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.