris to have a meeting with some other NGOs who are part of an anti-trafficking network. The location of the factory was chosen because the area is particularly vulnerable to human trafficking as it's a really poor area with some seasons where there is no work to be found at all and it's close to the border with India.

The journey didn't start as smoothly as we'd have liked but it's all part of the adventure! The trains are always late, and ours was 2 hours behind schedule. So after having arrived at the station at 8am we had to stand and wait for the train in the sun, while being constantly approached by beggars or with just big crowds of people slowly assembling around us staring silently at us!

Once on the train and a little way out of Dhaka we started to see some of the beautiful countryside. It was nearly all agricultural land with small villages dotted around here and there. Mainly rice but there are other crops grown like tobacco and jute. When the sun came out it was a really breathtaking sight to see fields of golden green crops and tiny people (they were far away) in brightly coloured clothes working on the land. It was like a post card.




Colourful washing hanging out to dry
(Side Point: Unfortunately after about half of the journey gone, i started to feel a bit rotten and had to start frequenting the pit toilet on the train quite often! I gradually deteriorated and had to have the doctor out the next morning who gave me something to cheer me up so that was good, anyway, that's a different story!)

We arrived at Saidpur town at about 6pm just as the sun was going down and it was a massive relief to get off the train, the AC cabin was FREEZING!!! We got a golf buggy type vehicle to drive us the half hour to our lodgings and it was (even though i was ill) one of the most magical half hours it think i've ever spent!

Chris in our golf buggy

We meandered through little streets generally just one main street in a village, all lined with little stalls selling everything you could need. They were all lit up with oil lamps, some with electricity and candles and the sun sinking in the background gave everything a really magical light. Everything was just so relaxed, maybe it was the contrast coming from Dhaka but here the pace was slow, the air was clean and people were chilled out and going about their business, some sitting on the grass verges and chatting , most gathered around different shops chatting to shopkeepers. As I've come to expect there was colour everywhere in adverts painted on the walls to the things people are selling, It felt kind of like a holiday village! everything was green around and the air felt fresh, now i know there are lots of problems in the rural areas of Bangladesh, poverty and trafficking and the oppression of women are a few of these things but the impression i got in that first half was, wow! Wouldn't it be amazing if we could all live like this?! It felt so simple and peaceful. We stopped half way to the guesthouse to get some coke for my deteriorating stomach and a couple of smiley children approached the buggy, they were just so friendly and understood my basic Bangla and were teaching me how to say things, and just so smiley! I love they way people here have the time to stop and chat and just wander around!

Again i have lots more i could say about this place and hopefully will do blog about the business in a few days but for now here are some pictures to tell the story again....

Chloe



James, the factory manager and his wife Happy's place, this is where we stayed
Pretty shutters on our room, credit to Chris for all nice photos he took things he thought i would like as i was lying poorly in my bed!
The factory where the bamboo coffins are made

More coffins
Random shot from the side of the buggy that I thought was really good?!
Possibly the funniest photo yet, the guy on the left is taking a photo of us taking a photo of him, but the whole picture is just brilliant and so typical of here!

Little local shops that stay open till 10pm at night
This is Bindu, he works at the pre-processing site for the bamboo, Chris hadn't noticed he didn't have any teeth and kept asking him to smile! Awkward!
I love this ladies sari combo! We took photos of all the staff for the website
The pre-processing site staff leaving for the day, what an amazing place to work! Some might have a cycle or a walk home in the evening sun
We went for snacks at Farid and Bonna's house, they rent a room off this courtyard where the people who live there share a kitchen and a bathroom. It was tiny but idyllic, a group of little ducklings wandered in while we were there and they picked fresh fruit from the tree for us
James, Happy, Sicky and Chris