Bang a Chittagong

We spent a day seeing all we could see in Chittagong. Since we had come fresh from three months in Dhaka without any vacations, our enthusiastic exclamations that "there are slightly less rickshaws and slightly more autorickshaws here!" and "there are some hills!" seem rather mundane in retrospect. Regardless, we had just encountered exciting new territory, and we soaked it up like the Buriganga in June (ba-dam-ching).

The High Court of Chittagong - this is not the only famous pink building in Bangladesh, a fact which I am curiously not surprised to learn

The roads are slightly wider in Chittagong!

Since Chittagong is the major port city of Bangladesh, we went to check out some of the docks. We ended up just walking down towards the river at a loading dock. I think we were the only non-employees anywhere near the dock, but thankfully people seem to be very nice about foreigners bumbling through their place of work.

This picture was taken as I narrowly avoiding being rolled over by something really big.

The small dock in Chittagong we visited.

Then our driver tried to take us to a ship-breaking yard. Some of you may have read about the ship-breaking yards in Chittagong. Commercial vessels are brought to Chittagong where they are broken apart for scraps BY HAND. These yards got some really negative international press about four years ago because of the bad working conditions. As you drive into Chittagong, there are stores along the road where you can buy anything you could imagine from a ship, from kitchenware to fuel tanks to spiral staircases. As we drove down to the yard, we found ourselves in front of large gate and some angry men staring at us. The word on the street is that its incredibly difficult to see them now, because managers don't want to deal with more foreigners spreading the word about whatever goes on inside.

Our driver, in case I have not sung his praises enough, managed to convince the manager of the big ship-breaking yard to let us in. I can only speculate as to what he said, but after about 10 minutes with our driver they were suddenly very nice to us. Maybe its best that we never know.

Absolutely no pictures were allowed, but Sara distracted the manager, our tour guide, with her many charms while we did our best to furtively document our adventure.

We walked down the beach at sunset, flanked by full-size beached commercial transport ships. Beautiful!