Taking the train...

This past weekend I took a train trip up to a more rural area of Bangladesh, which was really nice – so good to get away from the noise and busyness of the city, even if only for two days. We went to a town called Srimongol, which is where a lot of tea estates and fruit gardens are. It is a more hilly area of Bangladesh, so that was a nice change as well (much of Bangladesh is flat and covered in water).

We had to get up early to catch our train, and at 5:30 in the morning we met our rickshaws to get a ride to the station. At the train station, we found a place to wait where we didn’t attract too much attention – as foreigners in this country, it is not unusual for a crowd of people to circle around just to look at you, and for beggars to come up to you constantly and persistently, but we avoided that for the most part. The people we were sitting near were surreptitiously reading our tickets to find out where we were going, so I knew that they would tell us when our train came. Sure enough, they let us know, and a couple of people also looked at our tickets and made us follow them right onto the train and into the right car. (There is basically no way of knowing what car to get on unless you can read Bangla, and because Bangla is an entirely different alphabet I can’t read anything here!) One lady took us right to our seats, told the people who were sitting in them to move, and then stayed with us for most of the trip! People here definitely do want to do whatever they can to help visitors to their country – it is really nice. We’ve had similar experiences everywhere we go in Bangladesh – someone will always come to our aid, whether we ask them to or not!

There are a few different classes of tickets you can buy for the train – air conditioned compartment, first class compartment, assigned seat in the regular compartment, and standing room in the regular compartment. Riding in the cargo cars or on the top of the train is the least expensive way to travel…and it is a pretty common sight. Every train has at least a few people on top of it (and apparently a lot of people during busy travel times). We had assigned seats in the regular compartment. The windows all open, and there are fans as well, so it was actually pretty comfortable… not exactly the cleanest, but still, not bad! The temperature was bearable, especially because we had lots of wind blowing into the car.

Here are some pictures from the trip.

 Transporting bricks down the river.

The inside of the train...not too full, thankfully!  And the fans in the ceiling were working...which we appreciated during the times when the train had to stop to let another train pass.

Outside of the train, during one of our stops along the way.

Who knew one person could carry so much hay on their head at one time??

Pictures and stories from the rainforest and tea estates to come soon!