On the morning of the 8th I was bound for Bogra, 40 miles northeast of Natore, but I couldn't find a bus due to the continuing political disturbances and bus bombings. I was able to get a ride in the back of a covered pickup to Singra, perhaps a third of the way to Bogra, and then a van from there to Bogra, arriving about 11:30. The morning was sunny and we passed lots of rice paddies. Tambir, a young guy on the van who worked for a cell phone company, guided me to a hotel better and cheaper than the one I was planning to try, showed me a good place for lunch, and then went off to work.
After lunch I took a CNG about 8 miles north to Mahasthan, site of the ruins of a fort dating back to the 3rd century B.C., though abandoned perhaps 500 years ago. Not much remains, but it is a peaceful rural area. The former walls are now mostly hillocks, with some brickwork showing. I walked along the top of the eastern wall of the rectangular citadel, something like a mile by 3/4 of a mile. Rice and other crops were planted along the walls, with people pulling out densely growing clumps of new grown rice to plant them more spaced out nearby. I made my way to the northwest section of the walls, the highest part, but still more hillock than wall. I came across a friendly but seemingly somewhat wary shepherd and his flock.
I came back to Bogra about 5 and watched a very crowded train slowly leave the train station. Many of the trains are packed due to the paucity of buses. All sorts of vendors had their merchandise spread out along the tracks, a sort of open market. I met Tambir for dinner and also met again Olivier, a Belgian who had been on the Sundarbans trip.
The three of us had breakfast again the next morning and then Olivier and I, with Tambir's help, hired a CNG for 1400 taka (about $18) to take us to the ruins of the 8th century Buddhist monastery of Somapuri Vihara at Paharpur, said to have been at one time the largest monastery south of the Himalayas. From Bogra we headed north and then northwest to Jaipurhat, and then southwest to Paharpur on bad roads past lots and lots of growing rice and through a few villages. At one we made a tea stop in a village and asked directions. The two hour trip to get there was pleasant and interesting, but the site itself was somewhat disappointing. At the center of a large quadrangle (which once had 177 cells for monks) sits a 65 foot tall brick stupa, which you can climb on. A large team of restorers was working on it, and there are some interesting terracotta panels of people and animals embedded in it, though it seemed many were replicas. We walked around the stupa and then along the periphery of former monk cells. Only the foundations are left. The workers were friendly and I took photos of a bunch of them. The museum was excellent, with black basalt Hindu sculptures and a beautiful large bronze Buddha from the 8th century. We spent about two and a half hours at Paharpur before making the scenic trip back to Bogra.
Back in town I walked to the Mohammed Ali Palace, a rajbari (that is, a large mansion) that is furnished and has mannequins dressed both in Bengali and British fashion. It is the former home of nawabs. Among the rooms is a large dining room (filled with mannequins), a billiard room, a bedroom, and a music room (more mannequins). Photographs of Kennedy, Nehru, Queen Elizabeth II, and others are on the walls, along with modern paintings and drawings of Laocoon, Apollo and Daphne, and other classical subjects. Outside is a sort of low budget amusement park with rickety rides. I had dinner again with Olivier and Tambir, and Tambir gave us each a big coffee cup emblazoned with the name of his company and a box of leather goods, including a wallet and a passport holder. That was nice of him, but I really didn't want to carry them in my backpack, so I left them in the next hotel I stayed in.
After a long breakfast the next morning with Tambir and Olivier, we all went our separate ways. About 11 I took a CNG 15 miles east to a little town called Sariakundi, and then a rickshaw to the banks of the wide Jamuna River, the river that flows through Tibet as the Yarlung Tsangpo and through India as the Brahmaputra. This area is flooded during the monsoon, but now there are big sandy islands in the wide river. When the waters are low these islands, called chars, are inhabited and cultivated. Drying in the sun on the cement embankment lay masses of enormous chili peppers, some very dark red, some somewhat lighter red, and some orange. Men and women were sifting through them, throwing out the bad ones. Only a few boats were on the river. I thought about trying to get a boat to one of the chars, but eventually just walked back towards Sariakundi, and I spent the next five hours walking on narrow roads, often damaged from the floods, through villages and past watery rice paddies.
