Bowman Gets Out of Dhaka

Last Friday I got to leave Dhaka.  Zach and I decided to go to Srimangal and to let our parents come, too.  We had lots of fun getting out of Dhaka on a four-hour train and then spending two and a half days seeing some of Sylhet's attractions.  We traveled around in this jeep most of the time, although we did have a couple rickshaw and bike rides that you'll see later.

The main attraction of Sylhet is its tea estates.  The British people brought tea to the area around the 1850s and there have been tea gardens here ever since, although now at least half of them are owned by Bengalis.  On Friday afternoon, we stopped for seven-layer tea.  While it did look pretty cool, it didn't taste nearly as good as the white tea we ordered at the same shop.  Mom hasn't found an exact recipe yet, but she does know that to make the white tea, you actually use green tea, ginger and lemon.  Yum!

Besides drinking tea, we spent much of our time walking through vast tea estates.  Apparently tea plants actually grow to the size of trees, but they're trimmed to elbow-level for ease of picking.  It sounds like that's the only thing that is done for the ease of the tea-pickers, who must pick 24 kilograms of tea a day just to make 48 Taka (which is about $0.70).  I was pretty upset when I heard that's all these hard-working women make.  Is there anything we can do about it?  Does Mom need to stop drinking tea?

One of the most fun things we did in Srimangal was rent bikes and find this little beach area for a picnic. I'm loving sand these days.  In fact, I'm loving it so much that I mixed it up with my sandwich and carrots and ate it all together that afternoon.

After lunch, it was time to hop back on the bikes.  Check out the orange one Mom got to ride.  Apparently it was so nice that the shop owner didn't even want to unwrap it.  He told her to use it with all the plastic still attached.  I guess that saves a cleaning job later.

After a morning of hiking through Lawachara National Rainforest Park, Mom and I tried some fresh coconut milk.  While refreshing, it's not nearly as sweet as I was hoping for.  

All-in-all, it was a relaxing trip out of this city of thirteen-million.  The morning jogs and walks through the rice paddies outside of our hotel were the best part.  For a few moments, I didn't even see any other people, which hasn't happened to me much in the past eight months in Bangladesh.