It's a Big Blue Watery Road

5/19/2009
From Chris:

Dear Blog-readers,

It’s been a while since our last update. Our time here in Bangladesh has been busier than I anticipated, but maybe that’s just the nature of our group. Some of us (primarily Banks and I) aren’t really good at sitting still, so we’re always looking for something new. The next adventure.

We have a lot to tell you about the village visit, and other adventures since then, but before I must tell you about the adventure we had on the river in Old Dhaka.

So. It was 5/9/2009, on a sunny day in Dhaka. The first half of the day we really hadn’t done much—slept in after the exhausting day before, ate some “kub moja” food at the G.P., and relaxed (it’s summer, right?). But we had an adventure planned for that afternoon, and right around 3pm, we took two tuk-tuks (which will now be referred to as CNGs) with the Canadians over to the river on Old Dhaka. We had heard from a guide book that the river was an interesting “panorama” of human life, and we wanted to see for ourselves. We came to the place and pulled into what looked like a rickshaw station. They were everywhere. Fruit stands lined the road, with grapes and stranger fruits hanging and showing off their vibrant colors in the sun.
We found a ticket counter and paid a small fee to go onto the dock. People were carrying big bundles of goods on their heads across the wooden bridge from where we were over to the dock, and we followed them, looking out over the sides of the bridge at the ground littered with grass, trash, shanties, and broken boats.
The dock was another one of those sensory-overload places. There was so much movement everywhere. People shuffling past you. Vendors shouting at you to take pictures, their fruit and other foodstuffs on display in large baskets along the main walkway of the dock. And the children. They always went crazy when they saw us. They noticed us quickly and formed a mob around us, following us wherever we went, pushing each other out of the way to be in the center of the pictures we were taking. The captains of the tiny wooden boats were offering us rides on the river, people would approach us and introduce themselves randomly (how are you, what is your name, what is your country?). Chaos.
We felt like we were attracting too much attention (but I mean, six goofy white people traveling in a pack?) so we tried to move around to other ends of the dock to escape the big crowds of people that would congregate around us if we stopped for anything.
Trey informed us that he needed to use the restroom. Dangit Trey, so we searched around the dock for one but there weren’t any. We started asking on the boats. The big ferry boats agreed to let Trey use a restroom, and so Trey and Tommy (for moral support, of course) hopped on.
The rest of us continued exploring the dock, taking pictures, trying to escape the large crowds, and looking out at the big river before us. Ferries, wooden boats, barges, and so many other old, rickety, floating vessels were making their way down the waters that, while dirty, looked beautiful as they rippled and shimmered in the sun.
Too much time had gone by and I didn’t see Trey and Tommy. I started to look for them, all along the dock but I couldn’t find them. Banks and the Canadians were at the other end of the dock, and I told the Canadians that I couldn’t find Trey and Tommy and needed to look for them. A man came out of the crowd and asked me if I was looking for my two tall, white friends. I told him I was and he started motioning toward the other end of the dock frantically, and pulled me along as he started to walk to the other side of the dock. Were they in trouble? “Where are they, where did they go?” I asked the man, but he didn’t say answer, he just pointed and kept walking. Faster and faster. I didn’t see them anywhere. I hopped on little objects on the dock to get a better perspective, but I couldn’t see them. All the boats looked the same. I knew we had passed where we left them, but the man kept going. “Where did they go?” but he didn’t answer. I looked back and the rest of the group looked confused. I tried to motion to them, but the man wouldn’t stop, hustling to the other side of the dock as if something terrible had happened. We cut through the crowd and kept moving down the dock and still, Tommy and Trey were nowhere to be found. “Where are you taking me?” He wouldn’t respond, and wouldn’t stop. I wasn’t sure I trusted him. I told him I had to turn back, shook him off my arm and went back to meet up with the group.
After explaining to them the strange incident with the man, Banks told me that he had received a call from Trey and Tommy. Actually, Trey just walked into my room, and he would like to write about this part himself.

(Trey): I had to go to the bathroom so badly. The boat dock, however, was not exactly the type of place with nice public restrooms. So, I was forced to improvise, and figured those big ferry-looking boats would have a toilet (squatty-style, of course) that I could use. I walked up to one with my boy Tommy and started gesticulating wildly and trying to communicate that I needed to use their facilities. I thought they finally understood me and I marched myself up to the bathroom on the upper deck. I did what I needed to do, came out, and what did I find? The boat had taken off down the river. Dangit. I was only in there for about a minute––give me a break! I yelled at Tommy that he needed to get out of the freaking bathroom and come help me deal with this situation. Our predicament was particularly alarming as many of these big ferries were bound for Chittagong…20 HOURS away from Dhaka. And this boat was a far cry from any type of river cruiser back in the U.S. Not what we were going for. So, Tommy (with his hilarious quasi-Chinese voice) and I forced the boat back to the shore through sheer force of will and just ended up about a kilometer from where we started. Turned out to be no big deal, but before I figured that out, I told Tommy that he sure as heck better conserve the water because we might be headed to Chittagong…

(Chris again) Good job Trey. So after that whole fiasco, we re-grouped at the end of the dock and negotiated with the owner of a tiny wooden boat to have him paddle all six of us around the river and show us around. He was a little man with a sleek black beard, long curls hanging off his chin, and he was very excited to have us all come on his boat. We climbed from the dock to the side of a ferry, and then onto the boat, carefully balancing ourselves for fear of the tiny boat capsizing and sending us all into the Giardia-infested waters.
We paddled to the other side of the river where we crawled out of our tiny wooden boat into a slightly larger, much more stable wooden boat, which made the journey much more enjoyable. We saw the slums built along the side of the river, the idle rickshaws, the lean-to’s, the children playing on the shore, and the people bathing in the dirty water. On the river, other wooden boats would float by, crammed with locals, all manner of goods packed between them. And on the big boats men would hang off the side on hanging platforms—slopping paint on the sides, scrubbing them down, and banging on the hulls with hammers relentlessly, with no avail. The Bengali sailors would peer over the sides of the big rusty tankers and wave at us, screaming at us in their broken English, and taking out their camera phones.
Our boat captain told us he wanted to take a smoke break, and he started paddling toward a little place in the shore nestled between the docked tankers. He pulled the boat onto shore disappeared into the little slum community there, leaving us in the boat without so much as a goodbye. It was awe-inspiring, being right there at the edge of the river slums, witnessing the people living in on and between those massive tankers, in the muck of the shore and the filth of the river.
Our boat captain came back, cigarette in hand, and continued paddling the little boat around the river. The sun was setting and the light was perfect to highlight the patches of mismatched color on the hulls of the big tankers. We turned the boat around and started back towards the dock, soaking in the last bits of the river before paying our kind boat driver and leaving the dock as everything was settling down. We took two CNG’s back to the G.P. and called it a day.
The sights to see here in Dhaka aren’t the old, majestic ruins you can find in other parts of South East Asia. They aren’t the sleek, modern structures that you can find in some of the other mega-cities. They are the chaotic, gritty masses of humanity that you can find in places like the river. That’s where you can hear the heartbeat of Dhaka.
It was my favorite place we’ve been so far, and I look forward to going back to Old Dhaka, and seeing more of the same.

Well my friends, it’s getting late here in Dhaka, and I have an early morning tomorrow at Grameen, so that’s all for now. Stay tuned for more details on the village visit (I’ll post what Trey has written about it so far too). Thanks for reading!

Keeping it fresh in the dirty Desh,
Chris