The people were very friendly and this turned out to be perhaps my favorite day in Bangladesh. In one village kids had just gotten out of school. They were very shy. At the village edge a friendly woman was packing wet cow manure onto sticks a foot or so long, and then leaning them in a line on a fence to dry in the sun. I watched her do it and took some photographs, which she smilingly posed for. Others did, too: old men, women, kids. They were all very friendly. Along the way I saw many stacks of rice stalks and some houses only of corrugated metal, which must be miserable in the hot season.
I passed by an outdoor brick factory, with a tall smokestack, and went in to explore. Stacks of bricks lay everywhere, gray ones not yet fired and red ones, stamped PAT, already fired. The workers were all very friendly, so I walked up the bamboo ramp to the flat top of the enormous kiln with bricks being fired inside below me. On top are holes, maybe 3 or 4 inches square, with round metal covers. Two men were using metal hooks to pull up the metal covers and pour coal chips and dust into the openings. I looked down some of the holes as the covers were lifted and could see a bright orange glow and feel considerable heat. There must have been about 20 of those holes.
On the other side of the kiln men were carrying bricks that had already been fired and had now cooled from the kiln to a stacking site. They carried the bricks in slings on their shoulders, with ten bricks on a little wooden platform on each side. Further away were rows of newly made soft gray bricks drying in the sun, with a big mud puddle and some sort of brick making machine, now idle. Some of the workers showed me how the bricks are made. I've never seen so many brick factories as I saw in Bangladesh.
I kept walking and met more friendly people. A group of girls, mostly shy, spoke some English. One spoke good English and told me she was 9, in grade 6, and the daughter of a school teacher. Soon I was being followed by a big crowd of kids and adults. One big guy asked me to stop for tea at a little wooden shack and insisted on paying as I was his guest. After we finished and had talked a while, a boy came up and invited me to visit his secondary school. The classrooms were of corrugated metal and dark, with few or no windows and wooden benches and tables. He took me first to a raucous English class. The teacher, over 65 he told me, took me to meet the headmaster. They took me to a Form 7 class, with one girl among all the boys. She spoke some English and held her own among all those unruly boys. I was told her father is in the United States. Students by now had in large part deserted their classrooms to follow me around. I was told there are 600 students in the school. I was led to a Form 10 classroom, the highest in the school and all boys. The small room was dark and crowded, another corrugated metal room with only one small window and no electricity. There was not much discipline other than yelling by the teachers. Just before I went in I was introduced to the agriculture teacher, the only one I met in Islamic dress. Inside, the class put on a performance for me. First, some small kids performed acrobatics on the floor. Then, one kid sang, though his noisy classmates seemed to pay no attention. Next, two or three boys acted out, quite forcefully, what seemed to be a scene from a play. Finally, a drummer played.
I left accompanied by a sea of friendly students. The English teacher invited me to tea at another roadside tea shack, and told me that he had been teaching for 45 years. At the tea shop a mass of kids swarmed around me, wanting to shake my hand. There were adults, too, all very friendly. Finally, I broke away and continued my walk, reaching another embankment, or ghat, of the Jamuna River, with good views of the river and chars. I watched wooden ferry boats coming and going. By then it was 4 o'clock or later. I got to talking to a guy who told me he was studying to be a pilot in Bangalore (in India). He offered to take me to the CNG stand in Sariakandi on his motorcycle. Three of us rode on the motorcycle and on the way we stopped for tea, my third of the afternoon, this time with ginger. I left on a CNG about 5 for the 40 minute ride back to Bogra, a beautiful drive through rice paddies in the late afternoon. The streets were packed in Bogra.
The next morning I left Bogra for Rangpur, 65 miles north and near the northern border with India. With the continuing transport problems, it wasn't easy. It took more than three and a half hours and entailed an auto rickshaw, 3 CNGs, and two buses. The auto rickshaw just took me through town to the CNGs heading north. The three CNGs got me only about 20 miles from Bogra, to Gabindaganj. From there I got a bus to Palabari, less than 10 miles away. Finally, a crowded bus took me all the rest of the way to Rangpur. Total fares all the way were a little over two dollars. The road was busy and I saw several other buses. Perhaps the opposition is not very strong in this northwest region. As always, we passed lots of rice on the way.
