The Clamour and Clutter of Dhaka

Now what... I was at the bus station in the middle of a crowded side street with drivers all yelling at me to attract my attention and climb into their vehicle.  I walked over to the CNG stand (the place where all drivers with the little green machines hang out) and hired a ride to a hotel that shouldn’t have been too far away.

Common area of the hotel

One thing I forgot, or didn't notice as much when I was here before... MAN Dhaka is a loud freakin’ city!!  Truly, I could hardly stand the racket and noise after the peace of the past couple of days in the village. The driver got all kinds of lost on the way to the hotel and it took an hour to get there, but I reached it fine, the Good Morning Guesthouse.

Not a bad room, musty

By this time it was almost 6 so it was coming on night and I didn’t want to be wandering around looking for a hotel. The hotel was fine, the room was clean but it smelled moldy, like your basement smells the summer after a flood. They had no single room available so I had to pay a double rate for a double room but at this point I didn’t care, I just wanted to be in out of the noise!


The hotel "Good Morning" should have had internet but it was broken (of course). I set my bags down and went out in search of a café and wandered high and low along the river. It wasn't an area of town I would otherwise have walked through, and it was an interesting part of town as I crossed the river and got to see down into a small shanty village set up along the river, crowded with people in the early evening.

I am a fan of heart graffiti

You must use a boat to get to the shantytown

Cool looking bridge with the boat in the reflection - love it

Small shanytown along the river in Dhaka

Sun setting on the bridge

cuddly couple at sunset



I stayed out until the sun was nearly to the horizon
before heading back to the hotel



View from the Balcony

 I didn't find much of anything interesting (in particular, I did not find an internet cafe!) and I eventually just walked back to my hotel and had a snack from the bag of food Animesh had sent me with before having a very cold shower (no hot water in my overly expensive hotel room) and reading my book awhile on the balcony overlooking the city.
I was up in the early morning around 5:30 to catch a ride to the train station, as the train to Srimongol was leaving at 7. The boy from the hotel walked with me to find a ride (which is almost impossible at that time of day!). We hired a rickshaw to take us to Gulshan-2 which is where I’d stayed my last visit in Dhaka, and there was one lonely CNG that drove me to the train station for twice the normal fare (supply and demand and all that, I didn’t care).

Note to anyone who travels around here: if you want to avoid hassle, make sure you have bills enough to give close to accurate fare to the drivers, as they will make it a fight for you to get your change, and sometimes that irritates me. I get to choose to tip you, you don’t get to just KEEP my money - that’s something in Dhaka that makes me CRAZY, I hate it!! Now? Now I show them the amount I'm GOING to give them, and I request the change first (I haven't had any argument about it at all yet) - that, or I have the correct amount in the first place, either method a stress-reducer all around!


So I arrived at the train station in record time, and even at the early hour it was busy. I grabbed the nearest friendly face to ask him where to buy a ticket (many counters, no English!) and he pointed me in the right direction. I got a ticket for the next train to Srimongol and walked out to the platform with my bags to sit and wait for the train.  Only 45 minutes to be observed (it IS starting to feel like I'm some strange circus performer found to have run amok of her circus!) before the train whisks me away...


Let the staring commence!!