I'm not expressing myself as eloquently as I'd like to since I'm operating off three hours of sleep in the past 30 hours. I can hear you say "Wah wah wah--poor tired lady on vacation in paradise." Yes, I know that I'm whining while drinking wine, eating chocolate, and enjoying no honking whatsoever. But at least let me tell you about our trip here, ok?
We left Chittagong at 4:00 PM on Feb. 17. We were lucky to get a ride to the airport in a van. I was so thankful because two days prior I came down with a bad cold/respiratory nastiness. I didn't want to take a baby taxi (CNG) to the airport, as I was afraid I would hack to death after 45 minutes of breathing diesel fumes. I don't know if Kat would have gotten a flight refund if I hadn't made it, so it's good that I lived.
Our flight was delayed only 30 minutes--considering our Bangladesh travel experience, we would label this "leaving early." And, as luck would have it, this is the one time we didn't have to worry about arriving a little late to connect to our international flight.
For those of you who don't live and work in Bangladesh, allow me to explain. There's an annoying art to planning any sort of travel out of and into Bangladesh. All international flights (except for a flight from Chittagong to Kolkata and places in the Middle East) leave from Dhaka. (Chittagong used to have a flight to Thailand, which was cancelled months ago and never revived. I am on a mission to figure out how to resuscitate this. Begging and bribing have crossed my mind. The question is: Who do I bribe? And with what money?) We have domestic flights between Dhaka and Chittagong scheduled throughout the week. However, these flights don't always follow posted schedules and are arbitrarily cancelled at least a few times a week. Perhaps they didn't have enough passengers. Or the fog showed up. Or the crew didn't show up. Who knows.
All this means we can't just take the domestic flight that is supposed to arrive in Dhaka two hours before our international departure. Oh no--we have to do backwards planning for any sort of travel involving airplanes. Case in point: our international flight to Malaysia left Dhaka at 1:40 AM (on the 18th). There were two evening flights from Chittagong to Dhaka on GMG (one of two domestic carriers) on the 17th : a flight at 6:30 PM and a flight at 9:10 PM. We chose the 6:30 PM flight, because if it was cancelled, we could take the 9:10 PM flight.
This is how we plan all our trips. There has to be a spare flight we can take to still get our international flight after our first domestic flight gets cancelled. Does this sound a little uptight to you? I guess we've seen enough people learn the hard way, so we have to accept burning up a vacation day in transit. Or staying in Dhaka the night before an international flight. Or, in our case this trip, sitting in the Dhaka Airport from 7:00 PM until 1:40 AM while dealing with a lingering cold, bad food, and mosquitos. While eating terrible soup made from a dry mix in the one airport restaurant, the waiter ran over and yelled "Mosquito!" and sprayed under our table with the smelly Asi brand bug spray. Kat and I smiled and said thank you. I then turned my head and coughed for 5 minutes straight. Tasting toxic mosquito spray on your tongue will certainly kill your appetite.
Eventually we did get on our flight. And we got bumped to first class seats! They still had us eat the economy food, which was made by Biman Airways (Bangladeshi Airline). Tummy wasn't so happy, but legs were.
Writing all this down makes me smile. When I took this job, I thought I'd be jetting off to Thailand for three-day weekends. HA!
Upon arriving in Malaysia, we took a 28 minute (that's how they advertise it--and it's true!) monorail trip into the heart of Kuala Lumpur. Simple. No negotiating. No diesel fumes. No mosquitoes. We followed the detailed directions to our hostel, and walked in around 10 am. Unfortunately, our room wasn't ready. So Kat and I spent hours lounging on the patio, laying on the giant bench, whiling the hours away. In delirium. Neither of us had slept much, so I think people wondered if we were drunk.
We met Vince's Malaysian twin! The second this little guy jumped up on our bench, we both said "Vince!" Then we remembered we were in Malaysia.
Vince, as much as I miss you, I have to say. It may take some coaxing to get me to go back to Bangladesh.
Ciao for now.
No comments:
Post a Comment