After lunch I went to the domed Tajhat Palace, built in the 19th century. It is in poor shape, though it does have a white marble staircase leading up to it. Roman statues used to line the steps, but no more. The frontage of the palace is something like 260 feet. It was built by a Hindu from Punjab who was a successful jeweler and then became a zamindar, or landowner, acquiring the title of raja. I headed next to Carmichael College in a spacious area at the edge of town. Established in 1916, it has some deteriorating Indo-Saracen buildings. I saw a plaque thanking zamindars for donating the land. The grounds, despite the trees and grass, were not particularly inviting. Much of the grass was dead and trash was everywhere. An orange sun was setting as I took a rickshaw back to the city center.
The next morning shortly before 10 I left on a bus heading 25 miles west to Saidpur, a slow, packed bus making lots of stops through a countryside of rice and other crops. From there another 25 miles southwest by bus took me to Dinajpur in the northwest corner of Bangladesh. I arrived about 12:30, found a hotel, and then hopped on a bus heading north and for the most part retracing the last part of the route I had just taken. Kantanagar, where I was heading, is only 10 miles away from Dinjpur, but the bus was very slow, and packed with people. Those ten miles took about an hour, and I didn't get off till about 2.
From the road I had about a 15 minute walk to the Kantanagar Temple. I crossed the river via a long new bridge, with crops growing on the exposed silt in the riverbed below. There was road work beyond the just completed bridge and villages on the route. Just before reaching the temple I stopped to watch women standing in water planting rice.
The brick and terracotta temple, in a courtyard surrounded by a wall with offices and pilgrim quarters inside, was built in 1752 by a maharaja from Dinajpur. It is covered with superb surface decoration with lots of figures. I spent two hours there and very much enjoyed it. There were few others there, all local people. Some seemed to enjoy watching me looking closely at the panels. The sun had been out when I arrived but the sky was cloudy when I left. The women ankle-deep or deeper in water were almost finished with their rice planting for the day. The sun came out as I walked back with lots of friendly people on the way.
The bus ride back to Dinajpur was slow. Back in town, I walked to the century old Dinajpur Rajbari, mostly in ruins except for two temples. I've read that Dinajpur is 38% Hindu. One of the temples, brightly painted, had a few folks in the courtyard, including a very curious little kid and his friendly mother. I took an auto rickshaw to the train station to see about a ticket for the next day. With few buses running, I had had difficulty getting all the way to Dinajpur, in Bangladesh's far northwest corner. Now I had to figure out how to get back to the center of the country. At the station, however, I was told there were no tickets for reserved seats on the next day's train to Dhaka. With few buses running, lots of people wanted to take the train.
After lunch I took a CNG about 8 miles north to Mahasthan, site of the ruins of a fort dating back to the 3rd century B.C., though abandoned perhaps 500 years ago. Not much remains, but it is a peaceful rural area. The former walls are now mostly hillocks, with some brickwork showing. I walked along the top of the eastern wall of the rectangular citadel, something like a mile by 3/4 of a mile. Rice and other crops were planted along the walls, with people pulling out densely growing clumps of new grown rice to plant them more spaced out nearby. I made my way to the northwest section of the walls, the highest part, but still more hillock than wall. I came across a friendly but seemingly somewhat wary shepherd and his flock.
I came back to Bogra about 5 and watched a very crowded train slowly leave the train station. Many of the trains are packed due to the paucity of buses. All sorts of vendors had their merchandise spread out along the tracks, a sort of open market. I met Tambir for dinner and also met again Olivier, a Belgian who had been on the Sundarbans trip.
The three of us had breakfast again the next morning and then Olivier and I, with Tambir's help, hired a CNG for 1400 taka (about $18) to take us to the ruins of the 8th century Buddhist monastery of Somapuri Vihara at Paharpur, said to have been at one time the largest monastery south of the Himalayas. From Bogra we headed north and then northwest to Jaipurhat, and then southwest to Paharpur on bad roads past lots and lots of growing rice and through a few villages. At one we made a tea stop in a village and asked directions. The two hour trip to get there was pleasant and interesting, but the site itself was somewhat disappointing. At the center of a large quadrangle (which once had 177 cells for monks) sits a 65 foot tall brick stupa, which you can climb on. A large team of restorers was working on it, and there are some interesting terracotta panels of people and animals embedded in it, though it seemed many were replicas. We walked around the stupa and then along the periphery of former monk cells. Only the foundations are left. The workers were friendly and I took photos of a bunch of them. The museum was excellent, with black basalt Hindu sculptures and a beautiful large bronze Buddha from the 8th century. We spent about two and a half hours at Paharpur before making the scenic trip back to Bogra.
