On the good and bad facing England’s stars in Bangladesh
Alison Mitchell recalls some memorable times in Bangladesh but also offers a few travel tips ...
Freedom is a gift we take for granted too often. England’s players won’t have much choice about where they spend their time between matches and training sessions during their tour of Bangladesh.
If the level of security at their hotel is similar to that which I experienced staying with India and Pakistan prior to their World Cup showdown in Mohali in 2011, there will be armed guards on each corridor, snipers peering down from roof tops outside, armed vehicles parked by the gate and soldiers stationed behind sandbags across the road.
The team X-Box, darts board and table tennis table will be in high demand to keep the cricketers entertained. It could be great for team bonding, but it will also be a severe test of patience.
The security situation is a great shame, because Bangladesh is an exceedingly colourful place to tour if you’re game enough to take on the noise, traffic and crazy bustle of the city streets.
My first visit was to Chittagong for England’s World Cup match in 2011. It didn’t provide the happiest of experiences, as the Test Match Special team got caught up in a mob crowd late at night outside the stadium following Bangladesh’s first win over England.
The crowd, which had congregated in the street, was delirious with the ecstasy of victory; it was as if they were waiting for something to happen and the sight of six English folk suddenly walking out of the stadium as we looked for our minibus seemed to send them over the edge.We were suddenly surrounded as if in a rolling maul on a rugby field. The din of shouting, chanting and drumming was deafening and discombobulating.
We all got separated as we were swept along. I was jostled by men in a way that women shouldn’t be jostled. I remember my mobile phone being wrenched out of my hand and eventually police with lathi sticks sent the crowd scattering. I emerged towards one policeman with my hands held up to indicate I needed help, and was eventually reunited with the others on a raised central reservation with the police forming something of a protective ring around us.
That might have put me off ever going back to Bangladesh but I was determined to have a different experience when I travelled to Dhaka for the World T20 two years ago. Admittedly, when it comes to getting out and about in the Sub-continent it is much easier being a journalist than an international cricketer.
Players are usually quickly recognised in such a cricket-crazy country and it immediately causes a major scene when excited fans flock for photographs. Even as a European female you can attract a small following of curious people on the streets of more out-of-the-way places but you can generally be fairly anonymous if you dress respectfully.
I felt I embraced Dhaka and Dhaka embraced me when our producer Tim Peach arranged for us to meet a kindly looking man with fluffy white hair, whom he’d got to know during the 2011 World Cup. Taimur Islam was involved in a not- for-profit organisation campaigning for the preservation of the colonial architecture of old Dhaka. Taimur took Tim, Charles Dagnall and me on something of a magical mystery tour of the capital, setting off on foot after we’d chugged our way in a minibus along the choked up streets to the centre of the old town.
We picked our way through tiny narrow streets, swerving around donkeys, tuk-tuks and rickety bicycles. All the time Taimur kept pointing upwards at the remnants of Mughal monuments, which we would otherwise have never noticed amid the ground-level bustle.
We entered a dusty flour mill, a rumbling soap factory, then a tranquil Madrasa, where young boys were learning about Islam.We passed old men selling fish on the roadside, a lad reclining in his fabric stall surrounded by jars of brightly coloured powdered dyes, and a perfumery selling everything from “musk” to, my personal favourite, “sweaty”.
The real adventure though, was crossing the Buriganga River. It sounds like it could have been a romantic experience. Unfortunately it wasn’t.
I have since read that the Buriganga is one of the most polluted rivers in Bangladesh. A clue to this was perhaps the milky blue colour the water took on as it lapped against the stone steps we were being led down towards the ‘taxi rank’; a flotilla of narrow flat-bottomed wooden boats, not dissimilar to Cambridge punts. There are few bridges crossing the river in Dhaka, meaning the quarter-mile stretch of water across to the other side was evidently the M1 of river crossings. It was full of these rickety wooden boats bumping haphazardly alongside one another as the ‘taxi driver’ sat at one end, propelling his commuters along with his single oar.
I recall feeling rather enthusiastic about the whole thing as we clambered into one of these shallow vessels. It wobbled alarmingly, but the key was to get both feet inside and sit down on the floor quickly.z The journey itself was reasonably steady. Our driver had a knack of just getting out of the way of the far larger ships seemingly heading full steam for us as they carried their cargoes.
Our boat never quite reached the bank on the other side. But that was quite the norm. There are too many boats all heading for the same bit of shore meaning they come to a halt by careering into the
We picked our way through tiny narrow streets, swerving round donkeys, tuk-tuks and rickety bicycles, looking at Mughal monuments
stationary boats in front of them, leaving the passengers (us) to get to our feet with nothing to hang on to, then reach the shore by stepping forward from boat to boat to boat with feline-like balance.
Having negotiated this somewhat hairy journey, the sting in the tail was that the one bridge we could have used to cross back was closed off, to allow some politician to pass through. So we had to go through the whole ordeal again just to get back to where we came from.
Suffice to say our feline-like balance was starting to wane. Having climbed back over the log-jam of boats and sat myself down in the bottom of one with my legs stretched out in front of me, I tried my best to keep it steady in the water while Tim and Charles sat down too.
Meanwhile a myriad of locals coming on shore themselves started clambering over us in their bid to reach the bank. Thanks to a thick-set man with a particularly heavy tread, our boat suddenly lurched to the right and almost capsized.
A wave of disgusting, filthy water whooshed into the boat all over my bottom half. I’m afraid, at this point, I had a sense of humour failure. Not withstanding the sudden scare and the fact that we could have all ended up in the river being crushed by wooden boats, I was wearing a long gypsy skirt, which, when wet, became like a sopping sack, cold and dirty flapping all over my legs. Suddenly I was no longer having fun. Even my underwear was damp.
After making it to shore and tolerating one final church visit, I made it very clear to our wonderful new friend Taimur that after a brilliant, eye opening day, I was ready to go back to the hotel now, please!