Catie and I recently benefited from the proactive planning and action of some friends at AUW as we got to join them for a weekend in Bandarban, a district which is a couple hours outside of the city and part of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. The hill districts are an interesting part of the country and definitely worth a quick read about their history. A large portion of the people who live there belong to various tribes, and I believe there is a higher percentage of Buddhists and Hindus than in most of Bangladesh. The most amazing aspect of Bandarban though is the landscape – it’s all hills and jungle green as far you can see. I couldn’t believe that we were just two hours away from Chittagong. I quickly fell in love and considered simply never leaving and letting Catie go back to our city apartment alone.
We hired a van to take the four of us (Polly, Denise, Catie & myself) out to the area early Thursday evening, and much to the discomfort of my motion sick girlfriend the trip didn’t take too long because our driver turned out to be an aspiring (and rather aggressive) race car driver. Once we arrived at our destination of Hillside Resort, we had a large dinner and then headed to bed. It was quite dark so we couldn’t see much of the resort or our surroundings as we walked from the restaurant building to our “tribal style” cabins. The bed was comfy though and had a funky bright purple mosquito netting.
When we woke up the next morning, we were absolutely delighted by the surprise view from our balcony. At first it seemed we were living in a cloud with tall mango trees poking up from below, but as time passed and the fog started to clear we saw more and more of a magnificent sprawling valley. As it turned out, our cabin was actually built on a hill and most of it was supported by tall stilts rooted in earth far below our feet (something which we did not realize in the slightest the night before).
Photo taken in Bandarban, Bangladesh on October 30, 2009.
I really loved our tribal cabin. Not only was the view magnificent and the bed comfortable, but the floor and walls were all made by some sort of wide bamboo weave so that in the mornings the room would stay dark but there would be little pinpoints of light all around you that looked like stars. The bathroom was rustic (and featured impressively cold water) but it was fully functional and pleasantly open-air with windows lining the top of the walls. I even loved the giant (and by giant I mean at least one foot long) orange-spotted gecko that lived on our cabin roof and once decided to hang out and wait for me in our bathroom (which admittedly did make me yelp and jump at first) before slinking back up the wall and outside through the window. I think our fat jungle gecko friend kept himself pretty busy too as there were hardly any bugs ever around our cabin.
We ate several meals at the resort and the food was always excellent, especially the breakfast which was prepared for whatever time we liked and consisted of everything from fresh papaya and bananas grown right on the resort’s land to homemade chapathi and dal to pancakes and veggie omelets. We ate quite well (and shocked the resort staff on a couple occasions with the sheer amount of food we ordered) which was good because most of our two days in the area was spent trekking up and down the hills of Bandarban (but more on that later here)!
Photos taken in Bandarban, Bangladesh between October 30-31, 2009.
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