Made it to Brunei, enjoying a slight change of pace from Malaysian Borneo, though much of it is the same. That being said, had a great time in Batu Niah – the park full of incredible caves. More to follow later, just quick updating.

In the land of the Pangs!

The Perhentian Islands really were spectacular. Beautiful scenery, great jungle trails, awesome beaches and snorkelling, awesome corals, and incredible wildlife – we swam with sharks basically every day – including some big 5ft+ black tip reef sharks (not dangerous) – its really scary the first time you see one as they appear suddenly, move quickly, are way bigger than any other fish, and look predatory. One of them took an interest in me at one point, and I ended up swimming backwards as quickly as possible while Connie looked on in horror – but I think he/she (the shark) was just curious, as the shark quickly dashed away when I started running. We also got to swim with some giant sea turtles – not Volkswagen sized like the ones in Costa Rica, but large enough. They surfaced by us close enough to touch – again, super impressive.

Now we are down the coast a bit in the capital of Terrenganu province – Kuala Terrenganu. Its fine – but its like backpacking through Regina – the city is ok for what it is, but there’s no reason to stop here other than as a transit point. We’d hoped to transit from here to a one or more resorts via a place reputed for getting cheap package deals – but we’ve been traveling much more cheaply than what they’ve offered so were back on our own for the moment, and trying to figure out what our next step will be.

One thing I noted in a reply to Mark vR today: Spring sure sounds good – I’m missing the biking already. Being here where its hot continuously, I’m really starting to appreciate the seasons – I think that having seasons adds a lot of zest to each part of the year – the anticipation of change and possibility of new activities and so on really spices up the years in ways that you can’t appreciate until you’ve been away for a while – and we haven’t even missed much of it yet!

Anyway – happy trails all!

-R&C

From Jeff Johns, our photog buddy from LA.

Hey Hey hey – were alive and well, and returned from the cyclone shelter. Quick background: occaisonally, there’s a project that’s far enough away (in time, if not space) that it justifies sending a group of volunteers to live on site for a time, to save on the daily commute. That’s what we call a “safari.” For us, it meant spending 6 days in the town of “Bokantola” (or something like that), which was a whopping 10 kilometers away.

Of course, 10 km in Bangladesh required an hour and multiple modes of transportation to cover. The primary issue was Cyclone Sidr’s demolition of a key bridge going from Tafalbari across a river to the road that continued to Bokantola; that previously steel bridge had been replaced by a rickety bamboo contraption. For foot traffic, its not a huge deal as you can scoot across pretty quickly – however, we ended up hauling two trolley’s worth of stuff across, along with motorcycles, van-du’s, and the regular foot traffic – a distinctly precarious exercise.

Actually, let me step back, to the beginning. The safari builds are for playgrounds: Hands On is working with Save the Children (UK) to install playgrounds in 5 communities around the Sharankola area (in which our base town Rayenda is situated). Actually, by now, the 5th and final playground should be done – a big relief for everyone, no doubt! Anyway – at a high level, the playgrounds are a two step process to build: a pre-fab stage at the base in Rayenda, followed by transportation of the material to the playground site and installation.

Pre-fab is a long and arduous process. It consists of cutting and cleaning Bangladeshi lumber, and drilling holes in the right spots so that it can be bolted together quickly on the site. Now, when you think of lumber, you’re probably thinking of nice clean, straight boards – the kind you build a deck out of and then stain. Bangla-lumber is a different beast entirely. To begin with its cut from fresh wood – and when I say “fresh,” I mean like felled that morning, such that the wood is oozing sap, and when you drill it, water/sap squirts out around the bit – crazy. Secondly, bangla lumber is cut to get the most board feet from the tree – no matter what. The result is that no single board is straight. At all. See the picture to the right – that’s a 4×4 piece (carried by Nate and Tim – nice Longi’s dudes) that’s shaped like a crescent moon (note: its supposed to be straight). So – pre-fab consists of cutting the lumber to size, throwing away a third of it that’s cracked, too full of knots, or mostly bark, then planing and edging it, then laying it out roughly in shape and drilling. The planing and edging is to reduce the number of slivers and cuts that kids receive, and make it a lot easier to paint. Planing is choke point in our critical path – we had two Black and Decker weekend-warrior electric planers, and with the electricity being spotty, getting the massive amounts of lumber planed quickly enough to ship out to a build was a major effort. One of the planers eventually ate a shirt (Anu survived unscathed) and died – fortunately, 4 of the playgrounds were done by that point.

