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.
