Bangladesh - Day 1 - The Adventure Begins

Apparently I don't do things halfway. I start writing fiction, and instead of putzing around with short stories, I hammer out a full-length novel. I get my passport, and instead of vacationing in the Bahamas or Europe, I move to Dubai. And now, for my first international vacation, when most of my colleagues are going to tourist-friendly areas like Greece, Egypt, Turkey, and even Thailand, I go to freakin’ Bangladesh.

Our adventure began officially at 8 a.m. Monday morning (September 29th). A private cab took us to the Sharjah International Airport, in the neighboring emirate of Sharjah (just a few kilometers away from our apartment building), for our flight to Dhaka. As this was my first flight out of a non-U.S. airport, the attention to security (or relative lack thereof) was kind of surprising. Asha actually got through the first security gate (into the terminal) with a giant Swiss Army Knife in her pocket, which she showed to the guard and asked if it was okay for her to take with her. He said sure (the second guard, at the second security gate which lead to our particular gate, did confiscate it, but only after Asha had again volunteered that she had it on her person). I set off the metal detector, and the guard did sort of a cursory sweep of my person with the hand-held detector, then let me through. None of this silly x-raying of our shoes as we walk through barefoot. The guards threw casual glances at the x-ray machine as our luggage went through, more engaged in the jovial conversation they were sharing than in meticulous scrutinizing. Kinda interesting.

When we got through security, the immigration control agent stamped our passports with exit visas from the UAE. I guess a person is kind of in no man's land at a point like that. A man without a country. Although I guess the issuing country (i.e. the U.S., for my passport) would still be valid, though no flights from that airport flew to any of our native countries. But I digress.

We arrived in a large duty-free area, but instead of buying anything (as we had a good three-plus hours until our flight left), we headed to the food court, which, to our surprise, was not only open, but was also permitting patrons to eat their purchases right there in the food court. If the importance of this moment escapes you, it’s probably because you haven’t been reading my other entries (go back and read them!). Short version: it’s still the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and eating in public during daylight hours is illegal. Apparently the airport has their own regulations once you get past security. It may have only been nine in the morning, but let me tell you, that McDonald’s burger tasted darned good.

Fast-forward a few hours (and another burger… hey, I was hungry, and Lord knows we had no idea when the next meal we would eat would be (note: it ended up being at about ten p.m., Dhaka time), and we were in the departure lounge by our gate. Asha bought some Smirnoff at the duty free area for use in Bangladesh (because, again, we had no idea how long it’d be or how easy it’d be to get some sort of alcohol in Bangladesh… another Muslim country, still during Ramadan, and much less tourist-friendly than the UAE). I watched the baggage while the girls went to the restroom. Coming back, Rebecca started singing the ‘one of these things is not like the other’ song from Sesame Street to Asha. And she was right. The three of us were the only non-Bengalis waiting for our flight. In fact, we were the only people whose ancestry was not from the non-Indian subcontinent that we saw for days. We did meet a guy named Rashid in the lounge, though, who was of Bengali ancestry but who was raised in Canada and now lived and worked in Dubai. He gave us some tips on Bangladesh, some that encouraged us, some that made us wonder more and more what the heck we’d gotten ourselves into. He would be staying with a friend of his in Dhaka for the week. We swapped phone numbers, and he told us to call him if we needed anything.

The plane was about forty-five minutes late arriving, and there wasn’t any announcement (at least, not one that we could hear, or in a language we could understand) regarding the reason for its tardiness. Realizing that we had gotten a cheap flight and that we were going to freaking Bangladesh, we joked that they were busy building the plane. The whole trip was full of these ‘what-are-we-getting-ourselves-into, laugh-to-maintain-our-sanity’ moments. At last, the plane did arrive, and we left on an Airbus A320. We flew over the Arabian/Persian Gulf, Iran, Pakistan, and India before finally arriving in Bangladesh. Shortly before we landed, our flight attendants sprayed the cabin with insecticide. I didn’t realize that’s what it was at first, but apparently it was their attempt to abide by the health regulations of Sharjah (out of which Air Arabia is based) in staving off the spread of disease carrying bugs (we’ll see how successful those efforts were on the return trip on Day 6… stay tuned!).

