Author Archives: todd

Tracking the Red Panda & visiting 27N88E

Posted on February 24, 2014 by todd

Last night I shared the room with a brother of my host Jiwan. He is development officer for the village. I’m not sure what that means, exactly.

I had tea at Kolama’s, then breakfast at Jiwan’s, and then was rushed on a motorbike with Tonka, teacher at a primary school in the Jamuna community. I was told he would help me find a guide to track down the Red Panda. The ride went past the degree confluence again. I do understand now why yesterday everyone said it’s a dangerous road. It certainly is more dangerous on a motorbike than on a bicycle. After a few kilometers he stopped, locked up his motorbike in a shed at the roadside, and we climbed up on beautifully narrow and steep footpaths to his school, between terraces and people’s houses. He said it’s a 20 minute walk and he does it every day. The weather was lovely and the kids where taught outside the building in the sun. Elderly ladies with weathered faces sitting near-by, chatting
The guide, Tonka said, would come over ‘after some time’.

The guide and a boy and I left at noon and walked up to the forest. We had a short rest at someone’s house where they had a glass of alcohol each. To my surprise the path we followed was paved.
We climbed around in the forest, through young bamboo and between old trees. But all we found was the ‘Red Panda toilet’ and orchids.

Tonka had finished his classes and took me back on his motorbike. I asked him to drop me off near the confluence, 27N88E. It was just some 150m away, on the slope above me. I set out through terraced fields and across overgrown terraces. I stumbled on a man-made path which led me directly to the confluence. The GPS was still a little shaken from the motorbike ride and the trees didn’t help with getting a good fix, but I can say with some certainty that I was either directly at 27N88E or at least within a small radius. I was not the first person at the spot, for sure, but the first with the intention of visiting it for the Degree Confluence Project. I took the pictures required by the DCP and walked back to Pyang.

These confluence visits are getting more and more awesome. They keep bringing me to places that I wouldn’t have visited on my own and which few, if any, other travellers go to. The resulting experiences are fantastic.

Back in Pyang I said hi to Kolama and had one of her wonderful teas. She said I shouldn’t have taken a guide and I can see now why that is. Next time I will know where to look for the Red Panda, and when (in the morning!). Then I got invited from house to house for a glass of Tin Pani. Last but not least I had one at Jiwan’s before dinner.

I shall leave Pyang tomorrow, towards Phikkal. I really like this place and I will visit again should I ever come back to Nepal.

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Pyang

Posted on February 23, 2014 by todd

After a sweet coffee for breakfast (I’m lookig forward to real coffee, by the way, but this one is great, too) I left the house for a quick stroll around the village in beautiful sunshine. Soon I was picked up by an elderly lady (Komala, as I learned later), who showed me the Hindu chamber in her house (even though she said she was Buddist) as well as a Hindu temple on a little hill (which, btw, is the only place where I have reliable mobile signal). The air was a little clearer than yesterday and the view over to Jamuna was amazing. Unbelievable that I had cycled all along those mountains yesterday. The distance, as the crow flies, is really just a few kilometers, but in between there are 2 river valleys that needed to be descended to and climbed out of again.

It was market day today, so the place was crowded and colorful.

I got to taste tin pani, the local ‘wine’, literally ‘three waters’, because it is somehow distilled by stacking three bowls on top of each other.

I also tasted chulri, a snack made of milk fat.

Occasionally, (not just here) people ask me how much my bike costs. I’m down to US$ 500, which is way off but still a freaking lot for the people in the countries I tend to travel in. If my maths don’t fail me, the Nepali Rupee is worth less than the Indian one, which makes traveling here incredibly cheap. I’m paying 325 Nepali Rupees per day here (granted, I don’t have my own room and share all facilities), which includes food (100 for the bed only). That’s a bit more than 2 Euros per day (about 70 eurocents for the bed)! I hope (for them) that there is an error somewhere in my calculation.

