Everything but a boat

We've just had an adventurous week in India where we took nearly every form of transport possible.  We started from our place in Dhaka at 8pm in a 4x4 and went to the train station where our train was meant to arrive at 10 pm (actually it was meant to be 9 pm but they finally decided to put the clocks back at New Years so the time changed but the train didn't move with it). The train was delayed until 1 am so we went to have tea at one of Marc's colleague's place.  The train finally left at 2 am. We'd booked a 4 person 1st class sleeper cabin for the 3 of us (my brother is staying with us), sounds extravagant but it only cost about 23 pounds for the whole cabin.  We settled down for some sleep. The next day about 10 am we went through Bogra, a town about 3 hours drive away from Dhaka (or probably 1.5 hours in any other country!) - so that took 8 hrs by train...  Eventually we made it to Lalmonirhat where we got on a rickshaw to the bus stop.  We took a 3 hour bus to Patgram up near the Indian border.  There we had some food with Marc's colleague's brother-in-law and got on an electric tuk tuk.  The border closed in an hour so we were 'racing' for the border in an electric tuk tuk that went about 14 kph waving to people who were working in the fields and breaking rocks by the side of the road. It was very funny.  The local kids got really excited about seeing 3 white people and even the adults were smiling and pointing.

We walked across the border and took a taxi to Siliguri in India. The next morning we took at share jeep to Kurseong - 3 hrs by jeep for 50 rupees each wasn't bad although it didn't compare to the 8 rupees each for a 3 hr trip on the Himalayan steam 'toy train' that we took to Darjeeling. Now that was slow. People were running alongside the train and hitching a ride to football practice by hanging on the side. Fun though, and excellent mountain views.

After we got to Darjeeling we couldn't quite face doing the whole thing in reverse order back to Dhaka, so we took a jeep back down the mountain and flew to Kolkata and then flew to Dhaka.  We thought about taking the train Kolkata to Dhaka but it was 12 hours and we thought it was a bit long...so instead we took a 25 minute flight and spent 10 hours waiting around at airports for it! A few hours in Kolkata waiting for fog to clear and then 2.5 hours in the immigration queue in Dhaka!  Completely mental and quite possibly the most boring thing ever.  It's a good example of what happens when there are too many people. Although the fact that the immigration people have to type in all your details every time you come through slows things down a bit too!