Chittagong Hill Tracts

Yesterday a group of us took a day to visit the Chittagong Hill Tracts.* It took about two and a half hours of driving to make it up there.

A note about driving in Bangladesh:
I think people drive on the left side of the road (British residue). But no one seems to follow any sort of system at all. And I thought driving in Doha was bad! Here, its a constant game of chicken. A little car is driving down the road, a bus comes barreling down in the opposite direction (this is where I hold my breath), and at the last possible moment, the little car swerves out of the way. The bigger vehicle (usually) wins.

So, after two and a half hours of driving on steep winding, twisting, bumpy, holey roads...I'm now pretty confident I know what its like to feel carsick. We pass through a couple check points and show our passports, along with the note of permission we obtained from some government official.

First we stopped at a Buddist temple and monastery. It was beautiful. And so calm and quiet, compared with the crowded intensity that is Chittagong. We got to chat with some of the monks, who were just hanging around, reading the newspaper.




We then stopped by a textile shop, where we got to see women sewing clothes and weaving beautiful scarves on enormous looms (Bangladesh is big in the garment industry, for better or worse, more about that later).




In the afternoon, we had some tasty daal for lunch and took a long boat ride around a beautiful lake, stopping off at couple little islands. Everything is just so green here!





This all sounds quaint and pleasant, right? Time for a history bite. The indigenous people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, to my understanding, developed an autonomous government while Bangladesh was fighting to break from Pakistan in the 1970's. But once Bangladesh became independent, it was usurped by the new nation and the Hill Tracts became part of the new country. Soon thereafter, the Bangladeshi government tried to resettle the Hill Tracts region with Bengali people (West Bank, anyone?). The natives were not thrilled, and since then there is a good deal of hostility between the two. There is rumored to be an ongoing genocide against the indigenous people by the settlers and the military, abetted by the government. The actual state of affairs is hard to discern, especially as a foreigner wanted for tourist bucks, but there is definitely a prejudice against people from the Hill Tracts region.

Back the the boat ride. The lake was beautiful. But it was also man-made-- by the Bangladeshi government, to harness hydro-electric power. It flooded the farms and homes of hundreds of indigenous people, and destroyed one of their most sacred temples.



I had a hard time enjoying the scenery, with that in mind. This is why I'm a bad tourist.




*Please don't read the travel advisories for this region. And if you do, please don't tell my mom.