So – pre-fab takes 3 or 4 days per playground, after which you’ve got a pile of lumber, perhaps the size of a small pickup truck, like a Mazda B2200. Now, it needs to go from the base in Rayenda, to the playground: not a simple process. Consider: in Rayenda, a town of 50,000 people, there’s one pickup truck, owned by an NGO. There zero cars, a few motor bikes, and a lot of bicycle vans. Fortunately, there’s also something called a “trolley” – a sheet metal truck bed, pulled by a 2 wheeled tiller – i.e.: a farm implement with the digging blades detached, and rigged up to pull the bed. On our big day, the first trolley made it 20 meters down the path from our house to the road before a belt snapped – yay!

Remember the Tafalbari bamboo bridge-of-death? A trolley will not make it over that, so once we get there, all of the wood comes off, and is carried by hand over the river. Quick note: all of our own safari supplies need to be transported too (bedding, clothes, etc.), and tragedy was narrowly averted when a jar of our treasured “mobile” biscuits (shortbread cookies) fell off the bridge into the river, to be quickly retrieved by the local kids. Anyway – once over the bridge, the wood is reloaded onto our next bizarre means of conveyance – a “taligari.” A Taligari is a set of bamboo poles lashed together, with diagonal uprights providing sides, to create a rickety bamboo truck bed. This contraption is strapped to a single truck axle with two wheels in the center, and two Bangladeshi men at the front – who provide the motive force by freaking pulling and pushing this thing along the road. Anyway – several hours, several trolleys, vans, river crossings, and taligari’s, and were there!

“There” is a cyclone shelter where we’ll spend the next 5 or 6 days. A cyclone shelter is essentially an elevated concrete bunker: the bunker elements keep people safe from winds, lightning and flying debris, the elevation protects inhabitants from floodwaters. These giant structures dot the countryside, and also serve as classrooms and community centres when not protecting people in storms. Our cyclone shelter overlooked the empty acre mud plain where we’d be building, and was adjacent to our school and a number of good swimming ponds. The shady area under the shelter also provided a place to do a lot of painting work outside of the sun – a rare treat.

For living, the shelter was perfect. If you can’t tell from the photos, its a big l-shaped structure, providing us with more living space than our home base, and separate sleeping and eating areas. Most importantly, it provided a natural insulating layer between us and the locals. One thing you’ll notice here as soon as you arrive is “the fishbowl” – i.e.: big groups of people staring at you all of the time. If, like on some of the other playground builds, you’re staying in a ground floor room, you’ll find it really hard to get privacy and a few minutes away from the locals – apparently at some locations, you could wake up in the middle of the night and have people peering in your windows at any hour – disconcerting and annoying if harmless. The cyclone shelter, with a single entry point (a big staircase) took care of that issue easily – the locals were informed by the village elders that the staircase was off limits, and that was that. In addition to our eating and sleeping area, we also had the rooftop – which was a big open patio, perfect for chilling out, or sleeping out under the stars as Dan and Rajib did. The inside sleeping area was great too – big windows provided ventilation, and Connie and Allan rigged up a crazy rope system to hang our mosquito nets from – and sweaty laundry. [Pictures, from top to bottom: Tall Cool Dan, Connie brushing her teeth with 30 friends at the bottom of the stairs, the rooftop chillout zone after work, our sleeping area, goats enjoying the shade under the shelter]

