Before our original plans had changed, I thought I had time to pack in a solo 1-day stop in Bangladesh before meeting my wife in Nepal. I used points to fly from Kuala Lumpur on Malaysian Airlines to Dhaka, booked my wife onto the flight short-notice, and we got the visa on arrival at the airport.
Funny thing about that visa on arrival: you can’t get Bangladesh’s money before arriving, and the visa was $50 + 7 BDT (about 8 cents). Since you don’t have any BDT money, you give them $51 and somehow watch 92 cents disappear. Strange math.
Outside, we had a disastrous time trying to link up with an uber driver who somehow couldn’t find the only 2 foreigners, went back inside for a horrible exchange rate at an ATM, and then got a beat-up taxi to our hotel.
First impressions of Bangladesh: wow, the traffic. Wow, the roads.
We arrived at the Four Points hotel I’d booked on points and then tacked on one of my annual suite upgrades. They put us in the presidential suite. Yeah!
We were hungry and looked up Jatra Biroti for some vegan food and walked down there before going out to explore.
The food arrived looking and smelling delicious. That’s where it ended.
I like spicy food, but this was…something else. It was so unbelievably spicy that I couldn’t finish it. I never ever ever throw away food. I always take it home. This…I couldn’t. It hurt to eat it.
We walked back to the hotel to use wifi to get a ride down to explore some historic sites, but it started pouring rain like crazy, just as we got to the hotel, so we thought we’d sit for an hour and then go.
Look at this unsafe mess of cables on this pole. How do you know which one goes to which house??
While talking to the staff in the lobby, they recommended we could just rent a car and driver by the hour from the hotel and probably have an easier time than trying to negotiate with taxi drivers who might not speak English or might take longer routes to charge us more, so we agreed to do that, once the rain let up. With that downpour, we wouldn’t be able to explore anything.
We had some free drink tickets for the bar, due to platinum status, so went to enjoy those while killing time. This was when the spicy dinner kicked in. I started feeling horrible. Horrible heartburn, indigestion…my body was not taking that dinner well. I needed to lay down, so we agreed on a nap to kill that 1 hour.
When I woke up, I felt even worse. Everything was sore, and I knew food poisoning was en route. I took a hot bath and laid back down for what I hoped was another short nap, so we could go explore that night.
It didn’t happen. I slept through the night.
We had a luxurious room, were in a new country we’d never visited, and instead I felt like garbage and slept it away. We saw only 1 small corner of Dhaka, and my wife saw basically nothing while staying in the room with me.
The next morning after breakfast, we caught a ride to the airport for our flight to Nepal. I knew this would be the day food poisoning would kick in.
Flooded streets from all of the rain the night before made the trip to the airport slower and more chaotic than normal. We checked in and hung out in the airport waiting for our delayed flight with Biman Bangladesh (yep, a real airline we’d never heard of before making this booking) to Kathmandu, Nepal.
The airport bathroom was where food poisoning decided my running to the toilet for a few days should start. Off to Nepal.
This entry was posted in asia, Bangladesh, Dhaka
