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