When we left for the cyclone shelter, Allan (pictured in the hat) was feeling ill, and unfortunately his condition worsened over the first night, leaving him incapacitated and stuck in bed. John (pictured in the tire) followed suit the next day, taking our team strength down from 7 to 5. Sadly for both of them, the nature of their illness was of the gastrointestinal type – with toilet consequences I’m sure you can imagine. Which brings up our bathroom arrangements, which were… interesting. The first set of toilets had been damaged in a storm and backed up, and interestingly had later been claimed by the goats as their own – seeing a toilet stall full of goat pellets was pretty damn funny. There was another set of concrete squat toilets adjacent to the school which had the mysterious squat toilet feature of being essentially unflushable – not a great option for John, Allan, or any of us really. Which left the Tarp Toilets: two newly installed concrete squat toilets walled with bamboo poles holding up tarps to about shoulder height. They flushed well and were extraordinarily well ventilated, but left something to be desired in the privacy department. Oddly enough, the group consistently used the orange tarp toilet – the blue one just got no love – was it slightly smaller? Did the sun through the orange tarp create a cheerier squat ambiance? Connie maintains that the blue tarp’s proximity to the goat’s toilets made it less desireable. Who knows!

The tarp toilets were complemented with the bathing ponds. In rural Bangladesh, showers are rare but every home has a bathing pond close by. Given that the water table is at most two or three meters down anywhere in the country, building your bathing pond is a mater of just digging it as big as you want it. Once dug, you’ve got a pond that stays (relatively) fresh via ground water and rain, and can be used for bathing, dishwashing, laundry and so on. If a pond starts developing green algae, that’s a warning sign for the family that its getting over used. If the algae goes brown, that means its dangerous – polluted from overuse, or latrine contamination (shudder). Given that the community was conservative and Islamic, there were separate ponds for the men and the women. The women’s pond was maybe 150 meters away – over a cute bridge and down a trail to the school’s headmaster’s house. The ladies that lived there kept onlookers away, though Connie, Kirsty, Emma, and Valla were still obligated to bathe fully clothed. The Gentlemen’s Club tried a number of ponds around the area. The first (across the street) was shallow – 3 or 4 feet deep – and creepily warm (not being deep enough to stay cool in the sun), as well as being difficult to get out of without getting really muddy. The second, adjacent to the mosque, was heavily used and a little bit scummy. The one that we ended up settling on for regular use was actually the closest, the biggest, and the deepest – and had a good ramp for entry and egress.

Alright – to be continued! The amount of stuff that should be written out is just ridiculous.

Hey hey hey – were heading out on “safari” tomorrow AM. That means we’ll be at an unusually remote worksite where we’ll actually stay for a week as opposed to commuting back and forth more than an hour each way every day. Advantage: we get to stay in a cyclone shelter, something like the one pictured. That means we’ll be isolated a bit from the crowds of locals that tend to form around wherever westerners stay in small towns, which is a good thing. The shelter is essentially a concrete bunker raised on stilts; the bunker is to protect occupants from rain, wind, and flying debris; the stilts keep the whole affair up and out of the flood waters.

Fortunately, cyclone season is 8 months away. We’ll have challenge enough dealing with the lack of electricity and “rudimentary” bathroom and bathing facilities – yikes! But, were going with a good crew, and we’ve got enough chocolate bars (courtesy of the chocolate pimp), biscuits, and treats to keep ourselves motivated. Were also having a charging frenzy right now – ipods, cellphones, laptops, and cameras are plugged into every available outlet. Yes – I am bringing my laptop, with the expectation of getting one solid Cyclone Shelter Movie Night out of the battery – continuing my grand tradition of excessive technology in inappropriate locations.

Anyway – point is, we’ll be more or less out of touch for the next 5 days… so we’ll be slow to reply to email or correspondence, apologies in advance!r

Wow – it turns out weve been here one month as of today (having arrived Feb. 19th) – crazy how the time flies by. As it turns out, today we also figured out our departure plans: March 26th (next Wednesday) we’ll start our way back to Dhaka (hopefully by Rocket steamer), and then onto Singapore for a few days, and then to Malaysia for a month or two.

