No gibberish, I’ll go straight to the point. I didn’t like at all my stay in Bangladesh, precisely in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. I had planned to stay more or less two weeks in the country : arrive in Dhaka, visit the tea plantations in Srimangal, hang around the Kaptai lake, see Chittagong, and also Cox’s bazar, the most popular beach resort of the country. I finally left after six days, and I only stayed in Dhaka. I checked the places to visit in Dhaka, but I can’t tell I liked my stay.
Just to make sure I’m clear, I’m not saying “Don’t go there, this is a shitty country, etc…“. I’m repeating myself but you’re reading a blog, not a travel guide. And in this blog, I write about my experiences on the road. If I like a place, I write about it. If I don’t like a place, I also write about it. And regarding Dhaka… I really didn’t like it. It didn’t happen since Kiev in Ukraine…
It was hard to take good pictures, there was always someone staring at me. So I was sneakily taking pics with my phone, and they were sometimes crooked…
Some people told me I was a bit harsh with a poor country, others told me a country doesn’t boil down to its capital and that “you should have been elsewhere in the country, too!“. Oh and some people told me that even for the Bengalis, Dhaka is a chaotic city. But feel free to go if you’re attracted by this country, I saw on the internet that other bloggers really liked Bangladesh. Anyway, enough talking, lemme explain myself.
Description of Dhaka
Before talking about the places to visit in Dhaka (that’s what you want to know!), let me tell you exactly why I didn’t like my stay, and my experience there. Bangladesh is one of the first countries where I really had a hard time finding reliable information. Very few tourists go there, bloggers are usually not attracted by this country either. The few bloggers who went there, as is often the case in the travel blogging thing, loooved the place, wonderful, people so nice, blablabla… It was a bit difficult to prepare properly my stay, but I overcame the lack of information.
And my first contact with the Bengalis was at the Kathmandu airport, waiting for our plane going to Dhaka (I know they were Bengalise because apart from a few ones, the whole plane used the national citizen line at the customs in Dhaka). The voice of the airport announces that we need to get ready, because the boarding will start very soon. I was about to get up, but I finally decided to sit back down. Because after the announcement, in like fifteen seconds, the line looked like this :
Maybe they were scared to miss the flight…
Guys literally all squeezed in together. Knowing myself, I’d be fucking pissed to have someone else glued to me like this. It seems that it didn’t bother them. The notion of personal space is different there, it must be cultural. Anyway, I let everyone get in the plane, and I was the last one to board. You need to know something, in the picture you can roughly see 20 people. But there were actually 300 people, the same way, all squeezed in together, and the line was like dozens of meters long. A girl I know in Paris told me “Holy shit, those guys are humping one another! I guess you understand what we, girls, have to endure in the subway in Paris! It’s the same thing, there’s always a perv trying to rub against you!” OMG yes now I understand…
I finally arrived in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. Bangladesh, as we know it today, used to belong to Pakistan (it was called East Pakistan, separated geographically from current Pakistan by India). In 1971, with the support of India, the Bangladesh liberation took place, East Pakistan became independent and is now called Bangladesh. Its capital will be Dhaka! Bangladesh is a country with one of the highest population density : 170 millions inhabitants for a country barely bigger than Greece (the few countries with a higher population density are the tiny ones like Monaco, Singapore, Malta, Maldives, Bahrein, etc…). Anyway, with this population density, I guess they’re used to be all squeezed in together, and it might explain the waiting line at the airport…