River Boat Cruise

We went on an all-day river boat cruise today! The cruise started from Savar, which is a suburb of Dhaka to the west. Savar is heavily forested, and has the feel of being far from the city even though it's in the city limits. To get to the boat, we took a tiny dirt road that wound through a small village community. The boat was about 50 feet long, and had a bamboo woven roof over the top (see the picture above). The boat was definitely not up to any cruise boat safety code in the US--there was no railing or guard on the sides, so I was a bit worried about Salma all day, who was determined to go swimming in the river. The cruise was a great experience, although the company didn't quite live up to their promise. They said they would have an English-speaking tour guide, but our guide seemed to know only a handful of words in English. (And the other people on the tour with us were from France, and also knew little English.) The company also promised a "gourmet" meal for lunch. Lunch was basically an airplane meal. But those complaints aside, it was a really good experience. Our boat followed the Doleshwari river, which is a small river leading into the Borigonga river, which passed through Dhaka on the south end of town. We went down the river for about three hours, and then we circled back. We got to see lots of boats and people (including one guy taking a dump by the river!). On the first part of the trip, as we were going through Savar, it really felt like rural Bangladesh even though we were still technically within the Dhaka city limits. We saw men giving cows their morning bath, women doing the laundry washing in the river, and workers carrying bricks off the boats on baskets their heads. Once we got closer to old Dhaka, the river got a really stinky chemical smell. Our tour guide told us (with the help of Azfar's translation) that the smell was from all of the garment factories dumping byproduct into the river. It was also partly due to the brick factories which were letting off huge billows of black smoke. Riding on the boat through old Dhaka was a fun way to see it, as opposed to getting stuck in traffic jams trying to drive through the city. It was very peaceful on the river. And people on the boats passing us were constantly trying to get our attention and get us to wave--it was not a normal thing, I'm sure, to see that many foreigners floating down the river. But while it was generally peaceful, there was the occasional river "traffic jam," especially as we got near old Dhaka. And, like good Bengalis, all of the boat drivers were quite fond of laying on the horn. Our boat had a very creative horn: a trumpet! The man who was guiding the boat rudder would occasionally whip out his trumpet and give it a good blast to warn boats in front of us. Anyway, it was quite an enjoyable day of floating down the river and seeing a bit of the city that way. I took a bunch of photos. I'l add a couple of more posts with some pictures of the kinds of boats we saw and some scenes on the riverbank. Unfortunately, I didn't have the guts to take a photo of the guy taking a dump by the river, so sorry to disappoint you...