Bangladesh: Dhaka, the rivers and the Sundarbans mangroves

The first thing Dhaka does is take away your sense of edges. There's no clear line between the street and the shop, between one rickshaw and the next, between the noise of a horn and the noise of a man calling out prices. I'd flown into a country almost no one I knew had been to, with a vague plan to follow the rivers, and within an hour of landing I'd given up on plans entirely and just let the crowd carry me like a current.

Bangladesh sits on the great delta of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, which is a geographer's way of saying it's a country mostly made of water. Rivers are everywhere — under the bridges, beside the roads, at the bottom of every conversation about how you'll get from one place to the next. I came for that, and for the Sundarbans, the vast mangrove forest at the edge of the map. What I didn't expect was how much I'd fall for the cities along the way.

Old Dhaka and the tide of rickshaws

Old Dhaka is the part that stays with me. I spent a whole day on foot in the narrow lanes, past the red Mughal walls of Lalbagh Fort and the pink river-facing facade of Ahsan Manzil, the old palace. But the real spectacle is the rickshaws — thousands of them, hand-painted in impossible colours, packed so tight at the intersections that the whole street becomes a slow, ringing, breathing thing. I gave up walking at one point and climbed into one, and let a man pedal me through the chaos he understood far better than I did.

Down at Sadarghat, the river terminal on the Buriganga, the country's obsession with water becomes literal. Ferries the size of buildings nose in and out, porters cross gangplanks with impossible loads on their heads, and the brown river just keeps moving underneath it all. I stood at the edge for an hour, doing nothing, which is the only honest response to a place like that.

« You don't see Dhaka so much as get carried by it. »

A word on staying connected, since it's the family trade: in Dhaka and the other cities, my data held up fine. I'd sorted out an eSIM before flying in, and in the capital it was quick enough for maps, messages, the odd video call home from the rooftop of my guesthouse. That mattered more here than usual, because Dhaka is a place where you genuinely need a working map and a ride-hailing app to keep your head above the crowd. The signal was the calm thing in my pocket while everything else was beautifully out of control.

Into the Sundarbans

To reach the Sundarbans you stop driving and start floating. It's the largest mangrove forest in the world, shared with India across the border, and the only way in is by boat — slow days drifting through brown channels with the green wall of the forest pressing in on both sides. Somewhere in there live the Bengal tigers, though I'll be honest with you: I never saw one, and most people don't. What you get instead is the sense of being a guest somewhere genuinely wild, where the water and the trees were here long before any of us and aren't especially impressed.

Out on the boat, my phone went quiet — and this is the part to plan for. Deep in the mangroves the signal faded to nothing for long stretches, and on the smaller river islands it came and went with no logic at all. I'd told my family the night before, from the last town with proper coverage, roughly where I'd be and for how long. Then I let the phone sleep in my bag and watched a kingfisher work the channel. Some places are better without a notification in them.

Tea hills and an endless beach

Bangladesh isn't only delta and city. Up near Srimangal the land finally rises into rolling tea hills, all that green a quiet relief after the noise, and I spent two slow mornings walking between the bushes with a cup of the local brew. And then, far southeast, there's Cox's Bazar — often described as one of the longest natural beaches in the world, a single grey ribbon of sand running on and on until it simply gives up on the idea of an end. I walked it at dusk with my shoes in my hand and lost track of how far I'd gone. I travelled a lot of this country by boat and ferry, which is slow and crowded and exactly the right speed.

What I take away

Bangladesh gave me the rarest thing a traveller can ask for now: a country still mostly off the circuit, where almost no one was performing for visitors because there were so few of us. Water under everything, rickshaws bleeding colour into grey streets, a forest at the edge of the world where the phone finally goes dark. Strong signal in the cities for the practical chaos, a quiet phone on the river for the rest. That's the balance I keep chasing, and here I found it without even trying.

— Thomas, somewhere on the brown water, letting the current decide.