BACK IN CANADA

Well I'm home, finally. That was one long time of being in transit. It started Wednesday morning at 9:20 and ended Thursday at 1:30 when I got home. My flight got into Toronto at 12:15, I also went back in time 10.5 hours. It felt so good to being flying into and knowing that I was very close to seeing my Mom again and also the result of the Canadiens vs Capitals game 7. I wanted to check the score in Brussels but the internet in the airport was done so I had to wait another 10 hours to find out. When I got to customs at Toronto I asked the agent guy before I even said hi, he smiled and eventually told me that Montreal won. It was the perfect ending to a incredible trip that I'll never forget. I'm very thankful to God for the safe trip, because when you think of I'll the stuff I did and going to 3 countries by myself and some of the situations I got into it's amazing I was completely safe and didn't get hurt at all. Going to Bangladesh wasn't planned until late in the trip but I'm so glad I went and got to experience a country that was very different from Nepal and India. It was a lot different as well because there isn't a tourist set up and a traveler can experience the real Bangladesh. This is basically the opposite of Pokhara, Nepal which is similar to Clifton Hill and isn't the real Nepal at all.

I hope you enjoyed reading this blog, I really enjoyed writing it and I hoped I did a good enough job of writing to convey just out different that part of the world and the way those people live.

2nd last blog... probably.

Go Habs. What a sweet win and hopefully they can take game 7.

Well I don't have much to say, this will probably be my second last post. So today-Tuesday I didn't really do anything. I've had enough of the heat and car honking so I just chilled in the hotel today. Here car horns are as common and annoying as the bugs are when you go camping. It will be nice not to be a in a city with 10+ million people and the constant honking. Wednesday morning I fly from Dhaka to Delhi, India which is about a 2 hour flight, then I sit in the airport for what could be about 14 hours until my place leaves from Delhi to Toronto via Brussels at 2:30am Thursday. I may have to stay in the Delhi airport due to the issue with my visa and the rules of India. I'll get home at 12:30 Thursday afternoon. I'm really excited to go home and see my family, the last 3 days have gone fairly quick so that is good. I had a dream last night that I saw my family and it was exciting, actually my brother Matt made my mom late for the airport so I ended up taking a bus back to my house. It was pretty sad and once I realized it was dream I thought "that's good because I don't know how seeing my mom at the airport couldn't be good" and Matt will be at work so that didn't make any sense.

So here are some pictures from the amusement park that I wrote about the other day.

Finally Found the Girl

Well it took longer then expected but I found her. At least I'll have some company on the long flight home.

Pictures from the village.

Commit This To Memory

I'll never be able to forget Bangladesh.

So after a not so fun 6.5 hour train ride I'm back in Dhaka. The train sucked because I got about 5 hours of sleep the night before the train, I just couldn't fall asleep which isn't fun knowing the wake up call was at 6am. I managed to sleep on the train for a bit but not long enough, this was probably due to the fact that the train car I was in had a flat screen tv and they were showing some Bengali drama/comedy. I also woke up with a massive head ache so I when I got to Dhaka and went to a street pharmacy to get some pills and then took a 2 hour nap in the hotel. The hotel has free internet access which is the best part of the hotel. After this I went for supper to Pizza Hut, there is 3 or 4 in Dhaka, I'm totally sick of chicken and rice. The last night in Chittagong I had the worst chicken fried rice of the entire trip, you'd think with the amount of rice they eat they could make it taste better.

I've enjoyed my time in Bangladesh although there are some things that I didn't get to do that I would have liked too. One of them is see a tiger in the wild, a great place for this is south of Jessore a place called Sundarbans. It's a national park and has the decent population of Bengal tigers, I went to a tour guide place( the only way to actually get into the park because you have to take a boat) but they said it's not a good time because it's so hot and it would be very expensive by myself. So that was disappointing because seeing a tiger in the wild is on my bucket list. A good place for this also would have been the Jim Corbett tiger reserve in northern India but since they didn't want my money in India I couldn't go there. I probably won't let go of that grudge towards India.

When I was in Nepal I had written about how poor and underdeveloped that country was and there position on the human development index, well Bangladesh is 2 spots lower. When I say the country is very nice I'm referring to the actual country side and not the cities because honestly they are completely filthy. This is to expected some what though because Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, in my Lonely Planet book they have a stat that says the population will be 180 million people but 2015.

