SRI LANKA - Colombo (2003)

Colombo: 9.09.2003

We reached the hotel at 12.30 at night yesterday, having traveled from Dhaka via Bangkok. There was a 5-hour break at Bangkok airport. There we whiled away our time catching up on our report-writing and diary-noting. Bought some tit-bits from the souvenir shops, although, being at the airport, they were fairly costly.

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Bangkok to Colombo was a 3-hour flight, which passed quite pleasantly with the in-flight movie 'Matrix Reloaded' being shown. Sri Lankan Airlines is quite good. The food (veg version) was typically Indian and not the Continental boiled stuff.

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We discovered in the morning that tomorrow is a holiday on occasion of full-moon - 'poya'. It is observed every month. Our stay in Colombo had anyway been reduced on account of our extending Dhaka by a day and now I had 1.5 days and Easwar had 2 days. We may have to extend by another day, which means eating into the Friday rest-day at home. Anyway, we are pushing most of our meetings into today and requesting a couple of customers to meet us tomorrow.

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Colombo, a seaside city, seemed a very soothing place to me. Our hotel was across the beach promenade, that was full of families sitting around and children flying kites. The roads are very clean and well-kept and even the city-centre and commercial areas did not exhibit the mad congestion typical of capitals out of control.......

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Work-wise also, it was a relaxed place. The 9 to 5 working hours are strictly observed and nobody shows interest in meeting us after six for official purposes, unless he wants to meet us clandestinely at our hotel. Right now we are expecting such a guest, and writing the diary while waiting.

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We had just been to a shopping mall to buy some Ceylone tea and the markets are very impressive in get-up and brands stored. A fair sprinkling of fair skin also visible.

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Colombo shows off quite a number of old British-styled buildings, like in Chennai and Kolkata. The oldest beach-side hotel, Gaulle-face, was built in 1824.

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The customer who landed up in the evening at 6.00 pm was at a loss as to how to entertain us. He took us to a supermarket, Majestic City, but most of the shops had already downed shutters. We bought a few pirated CDs at around 500 baizas each and somehow managed to cross 8.30 pm - a reasonable dinner-time.

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For dinner we went back to the Ceylone-tea-walla shopping plaza, named Cresscot Plaza, that had a food court. Sri Lankan (the most crowded), Indian, Korean, Chinese, Mongolian and KFC were there and tomorrow being a holiday, the place was filling up. Liquor is available even in supermarkets in Colombo and my companions had some. Our customer spoke very little English (Tamil no problem) so the conversational load was all Easwar's. I ended up having a veg thali. Actually Colombo has a number of the 'udipi'-type restaurants, totally veg. At the Taj breakfast room, one section would be devoted to South Indian preparations. After all the dragging out of dinner, we were still in bed before 10.00 pm, flipping movie channels.

Colombo: 10.09.2003

Today was a forced sight-seeing day. There are places on tourist interest slightly outside Colombo -- an elephant orphanage, hills and waterfalls, beach resorts etc. But any of them would have required a time span of 4 hours. We had a customer visiting us at 10.00 am and another at 3.00 pm, so we opted for going around the city.

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Being a holiday, traffic was light and the cleanliness of the city was even more striking. It does have a small-town look according to width-of-road and size-of-building parameters, but the town is really relaxing. Maybe, as one of our numerous hosts said, it's because of the less-than-a-million population (660,000 to be precise, for Colombo). Overall population for Sri Lanka is just 7 million!

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The Sinhalese are mostly Buddhists. The city has lots of bodhi-trees with lots of buddhas sitting beneath them. Some of the statues and temples are very impressive. We visited a huge park, opposite the Town Hall, spotlessly maintained......

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We went out for a small walk in the gap between two customers who were visiting us in the hotel. There is a seaside corniche right in front. Apart from a walkway, there is a stretch of grass as well (about a kilometre long). Generally in the evening, more so this being a holiday, it was practically like a mela! Stalls of food, families picnicking, children flying scores of kites - that was the loveliest sight. These are the Chinese type of kites, made in various shapes like birds, boxes etc with very long tails. Even adults were flying them and they were content to just join the throng of colourful kites fluttering in position about 50 feet high..