It is warm here during the day if the sun shines. But it gets quite chilly in the evening when the sun sets (around 6pm). It’s less than 10 degrees now and if nothing else, the temperatures make me want to go back down to the plains. My clothes are not suited for this.

Houses here don’t have any fire places or other ways of heating. And no insulation, either. They have lovely earthen stoves, but those are used for cooking only. Electricity is available at night only. I was told yesterday that the villagers feel very underprivileged, understandably, and many would like to migrate. The road to here is fun for me, but it is no fun if it’s the only connection to the outside world. Supplies for the local shops are brought in by pack horse from Phikkal.

There is very little light pollution and the night sky is so full of stars.

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Rahasal Child Orphanage, near Ilam – Pyang

Posted on February 22, 2014 by todd

The plan was to reach 27N88E, an unvisited degree confluence, today, and then go as far as Phikkal, which I had come through yesterday. According to one of my maps the confluence is located not far from the road connecting the villages of Jamuna and Pyang.
Straight line distances between all the places are not huge, a few kilometers here, a few there. But the winding roads easily double that.

So I continued on the paved main road, which climbed up to Ilam, then near Barbote I took a right turn onto an unpaved track. It was quite stony but not too steep and ok to ride, albeit slowly. It then descended quite steeply into a valey where a bridge crossed a river. I felt very happy to go down this way, not up. On the other side the track climbed up, and impossibly steep so. Every now and then I had to get off the bike and push.

The sun was setting already when I finally cycled past the confluence. It was 150 meters off the track, on a steep hillside. But for today, finding a place to sleep had priority. Locals had told me that there was a hotel in Pyang, not far ahead. I did find it, roughly 2km from the confluence.

The hotel is more of a homestay. I’m sleeping in the same room as my host. The same thing happened in Iran, where the guy dragged the mattress from his bedroom to the living room to sleep in the same room with me. I don’t know whether that is a sign of respect, or if they think I might run away with their possessions during the night.

His brother showed up after dinner and told me that they’d rarely seen any westerners here, if at all. Especially none on a bike. He also asked me how long I wanted to stay, and that they’d like to show me a Red Panda. Apparently that’s a rare species found in the mountains near-by, but I hadn’t heard of it. They said that tomorrow was impossible, maybe the day after would work, and I should stay a little longer. Why it was impossible they didn’t say.

Cycled: 40km

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Charaali – Rahasal Child Orphanage, near Ilam

Posted on February 21, 2014 by todd

I left Charaali to the north. It was a misty day again, like pretty much every day since I landed in Dhaka 4.5 weeks ago.
After 6 kilometers the first mountains appeared in ‘the distance’, layer after layer. What I saw were only the first ‘hills’, not the the high peaks of the Himalayas. After 10 kilometers the road started to climb and I was leaving the plains behind me.

I climbed up to 1700m, slowly, and then down a little to a place called Phikkal at 1500, where the road turned west. If everything goes according to plan, I will come back here from a different direction (roughly northish) in a couple of days. The road followed a ridge with slight declines, before going down into a river valey to 500m. That part of the road was an awesome ride. Then it went back up.

A few kilometers before Ilam, my destination for the day, I was stopped by a young man who invited me to stay the night at a child orphanage he was volunteering at. He had seen me a while back coming back up from the plains (he had brought a Danish volunteer to the airport who’d been at the orphanage for 3 months). He and his brother are taking care of 6 little kids, the youngest just 2 years old. She had been found abandoned in a public bus.

I received a fine dinner and before going to bed we watched a Nepali movie about domestic violence, in which one of the girls had starred.

Electricity is a luxury here. It is usually available from 6pm to 6.30, and then from 7pm through the night. The orphanage had just moved into a new building that was semi-finished (the kitchen and a 2nd storey were still missing). It is being funded by donations and government as well as municipality help.

Cycled: 72km

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Siliguri – Charaali

Posted on February 20, 2014 by todd

Spent the morning in the city waiting for my Indian SIM card to be activated. For some reason this had to be done in the shop where I bought it yesterday.

