At first appearance Dhaka may turn off or bewilder many, but the more resilient and curious tourists will want to explore this chaotic but dynamic capital
Andrew Miller17-Nov-2010Dhaka, it’s fair to say, would not be everyone’s first choice as a holiday destination. As a city it is crowded and chaotic – a microcosm of the nation it governs – with chronic traffic congestion, grinding poverty, and a sprawling populace that has grown exponentially since independence in 1971. By some estimates roughly 30 million people, or one-fifth of all Bangladeshis, have been drawn to the capital and its surrounding districts in the past 40 years, and the struggle to escape the daily grind is palpable.The city doesn’t boast many attractions in the conventional sense – architecturally it is bland in the extreme, with low-rise tower-blocks dominating the skyline, a testament both to the city’s hasty expansion in the late 20th century, and to the relative neglect it suffered in the 19th, when the region’s wealth was concentrated around the dominant Bengali port of Calcutta, the capital of the Raj. And yet, as with all such urban jungles, the city’s dynamics have developed a life of their own. Any visit, no matter how fleeting, will undoubtedly be a memorable one.Dhaka’s signature sight is the wonderfully ornate bicycle rickshaws that flitter in and out of the traffic like exotic tinkling butterflies. The city is home to some 400,000 of them, each a work of art in its own right, and arguably the cheapest mode of public transport in the world. Aside from that fact, they are actually the logical way to overcome the desperate congestion of the major thoroughfares. The riders have the dexterity and daring to plunge for the slightest gap in the traffic, which the larger vehicles cannot hope to match, least of all the grimy and overcrowded local buses, whose paintwork invariably resembles papier-mâché after all the scrapes they’ve endured.Heat and noise are a constant accompaniment in Dhaka. Oppressive humidity is the city’s default setting, not least when you emerge into the mayhem of Shahjalal (formerly Zia) International Airport, which lies only a handful of kilometres out of town, yet can require a journey time of up to two hours on the numerous occasions when the city is in gridlock. Aside from the bass rumblings of a million motors and the falsetto of as many car horns, the sensory overload is completed by the regular calls to prayer from Dhaka’s 750 mosques, as well as the staccato crackling of loudhailers from the innumerable protest demonstrations that spring up on street corners and melt back into the crowd.The city’s cricket grounds are numerous and varied. The most famous of the lot is the Bangabandhu National Stadium in the heart of the old town. It was the venue, in 1955, of Pakistan’s first home Test as an independent nation, and 45 years later it performed the same role when India came to play Bangladesh in November 2000. Over the years it has become so integrated into the daily hustle and bustle of Dhaka’s life that it is barely recognisable as a stadium from the outside, with a host of electronics shops having burrowed into the cavities beneath its stands.In 2005, the BNS was handed over to the Football Federation for full-time use, and subsequently given a major makeover, complete with running track, in time to host the 2010 South Asian Games – although, with a change of government to pull the strings, yet another renovation is scheduled ahead of the cricket World Cup opening ceremony in February 2011. In the meantime, cricket has moved a few miles north to the suburb of Mirpur, where the Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium, with its 60,000 capacity, provides the team with one of the best equipped cricket grounds in the entire subcontinent.Other grounds in the vicinity include the BKSP national academy in Savar, which for the first six years of Bangladesh’s Test existence provided the only indoor nets facility in the entire country, and the extraordinary outpost of Fatullah, which is accessible via a five-mile dirt track across the Buriganga flood plains. This concrete shell of a ground hosted an excruciatingly close shave when Australia visited for the venue’s one and only Test, in April 2006. Ricky Ponting and Adam Gilchrist salvaged their country’s pride in a three-wicket win, and by the end of the month the ground had ceased to serve a significant purpose.The National Mosque in Dhaka•AFPSightseeing in Dhaka is an eclectic experience. The 17th century Lalbagh Fort is the pick of the city’s relics, while the sharply twisting backstreets of the old town are designed to entice and flummox. The salmon-pink brickwork of the riverside Ahsan Manzil was once the seat of the Nawab of Dacca but is now the city’s premier museum, although as a place of pilgrimage it pales compared to the unassuming townhouse in the district of Dhanmondi, where in 1975, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman – Bangabandhu, the father of the nation – was assassinated along with most of his family.The pace of life in Dhaka is relentless, and this is never more starkly felt than during a visit to the Pan Pacific Sonargaon, the city’s premier hotel, whose four walls succeed in obliterating all traces of the bedlam that lies beyond, for better and undoubtedly for worse, and where a cup of tea costs almost 400 times the going rate in the local bazaars. Similarly, the city’s chaotic waterfront is a place where fishermen’s dug-out canoes compete for space with some of the world’s mightiest container ships, as a ceaseless flow of trade heads off into the Bay of Bengal.