Back in town I walked to the Mohammed Ali Palace, a rajbari (that is, a large mansion) that is furnished and has mannequins dressed both in Bengali and British fashion. It is the former home of nawabs. Among the rooms is a large dining room (filled with mannequins), a billiard room, a bedroom, and a music room (more mannequins). Photographs of Kennedy, Nehru, Queen Elizabeth II, and others are on the walls, along with modern paintings and drawings of Laocoon, Apollo and Daphne, and other classical subjects. Outside is a sort of low budget amusement park with rickety rides. I had dinner again with Olivier and Tambir, and Tambir gave us each a big coffee cup emblazoned with the name of his company and a box of leather goods, including a wallet and a passport holder. That was nice of him, but I really didn't want to carry them in my backpack, so I left them in the next hotel I stayed in.
After a long breakfast the next morning with Tambir and Olivier, we all went our separate ways. About 11 I took a CNG 15 miles east to a little town called Sariakundi, and then a rickshaw to the banks of the wide Jamuna River, the river that flows through Tibet as the Yarlung Tsangpo and through India as the Brahmaputra. This area is flooded during the monsoon, but now there are big sandy islands in the wide river. When the waters are low these islands, called chars, are inhabited and cultivated. Drying in the sun on the cement embankment lay masses of enormous chili peppers, some very dark red, some somewhat lighter red, and some orange. Men and women were sifting through them, throwing out the bad ones. Only a few boats were on the river. I thought about trying to get a boat to one of the chars, but eventually just walked back towards Sariakundi, and I spent the next five hours walking on narrow roads, often damaged from the floods, through villages and past watery rice paddies.
The people were very friendly and this turned out to be perhaps my favorite day in Bangladesh. In one village kids had just gotten out of school. They were very shy. At the village edge a friendly woman was packing wet cow manure onto sticks a foot or so long, and then leaning them in a line on a fence to dry in the sun. I watched her do it and took some photographs, which she smilingly posed for. Others did, too: old men, women, kids. They were all very friendly. Along the way I saw many stacks of rice stalks and some houses only of corrugated metal, which must be miserable in the hot season.
I passed by an outdoor brick factory, with a tall smokestack, and went in to explore. Stacks of bricks lay everywhere, gray ones not yet fired and red ones, stamped PAT, already fired. The workers were all very friendly, so I walked up the bamboo ramp to the flat top of the enormous kiln with bricks being fired inside below me. On top are holes, maybe 3 or 4 inches square, with round metal covers. Two men were using metal hooks to pull up the metal covers and pour coal chips and dust into the openings. I looked down some of the holes as the covers were lifted and could see a bright orange glow and feel considerable heat. There must have been about 20 of those holes.
On the other side of the kiln men were carrying bricks that had already been fired and had now cooled from the kiln to a stacking site. They carried the bricks in slings on their shoulders, with ten bricks on a little wooden platform on each side. Further away were rows of newly made soft gray bricks drying in the sun, with a big mud puddle and some sort of brick making machine, now idle. Some of the workers showed me how the bricks are made. I've never seen so many brick factories as I saw in Bangladesh.
I kept walking and met more friendly people. A group of girls, mostly shy, spoke some English. One spoke good English and told me she was 9, in grade 6, and the daughter of a school teacher. Soon I was being followed by a big crowd of kids and adults. One big guy asked me to stop for tea at a little wooden shack and insisted on paying as I was his guest. After we finished and had talked a while, a boy came up and invited me to visit his secondary school. The classrooms were of corrugated metal and dark, with few or no windows and wooden benches and tables. He took me first to a raucous English class. The teacher, over 65 he told me, took me to meet the headmaster. They took me to a Form 7 class, with one girl among all the boys. She spoke some English and held her own among all those unruly boys. I was told her father is in the United States. Students by now had in large part deserted their classrooms to follow me around. I was told there are 600 students in the school. I was led to a Form 10 classroom, the highest in the school and all boys. The small room was dark and crowded, another corrugated metal room with only one small window and no electricity. There was not much discipline other than yelling by the teachers. Just before I went in I was introduced to the agriculture teacher, the only one I met in Islamic dress. Inside, the class put on a performance for me. First, some small kids performed acrobatics on the floor. Then, one kid sang, though his noisy classmates seemed to pay no attention. Next, two or three boys acted out, quite forcefully, what seemed to be a scene from a play. Finally, a drummer played.