I left Siliguri around noon and cycled straight westward, to the Nepali border.

At the Indian checkpoint I met a group of German cyclists. They were on an organized tour and were waiting for their bikes. They had tried to cross at a different crossing further north, which is closed for foreigners. I don’t know why, but instead of cycling down they’d rented a car that took their bikes down to this crossing.
One of the guys asked me about my framebag, and where to get one. Unfortunately, I had to tell him that my business is not up and running yet…

On the Nepali side, on the western bank of the Mechi river, the immigration and customs situation was a bit unclear. It doesn’t seem to be customary here (as in, on the Indian sub-continent?) to have toll road-like immigration offices. Indians and Nepalis, who make up most of the border traffic here, can cross the border unrestricted, that is, without any document checks (and maybe even without any documents at all). Immigration offices are therefore placed somewhere at the side of the road and especially in Nepal it felt like I could have cycled past without anyone taking notice.
I did stop, of course, and bought my 15-day visa-on-arrival for US$ 25.

Fun fact of the day: While Indian Rupees are legal tender in Nepal, for reasons unknown the Indian 500 and 1000 Rupee notes are not only not accepted in Nepal, it is also illegal to carry them around or to try to change them. What can I say, most of my cash is in notes of 500 Indian Rupees.

My first impression of Nepal: it is more colorful. The houses, at least, are.

I kept cycling westward for a dozen or so kilometers and found a simple place to sleep at the junction from where I will head north tomorrow, into the Himalayas.

Cycled: 52km

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Siliguri

Posted on February 19, 2014 by todd

Siliguri is quite a charming city. The residential areas I cycled through yesterday looked nice and today I spent most time wandering the market, which is a colorfull lot of stalls and shops.

Last but not least, inspired by Heather, I went to the movies. “Gunday” was on. Fun to watch, even if it was in Bengali and I didn’t understand anything. Lots of slo-mo action, (male) skin, and a cheering audience (that’s what I liked most).

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Patgram – Siliguri

Posted on February 18, 2014 by todd

I left late, around 10am. On the last 10 kilometers to the border crossing it seemed as if people were even more friendly than during the last weeks, waving and smiling.
At the Bangladeshi immigration desk I said “Hello. I’d like to leave Bangladesh.” And immediately regretted my words. I almost added “Well, not really, you know. But I kind of have to. And I’ll be back!”

Then I was in India.
India, where customs and immigration offices are housed in bamboo huts, where everything is recorded in big registers, on paper, no computers; where the roads are worse than in Bangladesh; where the driving is even more reckless; where girls wear jeans and ride bicycles and motorcycles; where the food and the chai are delicious; where it seems to be at least equally difficult to get cash with my credit card as in Bangladesh; where ‘traffic guards’ stop me to take a picture with me.

Cycled: 102km

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Lalmornihat – Patgram

Posted on February 17, 2014 by todd

I left Lalmornihat to the north, towards Patgram and the Burimari border crossing. The road follows the left bank of the Teesta river.

The northwest of Bangladesh is a wee bit less conservative than the southeast. Something I haven’t seen in Bangladesh before: girls and women on bicycles! Also, it happened once or twice that groups of school girls waved hello and smiled when I rode past. Something that seemingly would have been impossible in the south.

According to the map there were a few more Indian exclaves along the road, but when I stopped and asked people they said “there is no India here, only Bangladesh”. I wonder what happened.

I arrived in Patgram at around 2.15pm, after 82km of riding. I found a hotel, had lunch, and set out for some more nerdy sightseeing.

One of the biggest (maybe the biggest) Bangladeshi exclaves in India is the Dahagram–Angarpota exclave. At its closest point it is just a hundred meters away from Bangladeshi mainland. Its inhabitants have long struggled to be able to go to Bangladesh, had no electricity and no health care or other support. Only a couple of years ago India and Bangladesh have entered into an agreement where India leased that small stretch of land, called the Tin Bigha Corridor, to Bangladesh, to enable Bangladeshis to cross from/to Dahagram–Angarpota. An Indian public main road crosses the corridor as well. The corridor is guarded by both the Bangladeshi (on both Bangladeshi sides) and the Indian army (inside the corridor).

