Well, first things first. Internet is a bit limited – thus, the tardiness of this first update. But here we are in green, sub-tropical, humid and hot Bangladesh (which is pronounced Bong-la-desh, meaning the land of the Bangla-speaking people). Apparently “bang” is the word for frogs and so pronouncing it Bang-la- desh is tantamount to calling it the land of frogs, of which I have not seen any beyond the stuffed ones in Heart House (I shall explain next post).
But that is not to say I have not seen any animals. Within an hour of leaving the Cox Bazar Airport, we saw (all wandering freely) dogs (on the runway), cats, goats, sheep, cows (considered tasty by most of the population), and chickens (on the road). The traffic here is intense though not as terrible as Nairobi. They drive on the left and roughly stay in their lanes except to pass…which is essentially all the time since unmotorized rickshaws that are bike/man powered and small motorized rickshaws that are pulled by underpowered motorcycles share the same lanes.
Within an hour of arriving here at compound’s guest house (which is like one of the old style Route 66 motels a single row of joined rooms), Josiah realized he had a special roommate – which is not me since that is considered unacceptable since he is an adult. He promptly named him Gary…the Gecko (or (forgive the spelling) a tick-ticki…the Bangla word for this kind of gecko). Tick tickis are pretty ubiquitous but apparently there are also larger blue spotted lizards – that bite, large wolf spiders with bodies the size of a half dollar, and beetles that are the size of duck eggs. And while I haven’t seen the spider (which I am okay with), Josiah and I did see one of the massive beetles crushed on the road – and yes, they are huge.
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