I'm on the boat traveling from Mongla to Dhaka and it feels so much like a movie. It is a wooden boat with a roof woven of thin, flexible strips. I imagine this is what old Chinese merchant ships looked like that hauled goods through the whole of Asia. Robin is sitting by the table that doubles as a chessboard, chewing on a pen, scribbling in an over-sized notebook. He has on his adventurer's outfit: khaki pants, light olive striped button-down shirt and bare feet. On either side of him two industrial strength fans belie the truth: this old-looking ship has been newly built and prepared to accommodate heat-averse Westerners.
Our cast of characters also includes Yves (pronounced "Eve", go figure), the French captain, former airline steward, inventor of that thing that some stunt-guy always uses to fly into the stadium during the Super Bowl, former pilot for a doctor in the Amazon, solitary transatlantic sailor and the head of an effort to create the Lifebouy Floating Hospital of Bangladesh using a river barge he and one other man sailed to Mongla from France! The only other passengers on this leg of the trip are a husband and wife accompanied by their two-year old son and his Bangladeshi nanny. The husband, Pierre Claquin, is in charge of IOCH (Immunization and Other Child Health services) and its efforts to eradicate Polio in Bangladesh. His wife, Mimuna, is a younger woman from Tajikistan who served as Pierre's translator there before they were married. She is a professional free-lance photographer. Their son, named Sasha, is shy right now.
It sounds like the beginning of a joke: a doctor, a photographer, a sailor, an economist and a mathematician set out on a boat trip...
But what's past is prologue. (Cue the flashback!) We started out our journey in Dhaka, taking a German-built prop-plane on a thirty-minute trip to Jessore. There we met a bus that ferried us to Khulna. The bus trip was smooth, the temperature mild and the scenery gorgeous -- Robin and I slept most of the way. At Khulna we met a driver who was waiting to take us to Mongla where the ship was anchored. He spoke no English, but when he turned on the tape player in the car, Michael Jackson's "Bad" began to blare. Apparently this is an 80's movie.
We weaved in and out of traffic for about forty-five minutes. Finally our driver made a turn and I thought we'd reached our destination. So did he. But the military guard at the gate denied us entry. That's right, "the military guard at the gate" -- always the first clue that something is amiss. We were asked to come into a small building next to the gate. Inside, we found two uniformed military men seated at two sides of a large desk covered with ledgers. The office was dingy and otherwise empty. Of the two men it quickly became apparent that only one spoke English. He began to explain: "You are foreigners. You are not allowed in this area." He asked what our business was and we tried to explain our situation, but to little avail. They continued their mild interrogation and we continued explaining that we were travelling on a boat with Contic, the name of Yves' company. I kept waiting for the bribe solicitation, but I was pleasantly surprised that none came. The English-speaker asked a number of times if we could get him a visa to the United States, but I've heard that enough to decide that its just something Bangladeshis are taught to ask Americans. I thought nothing more of it.
So there we sat with our new port authority friend and his silent partner, pleasantly miscommunicating. I could see that Robin was becoming visually frustrated. It seemed like some manner of strange joke to me at first, until I alarmedly noticed that the car, with our things, was gone. "Oh no," I thought, "what a disaster!"
But our car soon returned with another gentleman who had been brought to help. He proved equally incapable of understanding our problem. We asked hopefully, "Are there any other ports where our boat could be?" The soldier replied, "Yes, there are two ports: Mongla and Chittagong." Well, Chittagong was hundreds of kilometers away, so obviously something was lost in the translation of our question. We continued to ask varieties of this question for another five minutes and still our hopes looked dim. Suddenly, we uttered the right words: "Is there any way to cross the river?" "Yes," the soldier replied, "you can cross the river further down in Mongla."
Hurray!
Miraculously we had found a solution. We were just in the wrong place. If we continued down the road we started on we'd hit the river, and then we were set. So we shook hands with our uniformed friends, got in the car, breathed a collective sigh of relief and said the magic word to our driver: "Nodi".
"River," in Bangla.
Didn't this happen to Indiana Jones once? I'm glad Robin had the perfect hat for the occasion. Everybody loves the hat.
-DB.
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