River Crusin'

Saturday April 16, 2011

River Cruisin’

We woke today excited for our full day river cruise with one of the highly recommended by expats (and one of the only too!) tour guide companies in Dhaka. We met at the main Gulshan 2 (name of the district) roundabout and had a small group for the trip today with a total of 8 people – a group of 4 Germans and a Lebanon man. We headed to the river dock about 45 mins to 1 hour away. The ride was with pretty minimal traffic which was nice but we would experience something else on our return home…..

The small boat we took was a very nice one indeed and seemed especially big since there were very few of us. Although, I wonder if its ever had a “full” boat…probably with hosting groups/embassy people I’m thinking. Of course we had some great staring by groups and workers along the river as we hopped onto our boatJ

The river we were cruising was one of the outlets that flow from the famous Ganges River out of India. The Bay of Bengal and ocean itself is more than 100 km away so it is pretty amazing when I find out from Rick that the tides are still felt in the waterways close to Dhaka!

We saw so many amazingly interesting things today including many smiling waving faces of men on their working boats and children playing along the water shoreline. There are boats that look like they are about to sink and they are the ones heaped with sand (dredged from the bottom of the river), bricks and jute fibers. It was obvious that EVERYONE working on the river was working hard!

Some other really interesting things we saw were the building of giant ships on the banks. Just like everything else in this country, this was all done completely by hand from the putting of metal sheets onto the exterior and the building of the inner wooden frame – absolutely amazing. We also saw cows being washed and not to forget the Bengali river dolphin!!!! In fact, I guess we were lucky because we saw the blind river dolphins more than 5 times which is very rare. They don’t jump out of the water with tricks like the ones in Hawai’i but still so great to see. They call them blind because the river is so dirty that they don’t know where they are swimming but have such incredible senses to do so.

What else…..o yes we saw paper mill plants (sadly polluting the waterways quite badly) and brick making plants (also heavily polluting the air with its smoke stacks!). We had 2 stops during the river cruise where we physically got out of the boat. The first was to an old landlord’s mansion, which has now been converted into a university and the second was to a very special kind of saree fabric and design weaving place. The prints were all done by hand and took about 3-4 months to complete one saree so you could imagine the detail that goes into such beautiful pieces.

Like I said earlier, the traffic coming home was literally at a stand still at some points downtown where a new by pass (“fly over” is what they call them here) is currently being built. But once you got through that the traffic was bearable although worse than the morning. Maybe everybody was coming back to town getting ready for a new work week (remember Sunday is the Monday here in a Muslim dominated country) after the new year celebrations.

Alison and I went shopping a bit in Gulshan 2 before heading home and just in time to get out of the giant rain and thunder storm that blacked us out tonight. We bought a basket for our food package to take to Milan’s family tomorrow which will be a 4 hour drive one way into the countryside leaving at 6 am tomorrow morning. I am so excited!