In Bangladesh
ON A trip this month to Bangladesh to report on the Rohingya refugee issue, I visited Dhaka, Chittagong, Cox's Bazaar and Teknaf on the Myanmar border.
I felt strangely at home in Bangladesh; it brought back memories of growing up in Kolkata in the '60s and '70s. My Bangla came back (much to the surprise of locals who did not believe I was Bengali – well half Bengali), and even the mind-numbing traffic chaos gave me a sense of déjà vu, as did the quiet old residential neighbourhoods of Dhaka.
Chittagong was an experience. After a day of interviews with local, politically active Rohingya, I spent two hours trundling around the city in the evening on a cycle rickshaw – the most ubiquitous form of transport.
In the gullies of the market near the Karnaphuli river, you can find the most incredible hardware in tiny shops: floor to roof piles of rope of different sizes, paint, fabrics, oil drums, even rusty ships' anchors in their hundreds.
Lean men in tattered white vests sweated over lathes under dim naked bulbs as they machined metal parts, while the gullies were a mass of people and cycle rickshaws weaving in and out and in some charmed manner generally avoiding collisions.
At one point, a small boy who was obviously in some position of vigilante authority, armed with a stick, got the driver of a minibus to move on simply by whacking the stick hard against the metalwork of the bus while the rickshaw cyclists stranded behind it shouted encouragement.
The plane flies at less than 10,000 feet between Chittagong and Cox's Bazaar, all along the coast offering an amazing view of the mud flats and creeks that slope into the Bay of Bengal. The smell of dried fish immediately assailed me as I left the airport at Cox's Bazaar on a cycle rickshaw and made my way to the Seagull Hotel.
The hotel faces the beach and proudly advertises itself as five star luxury but in reality as a modern glass and concrete structure with few in-room facilities and sealed windows, is a typically urban hotel hopelessly out of place at a beach resort town.
Cox's Bazaar - the longest beach in the world.
Source: Nirmal Ghosh
The beach itself – the longest in the world – is quite beautiful, though at Cox's it is usually crowded with people and foreigners are rarely left alone by inquisitive locals. It is hard to see foreign tourists coming here in droves because of this factor. Locals are also very conservative and women going into the sea in swimsuits are unheard of.
At high tide the thundering breakers can be tall and intimidating for those used to the tranquil seas of south east Asia. It is possible to hire a jeep and drive south for miles on this beach, which promises to be a great experience.
The evening I arrived, I was taken by a local friend who is a humanitarian worker currently between jobs, to a viewpoint a few miles down the road to Teknaf.
The drive which hugs the beach was scenically breathtaking. From the viewpoint a couple of hundred feet above the road, with thick jungle to my back, I saw a beautiful slow sunset unfold over the Bay.
After interviews in Cox's Bazaar I proceeded to Teknaf the next day - a typical desultory border town, many streets lined with refuse. The river Naf which is the de facto border with Myanmar here, is at places as much as two kilometres across, a huge body of water rolling down to the sea.
Across the river are the blue hills of the Arakan Yoma in Myanmar.
Twice in Teknaf I was approached by units of the Bangladesh Rifles – the country's border guards – who politely but firmly asked me who I was and what I was up to. My visit coincided with some tension with Myanmar over disputed territorial waters, plus as a border area with a large stateless population, it is a ''sensitive'' zone.
Bangladesh Rifles on patrol on the Naf river.
Source: Nirmal Ghosh
The state of the Rohingya refugees was grim – especially those I visited at Kutupalung and Leda who were outside the two official camps.
Rohingya are south east Asia's truly forgotten people, stateless and unwanted in both Myanmar and Bangladesh. They attract only a fraction of the international media and NGO attention given to other refugees and migrants from Myanmar – like the Karen - on the other side of the country in Thailand.
Apart from the Bangladesh Rifles, I also attracted some attention from Bangladesh's intelligence apparatus, but that as they say, is another story!