Now let’s back it up a little ways. When I first arrived in Dhaka, the customs agent asked me how long I planned on staying in Bangladesh. This is where all my problems started. Take this as a learning experience, should you ever visit Bangladesh.
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Bangladesh
I'm going to kick this post off with some history, and work my way up to the problem I almost had with the Bangladeshi police. It's going to be heavy on writing and light on pictures, so if that's okay with you, let's get started.
Normally I’m not a fan of volunteer tourism. I don’t think it does much good beyond making the volunteer feel like a charitable person. But when I was planning my trip to Dhaka, I knew that it was going to be really hard to have an enriching or positive interaction with Bangladesh if I didn’t find some sort of something to plug in with.
What I found was JAAGO.
Waking up in Dhaka I hear the ringing of bells on rickshaws, people yelling, and dogs barking. I am staying on the 9th floor of an office building that rises high over the slums on Dhaka’s southwestern outskirts. I look out the window, and I can see a rainstorm blowing in from the south. The Muslim call to prayer eerily wafts over the half-finished buildings all around me from the local mosques.
Yes, Dhaka has consistently been ranked as the #1 most “unlivable” city in the world by publications like The Telegraph, Business Insider & etc. It is mostly competing with Harare, Zimbabwe for that title. I’ve been here for a little while now, and I can 100% understand why. Thanks to overcrowding, traffic, and muddy rivers running through the streets, it takes 3 hours to get from one side of the city to the other on a normal day. The commute is stressful, deafeningly loud, and always wet, due either to sweat or torrential rain. Kind of makes you just want to never leave home, if possible.
But let’s just start from the beginning.
I’m leaving Hanoi! But before I come back state side I’m doing a last little stint of traveling. I’m leaving Hanoi on August 18th and I will likely be back in the States somewhere in the Halloween ballpark.
In this post, we'll cover the first few destinations of the trip: Singapore, Burma, and Bangladesh.