Easter Break

I think it's been a little over a week since we last wrote, so there's a bit of catching up to do.

Over the Easter weekend the office was closed on Easter Sunday, so we took the opportunity to take a trip out of Dhaka to show Lucy the real Bangladesh.

We travelled overnight on a coach down to the South West of the country in an area called Cox's Bazaar. This area is popular with the locals and is apparently famed for having the world's longest beach.

We were actually staying in a mission guest house about 60km north of the beach in a hospital compound (there seems to be a running theme of where we take our guests on holiday!).

The bus trip down was good. It's a 10 hr journey to Cox's but about 9 for us because we got down before the bus reached the final destination. Since it was such a long journey we treated ourselves to Executive seats, which was a new experience for us - lovely wide seats, which apparenly had a massage setting on them but none of us could get working and they reclined almost horizontally - ahhh bliss! It's going to be tough reverting back to our standard means of travel.

We arrived at about 7.30am on Friday morning, just in time for breakfast.

The guest house was beautiful; very peaceful and relaxing nestled away on a slight hill amongst lots of lovely shady trees. Our rooms were very nice and typically twee and we were even fortunate to have Western food cooked for us, which was a real privilege. There was even a pool on the compound, which was great for taking a dunk after a hard afternoon of reading!

We were the only Brits staying at the guest house, the rest were American Christians either working at the hospital, or visiting from a nearby area.

On Friday we spent the day relaxing as we were still pretty sleepy after the bus trip. Andy was very excited to spot a full sized basketball court and even more excited when there were people to play with. So, Andy and a few Americans who either worked on the compound, or were visiting formed a team and had a good run around in the blazing heat! Sadly the game came to an early end when Andy got a whopper of a blister on is left foot, so couldn't carry on. A bit disappointing since he could hardly walk, so was out for the following 2 days.

In the evening we joined in with the church service they have at the guest house. This is mainly for the expats who live and work on the compound but those staying at the guest house are invited to stay.

On Saturday we hired a car to take us down to Cox's Bazaar. We spent the morning looking round a Buddhist Temple, which was really interesting, followed by some browsing around the Burmese Market. This area of the country is very close to Myanmar (Burmer) and in fact used to be part of Burmer, so there are a lot of Burmese living in that area and there is quite a high Buddhist population.

After that we had a leisurely lunch in one of the hotels by the side of the beach, whilst we waited for the temperatures to cool down a bit. The restaurant was alongside the hotel's pool, so there was a large glass screen overlooking the pool. This kept us very entertained during our lunch as we watched the locals "swimming" in the pool fully clothed. When we say swimming what we mean is some cross between doggy paddle and a pretend drowning manoeuvre - very amusing! Just to add to the entertainment there were some young men who obliged us with their "diving" acrobatics, which as you may have already guessed were perfectly formed belly flops! Needless to say the Bangladeshis aren't renowned for their swimming prowess.

After tearing ourselves away from the poolside entertainment we wandered across to the beach. The beach was vast and not too crowded - not like European beaches!

There were some sun loungers strewn across the beach in a single line, which we hired for a couple of hours. The sun lounger experience is not quite like in Europe - there's a distinct lack of scantily clad people trying their best to frizzle and instead people sit on them fully clothed and simply chat to their friends, or on their mobile phone.

We of course followed etiquette and sat fully clothed - Andy pushed the boundaries a bit and sat in shorts and t-shirt but Nic of course sat in her full Salwa Kamiz (although minus the scarf bit!)

The sand was beautiful. Not really the pure white sands of the Indian Ocean but instead lovely warm golden sands - the kind you would see in the Med.

The sea was also wonderful. Some really good sized waves to play in and soooo warm! I can't even begin to describe how warm the sea was; just like a bath. So, we spent a good deal of time playing around in the waves admiring the ocean. It was a little restrictive trying to jump the waves in a full Salwa Kamiz (trousers and dress) but I made do!

It was really fun to see lots of Bangladeshi families enjoying themselves in the sea and to watch groups of fishermen hauling their nets through the waters. It's so amazing that there is somewhere so beautiful that people can go and forget the cares of life - no matter whether your rich or poor.

As always we attracted a lot of attention being the only white folk on the beach. So, we got the usual street children come up to us asking for money, or trying to sell us things. There was one lad who was going round with his older brother and friend, who couldn't have been older than 6 or 7. His brother was making him sit on the end of peoples' sun loungers and sing songs to get some money. That was really upsetting - it seemed so degrading to have to sing pityfully to people to get money, particularly when the locals were kind of giggling in a very patronising sort of a way.

Anyway, the kid was very cute, so we sat and chatted to him and his brother for a bit, which was fun.

After our day at the beach we spent the next day at the guest house just lazing around the compound. As it was Easter Sunday they had prepared a special Easter meal, which was yummy and there was an Easter service, which we were able to partly join in with before our bus back to Dhaka.

All in all a very relaxing break and a really good opportunity for Lucy to see the beauty of Bangladesh - away from the big smoke of Dhaka.

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