Bangladesh - Prelude to Adventure

I’ve now technically been to eight countries. I was born, and lived for most of my life, in the United States (1); I took a cruise in the western Caribbean in June 2003, spending a day each in Haiti (2), Jamaica (3), the Cayman Islands (4), and Mexico (5); I moved to the United Arab Emirates (6) in August 2008; and I spent a few hours in Oman (7) in September on my visa run across the border (read the previous blog entry for more on that little trip). My eighth country, though, was my first real international “vacation”, the first time I spent more than a day in a country that I wasn’t calling “home”. And boy did I pick a doozy: Bangladesh.

Our travel agent actually asked us, point blank, why we would want to go to Bangladesh. Apparently it’s not a popular tourist destination. Even among my extremely well-traveled colleagues, no one had gone to Bangladesh. But we were going.

Let me back up a bit. I wrote in a previous entry about the Eid al-Fitr holiday that marks the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. I wrote about how there was a distinct possibility that the Eid holiday would be extended from the original four-day weekend to a five-, six- or nine-day holiday. I also wrote about how, if the holiday were extended, I would go to Istanbul for four nights, and if it were not, I would go to Nepal. Well, by the time the Dubai Ministry of Education finally decided to extend the holiday, all of those packages were already snapped up. Some of my colleagues and I went to travel agents, scoured the internet, and phoned airlines to find out what was left that we could afford with our single paycheck we’ve received thus far. The answer: not much. Which was disappointing, but not devastating. There were plenty more holidays coming up, and I didn’t have much to spend on a trip yet anyway. I was kind of resigned to spending the week in town, perhaps going on a short trip or two to Abu Dhabi or Oman, or perhaps on an off-road camping trip in one of the neighboring Emirates. There was a lot of Dubai yet to be explored as well, and I had just started work on a new story idea that was really starting to take hold. Then, as things often seem to do when you become content with what you have, opportunity presented itself.

Maybe ‘reared it’s ugly head’ would be a more apt description. Two groups of friends/colleagues found two different trips available. One was to Bangkok, Thailand. The other was to Dhaka, Bangladesh. Actually, I didn’t know it was to Dhaka at first. I didn’t really know the capital of Bangladesh. It’s kind of one of those things where you’re like “oh yeah, I knew that” when you find something out, like dredging the deep recesses of your mind for some bit of information that you had acquired, but really didn’t properly catalogue it for recall. Incidentally, both were on my list of places to travel to someday. Bangkok, and Thailand in general, was a significant one (along with about fifty other countries). Bangladesh wasn’t. In fact, I really didn’t know much about what there was in Bangladesh. But incidentally, that was what won me over to going there instead of the ultimately preferred Thailand.

There were two main reasons why I chose Bangladesh over Thailand for this trip: lack of funds and lack of time to plan. Thailand has many ancient historical sites, touristy destinations, and other crap that I specifically want to see. Bangladesh has… well, I really didn’t know. So there were no expectations, no plans to make, no things that I just had to see/do/experience. The flight to Bangladesh was about 700 dirhams (~190 US$) less than the one to Thailand, and the lure of going somewhere that virtually no one had gone to was kind of exciting. So Bangladesh won. Thailand will be there, but the chance that I would find another opportunity to go to Bangladesh, especially with three other willing adventurers, was slim.

The idea of going to Bangladesh was the brainchild of Jorge, a Spanish (both in subject area and in nationality) teacher at our school who has taught in Thailand and traveled to 31 countries, including Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, India, Sri Lanka, and Iran. For him, the trip was also born out of necessity, as the trip to Athens he was planning on taking ended up being more expensive than he was planning on. He had a Bengali kid or two in one of his classes who put the bug in his ear for doing something original by going to Bangladesh, and when I caught wind from a couple of my colleagues (who will be introduced momentarily), I thought, ‘hey, why not?’ Hook. Line. Sinker.

My other two fellow adventurers were both Canadians. Asha, a PE teacher, had traveled to some rough countries before, including Uganda, Ecuador, Kenya, Tanzania, and Thailand. Rebecca, who teaches science, had also traveled to 31 countries, including South Africa, Malaysia, and Singapore. All three of my companions had roughed it in much of their travels, staying in hostels and guest houses in Africa and South America, backpacking for four months across Europe, and bicycling from Bangkok to Singapore. An adventurous bunch. But they had never seen anything like Bangladesh.

The adventures began before we even left the country. Just deciding to go to Bangladesh (figuring out where we were going to go, the length of our vacation changing at the last second, the frantic search for flights, the ‘sure, why not?’ decision to go to Bangladesh of all places) set the roll-with-the-punches, fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants tone that would become par for the course during the trip. Jorge had bought his ticket before Asha, Rebecca and I did, and he left on Sunday (September 28). The three of us who were to follow him bought our tickets on Saturday (September 27) under the pretense given to us by the travel agent (who asked us why we wanted to go to Bangladesh) that we could get our visas at the airport upon arrival. He said that his information said that the country ‘strongly advised’ visitors to get visas prior to arrival, but that they are available at the airport. So we bought our tickets and decided to go to the Bangladesh Consulate in Dubai the next day (Ravi, the travel agent, called the main consulate in Abu Dhabi to confirm that his information about visas was correct, and he also found that we could get our visas beforehand, with same-day service (if we arrived at ten a.m., we could have the visas by one p.m.)). We left early, which really didn’t help us get to the consulate on time. No one seemed to know where it was. Lots of people thought they knew where it was, but unfortunately there were about three or four conflicting accounts as to where it was. Eventually we found it… and realized why no one knew where it was: it was tiny. It was really just a crappy two-story house that the Bangladeshi government decided to convert into their consulate. And I use the term ‘convert’ loosely. The second-story waiting area was a living room full of china cabinets, furniture from the seventies, packing boxes, and all sorts of other knick-knacks that looked like they belonged in the attic of some pack-rat grandmother.

After waiting for a while, the Assistant Consul (actually I don’t know what his title was, but he was the only guy other than the Consul General who had an office, so I’m deeming him as such for now) heard our inquiry and gave us some forms to fill out. Halfway through, we realized that we didn’t have a lot of these things that the form was asking us for. A sponsor letter? An invitation from the government of Bangladesh? Seriously? We asked the guy about it, and he said that we needed sponsor letters from our employers. Oh, and no, you can’t get same-day service. In fact, it’s eleven o’clock, our office is closed. What time did you open? Nine. Seriously? A two-hour workday? No wonder no one ever gets to visit your country. And no, you can’t get visas at the airport. You were told wrong. Wait, no, you can, Mr. Burns. Americans okay. No one else can get visas at airport. Crap. But the guy’s story changed several times while we were talking to him. Either he didn’t understand what we were asking at first, or he just didn’t know what the heck he was talking about. I kinda figured it to be a mixture of the two. So, no visas were to be gotten before we left, and in theory there weren’t going to be any available at the airport. Jorge’s flight left in about an hour for Dhaka. Maybe a quick turnaround flight. Maybe a reprise of Tom Hanks’s role in The Terminal. Or maybe, just maybe, we’d all manage to get into the country.

We left the consulate to grab some ‘sponsor letters’ from our school, just in case those might help our case with immigration officials in the Dhaka airport. On the way out of the building, though, a poster in the stairwell caught my eye. “Visit Bangladesh,” it said, “Before the Tourists Come.” Wow. Well, we were sure gonna try. And we wouldn’t be disappointed...