Sylhet

I was off to Sylhet for my one and only field trip. Sylhet is the third city of Bangladesh, after Dhaka and Chittagong, but its real claim to fame is that most of the “Indian” restaurateurs in the UK are not Indian at all; they are Bangladeshi and they mostly come from Sylhet. Don’t ask me why!

Sylhet is in principle a 4½ hour drive. I say in principle because this is Bangladesh and the traffic can give you anything. On the way I soon learn the rules of the road and they are frightening. There are tricycle rickshaws on the road. They battle to overtake each other, but are mown down by tuk-tuks, who in turn are run off the road by cars. The cars get run off the road by lorries, but the kings of the road are the coaches; thousands of them, and they give no quarter. If they overtake, no matter who is coming the other way they carry on. It’s up to you to get out of the way. And of course all the time everyone is “giving it that” with the horn. Absolutely deafening when a coach is right up your backside. And all very Darwinian. Our driver is an old hand, and knows when to attack and when to drive defensively; but for this newcomer to a new set of rules it’s absolutely frightening. But (and this is a change from Russia) there are working seat belts in the car-thankfully.

So we make our way, gingerly, towards Sylhet, through paddy fields which are just being planted with rice from the many nurseries by the side of the road. It’s an interesting time of year because just as the new season’s rice is being planted the harvested rice is being prepared for being packed in great yards by the side of the road.

I can’t tell you anything more about the countryside, because there is nothing else to say, apart from the fact that there are also loads of brickworks as well. But that’s it. Bangladesh’s countryside. Done.

So after our 4½ hour drive, we get to the Sylhet offices of the Department of the Environment, find it’s a small villa with 6 people, not the 28 on the organogram, and that it has a tiny laboratory with non-functioning equipment. Still, if I hadn’t seen it, I would have made big mistakes in my report. But we’re on our way back after an hour and a half, and that included lunch-Ruby Murray of course. And this is where the trouble started.

We made good progress as far as a rest house about 50km, or two hours (!) out of Dhaka, had a cup of tea and pretty quickly drove into the biggest traffic jam of my life. A traffic jam shouldn’t be confused with a British, disciplined traffic jam. It’s full of people jockeying for position, horns blaring, getting through gaps that you wouldn’t believe possible. It went on like this for about 30 km, which we covered in 4 hours, making the journey just over 7 hours. It was absolutely awful, and the worse for being on the way into Dhaka, not on the way out. Because that’s what you learn here-that traffic jams are absolutely random. Wonder how I’m going to get to the airport in time?

But at least I’m alive; quite a feat given these roads.