Rest at last

For those of you not aware, Dhaka is not a pleasant place. Basically if you were to take all the negative parts of a city (traffic, noise, crowds, filth) and magnify it while at the same time getting rid of the positive aspects of a city (culture, night life). You would have Dhaka, except for the food. That is delicious, I had the best italian meal the other day. So we decided to take the long weekend and head to Chittagong. The weekend here is Friday and Saturday (Friday is a holy day) and then Thursday was Ashura. Unfortunately, we were double booked with BRAC and ICDDRB on Monday, so BRAC moved their Monday program to Saturday and we had to scramble to put together another trip. We decided upon Scrimangal, which is the tea region. We left with our driver first thing in the morning on Thursday. And arrived four hours later without a plan. I was immediately overwhelmed and wanted to turn around. We went to the train station to arrange our return tickets for the next night and quickly discovered that no one spoke English. Or at least that is what I thought. I was panicking the first few minutes, but there was no reason. Within a few minutes, a well dressed Bengali swaggered in and asked us if we needed a guide in English! I immediately said yes. And best part was it was only going to cost 500 taka a person including transportation for the whole day.
Then came the hard pat, finding a hotel. There was a problem with our guidebook (as in we only used it to look at potential hotels and not to actually contact them). So we ended up driving around from tea estate to tea estate trying to find an available guest house. We were about to give up and drive back into town, when I suggest that we try and locate the vaguely referenced Nishoro Eco-Lodge. It was perfect, meaning that we called and they had availablity and it was functioning on Bangali prices as opposed to the Tea Resort which had bumped itself up to Thai prices. But really, the place was amazing, it consisted of two huts made out of sustainable material and had real plumbing. And was in the middle of now where and they had mosquito nets. We spent the rest of the day hanging around the lemon grove and talking with the Swiss women whose room we were going to take over. She is taking a leave of absence from work and spending a year traveling. Her children are all grown up and have moved away so she is using her savings to see the world. She flew to Istabul and has been traveling via bus or train ever since. It sounds amazing. She said the highlight of her trip was some place in North Kerala. I am going to track down the name and add it to list of places to go. Then we ate dinner and fell asleep listening to the nearby waterfall as opposed to honking horns.