There are some very disheartening sites while walking down the street, most of the people that are homeless and therefore sleeping on the sidewalk are crippled. Everything from missing limbs to having a there feet turned around the other way. A common place to see this is also the train station and sadly many of them are kids. It's not uncommon to see people sitting with the legs crossed and using their hands to move their themselves, they can't uncross their legs though. This is very hard to walk past and not do anything about it or give them money, I normally don't give them money because once you give some to one person 10 more show up. I'm so thankful that I was born in Canada and have the opportunities that I have. I was thankful before I left for this trip and I knew of the struggles in 3rd world countries but my eyes have been opened even more. This was reinforced during the trip to the that guys village and listening to him talk about how hard life is for many people in Bangladesh. Life expectancy is about 66 years right now in Bangladesh. So in the one of the first blogs from Bangladesh I mentioned that they used to be under control of Pakistan. More on that: back in the day Bangladesh was known as East Pakistan(1947) This part of the world was controlled by Britain, they named India and then Pakistan, west and east. The 2 areas had about the same population but all the political stuff was done in west Pakistan( which is modern day Pakistan) West Pakistan exploited the east and treated them like crap. on March 26,1971 a war broke out which today is known as the Liberation War. Eventually Pakistan launched a strike on India and then India got pissed and fought back and kicked their ass and forced Pakistan to surrender and thus Bangladesh was born. When talking to the locals here they frequently bring this up and talk about it with great pride, they are so proud because they were liberating themselves when Pakistan was trying to impose large restrictions on these people, one of them speaking something other the Bangla( a correction to my previous correction is that Bangla is also know as Bengali) There was much bloodshed in the history of Bangladesh and the people that gave their lives for the country are celebrated throughout the country.

Foy's Lake and Sea World

Well it's Sunday morning here and that means in 4 days I'll be home, not counting today of course. So I woke up to a thunder storm which was a little bit weird because it was only the second time I've seen rain this trip. Once in Nepal and now once in Bangladesh. It's surprising how much it cools down during the rain and thunder, probably 7 or 8 degrees and the humidity is almost completely gone. Although right after the rain the humidity comes back with a vengeance and it's like it never left.

Foy's Lake Amusement Park. Imagine your at a great water park in a wave pool and they are playing your favorite song as loud as the speakers will allow and everybody is singing along. That is something I'd love to experience however I don't understand Bangladesh pop music and the wave pool water was green. So in a nutshell Foy's Lake was a big let down although watching a lot of locals dance to the music was entertaining and almost worth the price of admission. So there was only about 100 people in the whole water park, I was there at about 12pm so I just figured it's still pretty early but by 4 pm there wasn't anymore people. This was a bit strange considering when I talk to locals they tell me I need to go there because it's very nice. The lake is itself is nice, it's surrounded by semi big hills which is pretty neat because it's basically in the middle of a city with 4 million people. To get to the water park you actually take a boat down the lake and you can see the trail of gas and oil behind the boat. The rides at the amusement park were sketchy and each of them cost around 50 taka to go on. I brought an unlimited ticket which got me entry to the lake and the water park and unlimited rides. It was only 350 taka which isn't that expensive even by Bangladesh standards. Although about 20 minutes I realized the ticket guy didn't give me change when I gave him a 500 taka bill(that's the largest they have) I didn't go on any rides in Foy's Lake(it's separate from the water park which by the way is called sea world) because they looked sketchy and there was no one else on them-this is probably because the unlimited ticket didn't include rides on these rides. This sucked because I kinda wanted to go on the Ferris Wheel which is the one ride that looked okay. So the water park was funny, they had about 7 water slides and only 3 of them were working. Because of the lack of people I actually had to wake the slide operator guy up so he could turn the water on. They turn the water off when no one is up at the top of the slide. So all in all it was an okay time because the slides that did work were fairly fun but it really made me miss a Northern American amusement park(especially wet n wild in Vineland when it was around) I did manage to get a sun burn on my feet, the bottom of them because the walking paths were so hot from the sun, I also have a good sunburn on my back. I decided to show of my rocking body to the locals(who go to the waterpark in the same clothes they were on the street) Sharees and all. I didn't know if I could actually take my shirt off because sometimes that will be frowned upon in public, but I saw some other guys doing it so I figured it was okay.

After I left the water park I haggled with the ticket guy about not giving me the change and it worked. It wasn't even the same guy but he gave in eventually, his English was good enough that he understood(after I explained it 10 times) Not giving change seems to be a common theme when buying something over here, so I have to tell them what bill I'm giving them and how much change I should get. So after I wrote the last blog I went for supper-had chicken again because it's either that or fish and I don't eat fish(fish over here might be a bit iffy because of the pollution in the water) After the water park I went to KFC, it was great actually, I had the equal of the spicy chicken sand which-they call it a zinger. The chicken tasted the same as back home except there wasn't any grease which was nice. KFC is very popular here and there's about 6 of them in Bangladesh. After that I just chilled out back at the hotel.

