Srimangal and the monkey's backside.

At the weekend we went to Srimangal, 200 km northeast of Dhaka.  It is the area where they grow tea.  Here is Marc at the Finlay tea garden:

We also went into some of the jungle that is still left in Bangladesh.  Unfortunately we didn't have time for a long hike into the deep jungle but it was still great.  Here is me on the main track at the entrance.

In the jungle we saw amazing colouful, and very poisonous looking spiders and caterpillars, also lizards, chameleons, pig tail monkeys and the endangered hoolock gibbons. For some reason the monkeys don't like looking at the camera but you can really make out the 'pig tail' in this picture!:

It was a really interesting drive up to Srimangal, we could really see how flat Bangladesh is. It was pretty much constant paddy fields the whole way up. It looks like Bangladesh has a real water hyacinth problem as well, as practically every body of water that wasn't a rice field was choked with the stuff.

The traffic in Dhaka is bad, but at least it's slow. Once out of the roads it's terrifying.  The main highway is 80 kph, and is 1.5 - 2 lanes wide with buses, trucks, rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, cars, pedestrians, goats, chickens, cows and dogs all on the same road. Overtaking is done on blind corners, up hills and into on-coming traffic! The system is you pull out, beep your horn lots and flash your lights at the vehicle coming the other way to let them know they should slow down as you're coming through. And then often as not, pull back in as there is not enough room to pass.  And to make it even worse the road is elevated a couple of meters above the paddy fields so it doesn't flood in the monsoon, so if you need to swerve there is nowhere to go but down...You know those near-death experiences with on-coming traffic you have occasionally in the west? The ones where you pull over to the side of the road for a few minutes to recover? We had one about every ten minutes for a three hour journey - not an experience we want to repeat.  Next time we think we will take the train, which of course has it's own set of difficulties but hopefully only one on each track?