On arrival the Bangladeshis wouldn’t let me through at first, but when I assured them I had no intentions of defecting to India I was eventually escorted through – by bicycle as well! The Indians didn’t care at all. I cycled all around the exclave for an hour or so. At the far end of the exclave I met a group (two busses full) of students with their teachers who had come from Rangpur for some nerdy sightseeing, too, and a massive picnic.

Cycled: 122km

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Rangpur – Lalmornihat

Posted on February 16, 2014 by todd

I left Rangpur to the east, towards Lalmornihat. I avoided the highway and cycled on a minor road to the Teesta river. Instead of the river, which is wide and mighty on my maps, I just found flood plains full with fields – rice and potatos and other vegetables I can’t name. I cycled on the narrowest footpaths between fields and across desert-like stretches of sand (the sidearms of the Teesta which dried up last) until I could see the water. I stopped near an old guy, sitting on the ground and pinning leafes on wooden needle-like sticks. His wife(?) and two kids and another man appeared soon, too, and we chatted away in our languages without understanding much. I helped them pin the leafes and learned that it was stuff that was smoked. Was that tobacco??

I crossed the actual Teesta, which was narrow and shallow, on a boat that was rowed by a bunch of boys, maybe 7 years old or younger.

From there to Lalmornihat was an easy ride. I’m staying at the local RDRS guesthouse again.
After check-in I did some nerdy sightseeing: I went to India. And circumnavigated it.

There are a bunch (a lot, actually) of Indian exclaves in the area, as well as Bangladeshi exclaves in India.
But what does that mean? Is there an actual border? A fence? Is the grass really greener on the other side?

There is a tiny one of these exclaves less than 10km east from Lalmornihat, just a couple of hundred meters off a paved main road. I left this road and cycled along a dirt track until I hit another narrow but paved road. According to the GPS this was were the border was. I followed the asphalt and it seemed to follow the outline of the exclave almost exactly. I was a wee bit disappointed, though, as there was no border, no police, no fence, and everything looked just like everywhere else in the countryside.

At lunch I had met a guy who had told me that there were no Bangladeshi exclaves in India anymore, India had occupied them all, he said. Was he right? Had the same happened with the Indian exclaves this side of the border?

I asked a man standing at the track. He was happy to tell me that this was India! And he was Indian! I had just crossed the border to India! How exciting! :)
I cycled on and asked another guy – another Indian! From what I understood it is difficult for them to travel to India, though, despite being Indian. Going to Bangladesh is not a problem, obviously, even though it is technically illegal.

I’ll try to find a Bangladeshi exclave once I’m in India.

Cycled: 61km

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Bogra – Rangpur

Posted on February 15, 2014 by todd

It was pouring this morning and I quickly decided to take the mail train up to Rangpur.

I ended up in the back of a cargo coach with my bike, with a bunch of Bangladeshis and their belongings: bags of vegetables, furniture, bicycles, big pots full with little fish. Each two bowls had one man or boy sitting in front of them, constantly patting the surface in order to add oxygen to the water.

The train ride was long, but a very ‘native’ way of travelling, plus I was given snacks and fruit by my fellow travellers. And it was a good alternative to riding my bike in the rain. Unfortunately, it meant that I was taken way north of an unvisited degree confluence in the area, which had been on my to-do list for today.

I’m staying at the Rangpur guesthouse of the RDRS, a Bangladeshi NGO that helps with sustainable development in the rural areas in the north and east of the country.