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.The beach, with its series of small cement benches against the roadside wall, is a favourite place for budding (also flowering and fructifying) lovers. It is their domain till around 6.00 pm, when families start arriving. The blissful couples land up carrying outsized umbrellas, not so much as to brave rain or shine, as to provide some modest cover to their expressions of tenderness. The place looked like a veritable mushroom garden!

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The third customer had been waiting patiently at the hotel for us to finish our walk. After he had taken us to another fruitless search for open T-shirt shops, we returned to the hotel to find a message from another plaintive customer to whom we had vaguely promised that we'll have dinner with him tonight. Oh well........

LINK TO SRILANKA ALBUM

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BANGLADESH – Dhaka/Chittagong (2003)

Dhaka: 4.09.2003

Travel in Bangladesh was for me like a travel inside West Bengal.

.Right from the time we stepped off from the flight yesterday morning at 10.00 am, the teeming crowd outside the airport gates, the puddles and the flowing canal beside the road, the green ‘gram-bangla’ foliage, the cycle-rickshaws and autos, the double-decker buses – all built up to give an impression of a growing-up Calcutta. The imported cars are really a misfit amongst the throngs of colourful rickshaws. Bengali writing everywhere, Bengali speech everywhere; it felt like HOME!

.We were staying in The Sonargaon (The Pan-Pacific Sonargaon, to be exact). It’s a nice hotel, good rooms, bur strongly biased towards non-vegetarianism in its buffet menu. There’s one restaurant devoted to sea-food, which turned me out politely when I asked for veg dishes!

.The business visits were immensely enjoyable. You could see the hard-headed dealers visibly thawing when they learnt I spoke Bengali. Things they had not been able to express to our colleagues for years came tumbling out. They could also feel that I felt close to them and that made a difference. Panna’s home town being Bikrampur practically made me their ‘jamai’.

.Dhaka traffic is just terrible. Traffic signals stop us for 10-15 mins. It’s almost impossible to cross the road and we have to jump over cycle-rickshaw wheels.......

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I’m traveling with Easwar again this time and he is quite a food-lover. By the time our first meal was over, I had been updated on all the restaurants in Dhaka and Chittagong, as well as those in Colombo, which we were to visit next week. Food is on the minds of our customers too, being Bengalis, and we were having a tough time fighting off invitations to their houses. In spite of all our efforts, we still were pinned down for two lunches and three dinners.

.We have shifted our going to Colombo by a day and are travelling on 8th instead of on 7th.

Dhaka: 5.09.2003

Today was a holiday (Friday) and in spite of all efforts at keeping ourselves free, we could not escape a dinner engagement at a customer’s place.

.We rose leisurely at 9.00 am and stepped out to see a bit of the city. In the two-hour stint we saw Satmasjid (the masjid with seven domes), Parliament House and the outside of Lal Kila (it closed for lunch). Maintenance of tourists places is not very good and Satmasjid, for example, looks quite run down. At Lal Kila, I’m told, there is the entrance to a tunnel which was supposed to stretch up to Calcutta........

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For all its squalor, Dhaka surprises in the execution of certain progressive measures. In Dhaka city, all buses are now on CNG, which has eased pollution greatly. There are some double-decker buses, bought recently from Volvo, on the ‘no-conductor’ system. Can you imagine such a thing in Cal? But it may work well also, who, knows!
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Cell-phone services, though costly (Taka 6 per min outgoing) have a lot of facilities through SMS.

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While we were sightseeing, we were quite impressed by the usage of the waterways. The Buriganga Terminus is like Sealdah Station, with each jetty numbered (I think there are some 20 of them). Launch names and schedules (easily 30 names) are put up on a board near the ticket counters. Big launches for long trips, small boats for simple crossings, and the general ‘halla’ or pandemonium of passengers and merchants with goods – a real sight!.....

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We wanted to go in and see the proceedings without buying a ticket so I pulled out my Bangla and requested the gateman, who happily let us through. We spent some time soaking in the hubbab and on the way out, spent another 10 minutes with the gateman. He regretted that he still had some 30 mins to go before he was off duty, otherwise he would have taken us to the AC VIP room and “ektu alap kortam apnader shonge”. As per him, 40,000 people go through the gates daily – one way.

