On the morning of the second day of our trip I woke up really early and sat in the bungalow’s back porch for about an hour. The view from that porch was absolutely beautiful, with the cha bagans and the hills so near and the air clear in the morning sunshine. We ate breakfast in the clubhouse, and they served really good, thick bread. It was the best (non-naan) bread I’d had since coming to Bangladesh.
After breakfast we went trekking, which is the Bengali way to say hiking. We went to nearby Lawachara national park, a tropical rainforest, and hiked for about an hour. The air was so clean and fresh. I thought we were just going on a hiking trail without any real destination until we walked up a slope and emerged in a village. It was a village of the Kashi people, a tribal group that used to own a kingdom in the area back in the 1800s. Now they make their living by growing betel leaves for sale. The older Kashi speak their native language (which is in the Burmo-Tibetan language family), but the children are learning Bangla. We visited the school and talked to the kids, who were really excited to talk to us. They knew a lot more Bangla than we did. The girl I was talking to was in the fifth grade and read a lot faster than I can. As we were about to leave we found out that some of the villagers had made tea for us, so we took a break and drank the cha. I had more cha on that trip than I’d had for the month before it. One major issue with the rainforest was the leeches; several people were caught by them, as they say in Bengali. The Bangla word for leech is jok, which of course creates an opening for all sorts of leech-related bilingual jokes.
After returning to the resort to freshen up and get our stuff we drove to Sylhet city. The scenery in Sylhet district was different than the other countryside we drove through; there were more hills and ponds. We drove through several villages and small towns, including one town where all the rickshaws were red. In Dhaka they’re all different colors, so the fact that they were all one color there was surprising to me. One of the teachers said that it was probably the signature color of the local rickshaw factory. We finally got to Sylhet city proper, which is a fairly good-sized city but not anywhere near the size of Dhaka.
In Sylhet we had wonderful accommodations at a 4-star resort complete with a swimming pool, really comfortable beds, and Jacuzzis in every room. Our room had a verandah from which I could see water buffalo grazing in the distance. We ate lunch in the resort’s dining area.
After lunch we took a road trip to the north, passing through miles of flooded wetlands called beels. It was a beautiful but desolate landscape. Dotted in the distance were the figures of fisherman using their nets and boatmen pushing themselves through the water with poles. The temperatures got cooler and cooler as we headed north. When we were close to our destination we saw an elephant (hatti) in the road. He was trained to take money from people and hand it to his rider. We finally stopped at a cha bagan where you could see the hills on the other side of the border. It was my first glimpse of India! The Indian state we were looking at is named “cloud’s home” and deserves the name; the hills are covered in clouds most of the time. The wettest place in the world is just across the border there. The hills were really close, probably no more than two or three miles away across the valley.
Our next stop was a border post at the India-Bangladesh border. India was literally 50 yards away, but we couldn’t get any closer than that. Atif ran out to have his picture taken with one of the signs in no-man’s land. We then drove toward another place where you could see India on the other side of a river, but it was pouring rain so we weren’t able to see anything. When we drove back from there we had to drive through a flooded road where there was a stalled CNG full of water. The bus even had some trouble getting through. The most interesting thing about this area was that there were rocks, and even coal mines. We drove through a mining area with large piles of coal beside the road. Since most of Bangladesh is flood plain, rocks are rather hard to come by. The ride back to the hotel was really relaxing. It was raining again as we drove through the vast area of beels, and Atif played music that perfectly matched the surroundings.
Back at the hotel, we took advantage of the swimming pool! We convinced almost all the teachers to come in with us, including Rozima. Bengali women don’t wear swimming suits; they just jump in wearing salwar kameez. It was also good for our Bangla because we played monkey (boran) in the middle.
For dinner we went to the resort’s garden café. They served thai vegetable soup, which was absolutely delicious. I don’t eat enough vegetables here, so I had three or four bowls of the soup.
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