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Natore – Bogra

Posted on February 14, 2014 by todd

After breakfast I went looking for the local rajbaris. There are two, one commonly known as Natore Rajbari, and a second, known as Uttara Gono Bhaban. The latter is said to be one of the official residences of the president of Bangladesh, and not open to the public. While seeking the former I ended up at the latter and discovered that it can now be visited. It would open at 10am (it was 9.30 when I arrived) and the entrance fee was 10 Taka – for Bangladeshis. For foreigners it was 500 Taka, 50 times as much. While that is still not extremely much (though I don’t know what exactly there is to see at that rajbari) I don’t think my income is 50 times that of a middle-class Bangladeshi who can afford coming here for leisure and visit the place. (The 10-fold increase that is customary at other places I find acceptable.) Also, I didn’t feel like idling for half an hour.

Instead I went for the other rajbari, actually 7 big buildings and a number of smaller ones as well as some Hindu temples. The fee there was 5 Taka, even for foreigners. Hm, I found that a bit low. ;)

I was looking at the first temple when I was approached by two groups of kids, boys and girls, respectively. They handed me a flower and everyone shook my hand and shouted “Happy Valentine’s Day!”

It’s Friday, Muslim holiday, and the place was being prepared for some kind of Valentine’s Day celebrations. People were brought in by the bus full. I didn’t have five minutes for myself before I was stopped again and again for a chat or a photo. I looked around for a bit and left. It was charming but a bit too much.

On the direct highway, Bogra is just 75km from Natore, in a northeastish direction. I wanted to avoid that and cycled north, parallel to the railway. Sometimes I took shortcuts through rice fields, and for a while I cycled on the railway dam right next to the rail track on a singe-file path. It was amazing.

Near the town of Naogaon I turned east. It was quite late in the day already, so I hopped on a bus to Bogra that just happened to wait for passengers at the side of the road to cover the last 30 or so kilometers before sunset. I sat on the roof of the bus with my bike.

At dinner, I experienced my first ever earth quake.

Cycled: 84km

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Rajshahi – Natore

Posted on February 13, 2014 by todd

I spent some time riding around the city, then set out towards Natore.

On the way I stopped in Puthia, where there are some rajbaris and Hindu temples. Especially the temples are beautiful. They are about 400 years old and intricately decorated with terracotta tiles.
Some of them are still in use by the approx. 30% Hindu population.
A rajbari was the residence of a zamindar, a Hindu landlord used by the British during their rule on the Indian subcontinent to administer taxation and local affairs.
The ones here are not in the best state of repair. One is used by some government land office, so at least that one is looked after. The other buildings don’t even have complete roofs anymore. I was warned of cobras but didn’t find any.

Looking at the ceiling in one of the temples, I dropped and broke my sunglasses. They now look suspiciously like my normal glasses.

Natore is only about 40km from Rajshahi, and I arrived there around 6pm, with last light.

The countryside up here is still flat. No hills, no nothing.

I think Bangladesh’s surface is either one of the following three: settlements (villages, towns, cities); water (ponds, reservoir lakes, rivers); fields.
There is very little forest – there is some, of course, e.g. in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Bangladesh has no stones. Maybe there are some rocks somewhere in the eastern hill ranges. But generally there is only sand and silt from the anual floodings. That explains the high number of brick factories seen everywhere. Often the freshly burnt bricks are then broken up again to use as foundation for e.g. roads.

Cycled: 70km

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Dhaka – Rajshahi

Posted on February 12, 2014 by todd

My train was scheduled for 11.20am today.
I managed to cram absolutely all of my luggage into my backpack, so that I could leave the bike in a different coach if need be.

Mr Shiny Shoes cycled to the train station, feeling a little too shiny. I wished Dhaka’s tendency to cover everything with a grey layer of dust would apply to my shoes quicker than usual. But two kilometers of cycling (including getting lost on what is a pretty easy route) is not enough for that.

I paid 110 Taka (approx. 1.20 Euro) for the 8+ hour (again, a bit more than 200km) trip to Rajshahi.

While waiting for the train, I was of course the attraction, mostly for beggars and children. I try not to give money but buy food, if possible. But many times I just refuse to give anything. This is a very difficult topic, and fortunately, outside Dhaka and Chittagonga, begging is quite rare.