I left accompanied by a sea of friendly students. The English teacher invited me to tea at another roadside tea shack, and told me that he had been teaching for 45 years. At the tea shop a mass of kids swarmed around me, wanting to shake my hand. There were adults, too, all very friendly. Finally, I broke away and continued my walk, reaching another embankment, or ghat, of the Jamuna River, with good views of the river and chars. I watched wooden ferry boats coming and going. By then it was 4 o'clock or later. I got to talking to a guy who told me he was studying to be a pilot in Bangalore (in India). He offered to take me to the CNG stand in Sariakandi on his motorcycle. Three of us rode on the motorcycle and on the way we stopped for tea, my third of the afternoon, this time with ginger. I left on a CNG about 5 for the 40 minute ride back to Bogra, a beautiful drive through rice paddies in the late afternoon. The streets were packed in Bogra.
The next morning I left Bogra for Rangpur, 65 miles north and near the northern border with India. With the continuing transport problems, it wasn't easy. It took more than three and a half hours and entailed an auto rickshaw, 3 CNGs, and two buses. The auto rickshaw just took me through town to the CNGs heading north. The three CNGs got me only about 20 miles from Bogra, to Gabindaganj. From there I got a bus to Palabari, less than 10 miles away. Finally, a crowded bus took me all the rest of the way to Rangpur. Total fares all the way were a little over two dollars. The road was busy and I saw several other buses. Perhaps the opposition is not very strong in this northwest region. As always, we passed lots of rice on the way.
After lunch I went to the domed Tajhat Palace, built in the 19th century. It is in poor shape, though it does have a white marble staircase leading up to it. Roman statues used to line the steps, but no more. The frontage of the palace is something like 260 feet. It was built by a Hindu from Punjab who was a successful jeweler and then became a zamindar, or landowner, acquiring the title of raja. I headed next to Carmichael College in a spacious area at the edge of town. Established in 1916, it has some deteriorating Indo-Saracen buildings. I saw a plaque thanking zamindars for donating the land. The grounds, despite the trees and grass, were not particularly inviting. Much of the grass was dead and trash was everywhere. An orange sun was setting as I took a rickshaw back to the city center.
The next morning shortly before 10 I left on a bus heading 25 miles west to Saidpur, a slow, packed bus making lots of stops through a countryside of rice and other crops. From there another 25 miles southwest by bus took me to Dinajpur in the northwest corner of Bangladesh. I arrived about 12:30, found a hotel, and then hopped on a bus heading north and for the most part retracing the last part of the route I had just taken. Kantanagar, where I was heading, is only 10 miles away from Dinjpur, but the bus was very slow, and packed with people. Those ten miles took about an hour, and I didn't get off till about 2.
From the road I had about a 15 minute walk to the Kantanagar Temple. I crossed the river via a long new bridge, with crops growing on the exposed silt in the riverbed below. There was road work beyond the just completed bridge and villages on the route. Just before reaching the temple I stopped to watch women standing in water planting rice.
The brick and terracotta temple, in a courtyard surrounded by a wall with offices and pilgrim quarters inside, was built in 1752 by a maharaja from Dinajpur. It is covered with superb surface decoration with lots of figures. I spent two hours there and very much enjoyed it. There were few others there, all local people. Some seemed to enjoy watching me looking closely at the panels. The sun had been out when I arrived but the sky was cloudy when I left. The women ankle-deep or deeper in water were almost finished with their rice planting for the day. The sun came out as I walked back with lots of friendly people on the way.
The bus ride back to Dinajpur was slow. Back in town, I walked to the century old Dinajpur Rajbari, mostly in ruins except for two temples. I've read that Dinajpur is 38% Hindu. One of the temples, brightly painted, had a few folks in the courtyard, including a very curious little kid and his friendly mother. I took an auto rickshaw to the train station to see about a ticket for the next day. With few buses running, I had had difficulty getting all the way to Dinajpur, in Bangladesh's far northwest corner. Now I had to figure out how to get back to the center of the country. At the station, however, I was told there were no tickets for reserved seats on the next day's train to Dhaka. With few buses running, lots of people wanted to take the train.
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