.Dhaka, as well as Bangladesh in general, is a Toyota market. They are mostly reconditioned cars imported from Japan, where the allowed age of cars is just 3 years. Such a car, which has run less than 50,000 km, would cost around Taka 10 lakh, purchased from the local importer or reconditioner.
.Bangladesh has over 200 garment factories, though they are mostly concentrated in Dhaka. Large quantities of cloth come from South India. Garment production mostly export-oriented. The remarkable fact is that although a large number of workers (mostly ladies) are employed at these places, trade-unions are not only absent, they are banned!

Chittagong: 6.09.2003

We had gone to Chittagong today. We left by the morning flight and caught the afternoon flight back.
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Our stay was too short to go around in Chittagong, so I came away with a general impression. It’s a smaller town than Dhaka, but less congested, cooler, and with more greenery. There are many localities close by that are on hills’ like Rangamati, which has a natural lake, as well as Cox Bazaar, which boasts of the longest beach in Asia.......
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Chittagong is the main port for Bangladesh, situated on the estuary of the Karnafuli river. There is also a pretty beach, which we could not visit.

.We were taken for a hurried lunch, ie bundled into a van and quickly driven across the road to a Chinese restaurant. We ordered the only veg soup and the only two veg dishes available, one of which was ‘kalmi shaak’, prepared in Chinese style with mushrooms and lots of garlic. The dealer’s brother as well as a staff who accompanied us, insisted on eating veg as well.

.While on the subject of food, there are two very famous specialized food outlets in Dhaka – ‘Haji Biriyani’ and ‘Mama Halim’. Haji apparently makes only two dekchis of biriyani in the evening and closes shop once that is sold. There’s usually a queue of 50 people to sit on small benches and eat. Halim is a dish of mutton mixed with daal. We were treated to a lot of mishti, mostly chhana-based, in people’s offices and shops. ‘Moronchand’s Chhana’ is also very famous amongst sweetmeat shops.

.Because public transport is cheap and owning cars so costly, most of our customers do not own cars. They also live in flats instead of in houses. Even motorbikes, so ideal for traffic like Dhaka, is not common at all. Indian motorbikes would cost Taka 60-70,000 and Jap ones cost over one lakh.

Dhaka: 7.09.2003

Today we wanted to visit Elephant Road (where leather articles are available) and Bongo Bazaar (clothes market, including export rejects). But we could get free only by 8.00 pm, as usual. We caught hold of Mamun, a young customer, one who had taken us shopping the earlier day, and the three of us piled on to a rickshaw. Long time since I’d traveled that way (maybe IIT), straining a lot of muscle in just remaining onto the bit of seat made available to my backside. Easwar bought some small giveaways in leather. We went next to Bongo Bazaar, which is a market full of small clothes stalls. Quality of clothes was poor, but they were cheap. I was tempted into buying a couple of simple kurtas, but could not find anything of interest for the kids or for Panna that would qualify as a ‘Bangladesh buy’.

.Although internet cafes were available in the city, we could never get time till 11.00 pm and I’d usually end up e-mailing from the hotel in the morning. Could maintain home communication fairly well during the stay.

.Sonargaon is a good hotel – in looks, facilities and speed of service. One of my shirts had a cuff-button missing. When returned from laundry I found both the cuff-buttons replaced by new ones. Tonight we had dinner at the Italian restaurant ‘Ciao’, on pizza and pasta. Afterwards, we loitered outside the restaurant for some time watching the crowd at the discotheque on the same floor. The Sonargaon disco seems to be fairly popular among the upmarket Bangladeshi youth – fairly hep in dress and all that. Although entrance is free, the mandatory beer or juice costs Taka 500!

.In the front lounge, there is a small dais where various artists sit during the day and play the flute or sing gazals etc. On Friday morning, I found a man sitting with parrots and envelopes and promptly had my ‘guideline’ (I forget the Urdu word for it) chosen and read out for Taka 15! He also read my hand for a little more money. We both agreed that what he pronounced was absolutely accurate. He was sincerely advising me to wear certain stones when Easwar cleared his throat and reminded us of our sightseeing schedules. Anyway, the ‘alaap’ was fun!.......
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Tomorrow we leave for Colombo, via Bangkok. Overall it’s been a nice stay in Dhaka, not like my usual foreign tours. For one, it felt like Bengal anyway and secondly, because of my knowing Bengali, I participated in the business discussions much more actively (practically solo in some shops).

LINK TO BANGLADESH ALBUM

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