Cox's Bazar

Last week, we had a four day weekend for Eid, the celebration of the end of Ramadan.  A few other fun, young teachers and I took advantage of the break and went to Cox's Bazar, a town on the coast near the southernmost tip of Bangladesh, near Burma.  It's one of the longest beaches in the world.

It's a busy travel time for the country (think traveling at Christmas time), and everyone is trying to get to be with their families for the celebration.  Because of this, and the fact that we waited kind of late to make plans, all flights and trains were booked.... so we decided to be risk-takers and take a bus!  We had heard this was a typically a 12 hour bus ride from Dhaka to Cox's Bazar, although a few naysayers told us that due to holiday traffic we could be in for anywhere between 24 and 36 hours!!  We were so worried!

Our bus

Traffic in the city

Our bus left Dhaka Tuesday night at 11pm, set to drive all night.  We pleasantly surprised with the quality of the bus.  Although it was obviously made in the 80s, seats were big and reclined, we had air conditioning, and they gave us water and blankets.  The only weird thing was a camera crew that walked through and filmed everyone on the bus, then hopped off.  More on that later... But, we slept through the night and arrived in only about 10 hours.

To be honest, Cox's Bazar as a city is not so great.  Our hotel was almost a 30 minute CNG ride outside the city and we spent very little time there.  The place we stayed, The Mermaid Eco-Resort, was absolutely gorgeous!  We got coconut drinks with straws and flowers on arrival.  We sweet talked some of the employees and got two hammocks put up outside our two rooms.  Our rooms weren't fancy, no hot water or air-conditioning, just a bed on the floor, but it was just what we needed!  It was so quiet and green and lush, we forgot we were in Bangladesh.

The Mermaid

One of our cozy rooms

Our little bungalow "No Boat Yes"... still don't understand all of the room names... others included "Famous Cucumber," "Happy Ice Cream," and "Red Head Ear."

We wanted to go to the beach, so the employees at the resort put us in a small row boat and rowed us to a very secluded beach across the way.  There were just a few local kids hanging out and a fisherman or two.  Much quieter than the public beaches near the city.  Our little beach had some great mud at low tide which led to a pretty great mud fight!  SO much fun!

We ate all our meals at the hotel restaurant, which was delicious!  Homemade pasta and local seafood.  Bangla breakfast, like daal, sweet rice, but also delicious crepes!  At dinner, they had a Bangladeshi band playing music and fire spinners which was so nice!  The band was nice enough to let me try and play with them for a song or two!  I wanted to play the tiny hand cymbals so bad!  Turns out, they are much harder than they look, but still a lot of fun!  Kajori tried her hand at fire spinning too (against the Manager's wishes... good thing he looooved us:) )!!

"Sorry sir, I'm not even sure how I got this...."

Rocking out with the band

We had some pretty random adventures in the few days we were in Cox's Bazar.  One morning we started walking towards town with the hopes of landing a ride on top of one of those cool jeeps or buses like all the locals!  We were quickly detoured when we stopped to talk to some kids.  Following them through a dirt path off the road through their village, they picked a bajillion flowers/weeds for us.  We made it back to the main road just in time to hail a truck, a huge freight tractor trailer type truck, hop in the back and ride into town!  How exciting! 

We stopped at a market, had some tea, shopped for some fabric (I bought some and plan on getting a tailor to make it a hammock for me! yay!), walked on the beach a bit (a very public one where we got lots of typical stares from locals), and finished with fresh coconuts!  We had a bit of a photo shoot courtesy of a nice little boy who was quite good with a camera and liked taking our pictures.  On the way back (again walking, trying to flag down a jeep to ride on top of), we heard someone yelling at us and finally located a group of waving children on top of this super steep hill/cliff.  A few other kids appeared at our sides, and through a variety of gestures on both parts, we decided to climb up to meet everyone!  They were so nice!  They brought out two big dinning room chairs and made two of us sit while we tried to make small talk sharing none of the little of a similar language.  Very interesting!  Super friendly people though.  Overall a really nice, relaxing weekend!!

 

OH!  Almost forgot... The bus ride back...  This time, we were taking a different company, although it was a similar style bus, we got seats in the back.  They videoed everyone on the bus AGAIN!  No talking, just getting your face on camera.   Then we had the realization that they were probably just trying to document everyone on the bus so they could identify us in case the bus crashed, burned, etc...  Welp