Greetings all wherever you may be right now, and thanks for popping along to my blog today! Today I want to start my dissection of the Dhaka to Dakar adventure I undertook earlier this year (if you are new to the blog, I took a mostly overland journey from Dhaka, Bangladesh to Dakar, Senegal from late January to late April) by starting at the very beginning. Apparently it’s a very good place to start!

Naturally when undertaking a journey entitled ‘Dhaka to Dakar’ it’s not going to work if you start somewhere else, but it’s more than just the city’s name that made it a great place to begin.

I should probably start by saying it is also a very crazy place. And any visitor to Dhaka needs to be prepared for that – and the main issue is the traffic, which interestingly is an issue shared with Dakar, Senegal. I arrived late in the evening after two flights and tried out Booking.com’s new airport pickup service. Well, it outsources this service and I should probably do a post on that. In this case we touched down roughly on time but were stuck waiting for an airbridge for 20-30 minutes. Then I was slightly held up at immigration as they required the phone number of my hotel and I didn’t have it handy.

Still, I was somewhat annoyed that the driver wasn’t happy about the timing – I really wasn’t delayed that much and the main reason was beyond my control. He had the flight number, it makes no sense to arrive before the flight has touched down but whatever, he was angling for an extra payment I’m pretty sure.

There was an ATM opposite the immigration gate which certainly is a new feature in Dhaka, which allowed me to withdraw all the cash I needed for my four days in Bangladesh. The hotel was not that far from the Old City, I thought it was pretty well located and was a basic but solid choice.

It was the friendliness of the place that was the highlight of Dhaka. People were friendly and curious and as a visitor you stand out like a sore thumb yet somehow in a good way. Travelling through the city was the major downside because it was just so very very slow. Honestly, the roads are like carparks at times and you stop for 15 minutes, everyone turns off their engines and waits for the opportunity to move forward.

Experience wise the best thing I did was take the boat out on the Bandiagara River, the main estuary on which Dhaka was built. Something I hadn’t done on previous visits and it provided me with some great photos and footage of river life in Bangladesh.

But wherever I went people came up and chatted to me. The Ashan Manzil is an old mansion on the riverfront which I remembered for being very poorly lit and just full of dust from 2004 but in 2023 there is much less dust and it is presented a lot better than it used to be. It also bans photography which is a bit of a downer, although I have to confess to being sneaky at times. Actually camera restrictions are common in some parts of the world, whilst they often still allow photography via your phone which I find baffling as some iPhones have incredibly sophisticated cameras!

Just next to the mansion is this wonderful textile/dress/sari market and if you wander in here you, as a visitor to Bangladesh, are treated like a celebrity and everyone wants to know where your from etc. I experienced this on my first full day in Dhaka, and it really gave me a positivity boost (something I am in constant need of) and it continued wherever I went. In the part across from the parliament building I made friends, pretty much wherever I went.

And how many foreigners did I see? Barely any! And ironically if I said ‘hi’ I would be completely ignored by foreigners. Anyways, I did go overseas to meet foreigners, did I?

Even on the final day taking the brand new metro line to get close to the airport (check out the vlog on that experience, why the auto rickshaw left me with 1+km to walk I still don’t know!) I had loads of people come up to me and say hello. Many were taking the metro simply for the experience as it really is BRAND NEW (opened a few weeks before I arrived) and they even lock people outside to clear the backlog of passengers!

So why was Dhaka the perfect place to start? Because of the people! The wonderful, warm and inviting people who are a credit to the nation because believe me, you don’t get a warm welcome everywhere and I include Australia in that! Thanks for popping by! Take care and of course, May the Journey Never End!