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.
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.
This article is a brief guide to Rangoon's nightlife, as well as a final photo-log to this interesting city! And it's been moved! This article has become a city guide in it's own rite, so when you click on this article, you'll be prompted to visit this guide in its new location.
(It's better this way, I promise)
It was time to leave the Shan State, but before I did, I wanted to get off the beaten path a little bit. For 40 USD, a few new friends and I hired a truck to take us deeper into the Shan State than ever before to a temple complex called Kakku.
The canals looked like a low-key, Burmese Venice in the beginning, but as we got further out towards the actual lake, the building faded away quickly, giving way to miles and miles green grass, and scattered huts. Every once in a while I would see some construction vehicles working, and wondered how in the world they had even gotten that far out there in the first place.
Since Burma's history isn't exactly common knowledge, let's start by filling in some of your knowledge gaps. The first question is a simple one: what is Mingun Pagoda?
Fair question. It’s not quite on the level of the Great Wall or the Pyramids, so most people have probably never heard of it.
I was picked up at 4:00am and driven to a little white van in Old Bagan with the words ‘OK Express’ printed onto the back windows. Sufice to say there was no sleeping that happened on that bus. We took dirt roads for 6 hours from Bagan to Mandalay. At one point I’m pretty sure we drove through a dried up riverbed.