So I've only got a couple more days before I start the journey back home, I was going to go to Cox's Bazaar which is all beach resort on the bay of Bengal. Although I felted that I didn't want to go just for 2 days because it's a 4 or 5 hours bus ride south from Chittagong. This would me a 12 hour bus ride back to Dhaka and that's not something I wanted to experience. So the plan now is to catch a train Monday morning to Dhaka and just wait until Wednesday morning when I fly to India. There's one more site to see in Dhaka that I didn't go to before so I do that on Tuesday and that'll probably be the last thing I do before the journey home. I'm counting the days until I get home, I've been doing that for about a week now.

Well thanks for reading and enjoy your Sunday, not sure when the next blog will be, probably on Tuesday. Hopefully I'll be able to put up pictures then.

Go Habs
Andrew

Chittagong.

I didn't proof read this so ther's probably lots of mistakes. There's also no pictures because this computer doesn't seem to have a USB slot. Go Habs.

Well another couple days and another interesting travel story. So I left Rajshahi on Thursday afternoon at 4pm. I bought the train ticket earlier in the day, my plan was to go from Rajshahi to Chittagong. Although first I had to stop in Dhaka to change trains. So the guy at the train station said there's a train to Chittagong at 11:30pm, my train was suppose to arrive at 9:30. This would have worked out great but as you can probably guess it didn't work out. The train ride was fine, I had an AC car with the upper middle class people of Bangladesh so they don't stare as much as other people. The crappy part was how long this train took, it didn't get to the station until 11pm and since Dhaka is so big there are several stations. It didn't stop at the one I wanted it to stop at though(the main station was probably another 20 minutes down the line) So I get off the train and it's pitch dark because the power is off and this is a small station so they don't have a generator. I find the ticket guy although there's about 7 of them in the office and there looking at some paper with just a single candle trying to sort something out. So I didn't get anywhere with them and just decided to go find a hotel since I wasn't making the train to Chittagong because it wasn't leaving from this station. Finding a hotel isn't that hard as there are plenty of them, except the language barrier was a real problem this time. The baby taxi guy assumed I wanted to go the Sheraton hotel which I said yes too because it's in the LP guide, however on the way there I found the listing in the book and it's like $130 a night. that's insane. So now I have to explain to him that's it's too expensive-this was challenging to say the least. I was in the rich area of Dhaka where all the embassy's are, thus the hotels are more expensive. My driver was crazy, we almost hit at least 10 people and every time there was space of a couple feet between us and the car ahead he would accelerate like he was drag racing someone off the line. I quickly learned not to sit leaning forward with this guy. So eventually we came to another batch of hotels and I walked into one called Asia Pacific-as soon as I saw the front lobby I knew it was too expensive. I ended up walking down the street a bit and found the garden inn hotel. By this time it's like 11:30 at night and I'm super tired and getting more pissed each minute. I couldn't deal with trying to find another hotel so I stayed at this one which was like 50 bucks for the night. Side note: for those of you who haven't traveled before this about 5 times above my budget. The price may not seem like a huge deal to you but I'm used to paying about 10 bucks or less. So from a budget point of view this sucked but the hotel was really nice and there was a sit down toilet.

So after watching some wrestling on tv(it's really popular over here) I fell asleep knowing that I have to make a 300km trip to Chittagong on friday. I was up about 10am and ended up catching a bus for 300taka to Chittagong, the bus left at 11:30am and got here at 5pm. Not exactly a quick ride or safe for that matter, at some point I was more comfortable on the back of that guys motorcycle with no helmet then in the bus. Most of the buses here are private so now many rules apply, this driver was weaving in a out at like 70 km/h in a huge coach bus. The highway was only 2 lanes all the way and we had a couple almost head on crashes. Super intense.

So it's Friday night at I'm in Chittagong which is the capital of the Chittagong Division(go figure) the population is 4 million people making it the second largest city in Bangladesh. Rajshahi had about 1 million people. From what I've seen of the city it's very much a port town as there are tons of boats and factories along the river. It seems like there a steel making place every couple hundred metres. The other type of factory they have are ship breaking yards, similar to the dry docks in Port Weller(welland canal reference) Except here they don't get put back together and most work is done by manual labour, using blowtorches, sledgehammers and brute force. They are often used in Bangladesh movies as bad guy hangouts.

I probably won't be able to get pictures because they are getting strict with letting people in because of pollution and work conditions. If you google bangladesh ship breaking yards and search for pics you'll get a good idea of what they look like. The gov. also just sued a couple ship yards for causing to much pollution.

Well that's all I got for now, I'm hopefully going to eat something for supper that isn't chicken. Tomorrow I'm going to Foy's Lake Amusement Park, I pretty excited.


Andrew