It was dusk when our plane landed in Dhaka. One thing I noticed as we flew over was the relative darkness of the city, the lack of lights below, like most metropolis’s I had flown over or seen photographs of. A few streetlights, a lighted building or two, and a good chunk of headlights. It reminded me of Peter Pan’s Flight at Disney World, when the ride takes you over turn-of-the-century (that is, last century) London at night: the scene was dominated by those little sets of headlights rolling through the streets.

Finally we arrived at the gate and disembarked. Even in the terminal, there were no other westerners. ‘Welcome to Bangladesh’, a giant overhead sign greeted us. Indeed. We went to the passport control counter and were asked by the agent for our visas. We told him we didn’t have them, that we figured we could get them there, etc. etc. etc. Well, we were right. We were directed to go over to the currency exchange booth and pay fifty U.S. Dollars, returning to the passport control counter with a receipt. We did so, and got a fifteen-day visit visa stamp in our passport. Easy peasy.

After changing our money to Takas and searching unsuccessfully for some food or tourist information, we headed toward the airport exit. We met up with Rashid again at baggage claim, and he hooked us up with a driver who took us to the hotel where our friend Jorge was staying. And when we left the airport, that’s when Bangladesh really hit us.

There were armed guards with helmets and rifles slung over their shoulders making their rounds through the airport, who, like most people in the country that we encountered, would return any smile we gave with an even bigger one of their own. Kind of an unnerving sight, until they smiled at you. Several of them were holding back the mob of impoverished onlookers as cars and taxis left the airport. There was an iron-barred fence that enclosed the vehicle cue, and in each gap between bars, faces peered out at us, the unwashed masses come to see what sort of people were arriving at the airport today. The things you do for entertainment when you don’t have the technological trappings and economic prosperity of our Western world, I suppose. It kind of felt like we were on display, those dozens of eyes on us, taking in the sight of these light-skinned foreigners. Little did we know that this would prove to be a recurring theme throughout our journeys.

We got into a van with our luggage and a driver who spoke virtually no English. We spoke no Bengali, so it made for a fun match. Luckily, Rashid’s friend who hooked us up with the ride gave the driver instructions before we left, so we got to the hotel alright. The first thing I noticed when I got in the car (other than the people cramming themselves in to see the airport arrival festivities) was that the steering wheel was on the right side of the car. “Hey!” I observed. “They drive on the wrong side of the road here!” My comment was meant to be facetiously ethnocentric, but I had no idea how prophetic my words would prove, especially in the days to come.

After a van ride filled with traffic lights that weren’t working, long lines of street lamps that were broken or unlit, clogged intersections (where buses and rickshaws drove side by side), and several dark alley roadways, we arrived at our ‘hotel’. The Hotel Zakaria seemed kinda seedy, but that was exacerbated by the facts that a) this was Bangladesh, where everything is dirty and seedy by Western standards, and b) there wasn’t a whole lot of light in the lobby, the hallways, the stairwell, the restaurant, or the road outside. Ultimately, it was a nice enough place, a place to eat (where I almost cracked a molar on a piece of bone hidden inside a bite-sized morsel of ridiculously spicy chicken), sleep (once we got rid of the rat poop that was on Asha’s bedsheets), refresh ourselves (by brushing our teeth using bottled water), take photographs (like the plant that was growing in a bathtub in the hallway outside our room, or the giant cockroach in the stairwell that Jorge took up with immediately), and ride the elevator (that had no door, so we could actually touch the wall of the elevator shaft as we ascended… who needs fingers, anyway). We had dinner, explored a little, relaxed and chatted in our room, and then retired to bed. The driver that our hotel manager had secured to take us to Cox’s Bazar the next day would be arriving at 8 a.m., so we had to sleep fast. And sleep we did.