I had a crowd of people around me, when all of a sudden a guy, in his mid twenties, stepped forward. He held a speech to everyone around me, in Bengali, in a seemingly friendly tone. Of course, I didn’t understand a word, but it felt like he was speaking in defence of my privacy. The crowd slowly dispersed and he looked at me and smiled. I smiled back and asked what he had said, but he didn’t understand my (English) question.

He stuck around, without asking the usual, and let me know when my train finally arrived. One of the conductors quoted a 500 Taka fee for the bike, but my friend just showed me to the next coach and said “no money”, pointing at the bike. He then stayed around until departure (one hour later than scheduled) and we struck up a bit of a conversation with the help of two other guys who spoke more English.

This time, everyone was on my side, as far as money was concerned, and told me repeatedly not to pay anything to the conductors.

When they finally came to check tickets I politely but firmly refused their requests to pay the bideshi (foreigner) tax – from 500 down to “some money”. They came back and tried again a couple of times, but I just pointed at everyone else’s luggage and explained that there was no difference between those bags and my bike. And since there were no special provisions for bicycles anyway, there was no reason to treat a bike differently, fee-wise. Eventually they gave up and left me alone.

After it was clear that I wouldn’t pay, the conductors even became friendly. After nightfall they warned me to be careful, as fellow travelers might feel inclined to push me off the train to get a hold of my possessions. I found that slightly exaggerated…

Beyond that the trip was long but uneventful. I would recommend traveling by mail train, though, as you meet a whole bunch of different people than in the faster intercity trains. Bring a lot of time.

I arrived in Rajshahi at 11pm, 4 hours late.

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Dhaka

Posted on February 11, 2014 by todd

This morning I went to the train station to find out how mail train journeys work here.

The plan is to head to Rajshahi tomorrow, which is located approx. 200km (as the crow flies) to the northwest from here.

In the afternoon I spent several hours cycling crazy Dhaka, looking for new shoes. I finally found a pair of running shoes in Gulshan, one of Dhaka’s upmarket quarters. Proper cycling shoes seem impossible to be had, even in Dhaka.

Oh Dhaka, chaos capital! Traffic is enormous, nothing has changed since last time. Riding here induces a constant rush of adrenaline – at least when one is not caught in a traffic jam. The afternoon hours seem especially prone to clogged roads, and it’s not only the main streets that are filled to the brim. Often the small alleys aren’t much better off.

Dhaka at night is another interesting experience. The temperatures are pleasant (For me, anyway. Many locals wear their scarfs wrapped around their head.) and the streets are full with people. There are stalls (or just blankets) along the sidewalk where everything can be bought, from food to batteries, from shoes to vegetables. Some are lit by oil lamps, some by modern energy-saving bulbs illegally connected to the grid, some by battery-powered LED lamps.

For some reason I didn’t take any pictures today…

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Chittagong – Dhaka

Posted on February 10, 2014 by todd

A bit of a stressful morning it was. I was at the train station around quarter past 6am, the train was scheduled for 6.40am.

I looked for my coach, and the conductor – there is at least one per coach, it seems – was a bit baffled about the bike. A friendly fellow traveller stepped forward and helped by translating that the bike should go to the mosque. The mosque? There is a mosque compartment in one of the coaches – at the other end of the train. We found it, there is a massive generator in that coach as well (probably for the AC coaches?). The bike was not allowed in the mosque, even though someone had his luggage in there, too. Oh well, to make a long story short, a couple of conductors went berzerk over the various places we tried to store the bike in, before it was allowed in the generator room. I had only been on the train for 20 minutes but I was already sweating from moving the bike through the narrow ailes.

The rest of the journey was uneventful, except for the dust and sand that kept coming in throuh the open window. By the time I arrived in Dhaka I was as dusty as if I’d ridden my bike the whole day.

In the afternoon I went to one of the numerous DHL offices in the city and managed to send my souvenirs home without any special export permit.

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