Its been a great month – every day is full of adventure and weirdness. If your curious, our days go something like this, starting with…

Bed Time

In true Bangla style, I’ll do this backwards, starting with bed. To be honest, the depths of night are one of the most fascinating times of day in Bangladesh. Anyway – bed time is a great social affair, which depending on the exhaustion factor and the availability of electricity, starts around 9:30. Electricity is a big factor: without, most everything becomes a pain in the ass. Working on a laptop, for example, becomes a battle of tenacity between you, trying to do anything, and the bugs – clinging to your screen, flying in your hair, nose, ears, clothes, etc. Similar story for reading a book: a headlamp or flashlight functions as a colosal beacon, attracting all manner of awful: giant flying cockroaches, the previously mentioned winged nasal invasion squad, moths (some of which are quite large), whatever. Oh hell, Tim and Mark are just talking about the number of scorpions they’ve kicked out of the living room – great. Very passive, they claim.

The darkness and bugs do provide some entertainment, in the form of the gecko brigade which aggressively chases and eats moths. These little dudes skitter along the walls and ceilings and pounce on bugs repeatedly, until their belly area is visibly swollen. The other neat thing they do is chirp at each other – its a stattaco, high pitched, cheeping noise – something like a frog call, but of course coming from your bedroom ceiling.

The best thing you can do is retreat to the sanctity of your mosquito net enclosed bunk – but, that generally leads to sleep as the combination of horizontality and exhaustion knocks you out pretty quickly. Also, if you retreat early, you’ll have to emerge later to deal with tooth brushing and other bathroom tasks. Dental hygiene is of course a major concern. Bangla cuisine includes a stunningly high amount of sugar: the tea (“Cha”), for example, is served in a syrupy consistency (a blend of tea, sweetened condensed milk, and then some surgar for flavor). Similarly, the common desert here is “mishti” – a dough ball made of flour and sugar, coated in sugar, then soaked in liquid sugar before being sugared and served in a puddle of sugar syrup. Even without getting into the traditional deserts, we consistently find ways to sugar ourselves, and justify it on the basis of the hard work we’ve put in during the day. One common method is smearing roti (the bangla burrito shells we have with dinner) with Nocilla (the spanish Nutella knock off that’s available here for some bizarre reason). Optionally, if you’re out of Nocilla, I find the roti quite good just covered in sugar and rolled up like crepe. Mmm… sugary goodness.

Anyway – dental hygiene is important. Personally, I find brushing my teeth on the deck to be the best option. In the evening the deck is the nicest place to be, if you can ignore the bugs – its cool, and between 7:00 and 9:00, there’s usually a nice breeze (which consistently trails off by 10:00). For tooth brushing its perfect – all you need to do is lean over the deck and put some force into your expectoration to clear the walk way and get your toothpaste foam onto the trash pile in the yard. Tooth brushing aside, the deck is great for hanging out, and best of all, movie night.

Movie nights are a tradition I’m proud to have introduced. A laptop and someone’s speakers provide the A/V hardware, and a coffee table surrounded by rows of plastic chairs provides the theater. Bangladesh is blessed with two types of DVD’s: crazy Bangla DVD’s which consistently feature angry men with mustaches and shotguns on the cover, and pirated western movies. The western ones are great: you usually get 4 or 6 movies on a single DVD – for example, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, along with Spiderman 1 and 2. The quality isn’t exactly Blu-ray, but for 90 taka ($1.50), that’s a pretty kick ass DVD. Actually, there is a third category of movie: Bangla-packaged western movies. Our best movie night experience so far has been “Terminator 4.” For those in the know, there is no Terminator 4 (three was the last one made). The disc inside turned out to be “American Cyborg” or “Cyborg Cop” (the title was ambiguous) – it featured cyborgs (named Quincy and Phillip, I kid you not), but had nothing to do with Terminators, the end of the world, or finding Sarah Connor.

Before evening kick-back relax begins… Oh oh, this post is going to be continued later, as Zoolander will be starting on the deck in about 20 minutes. Another note: I’m not posting any more photos while I’m here as the bandwidth makes it really painful.

One funny thing about living in Bangladesh is the names you come up with for folks you deal with regularly, but have never (by virtue of language gap or unpronouceability) actually figured out their names.

Tin Man: This is the guy that sells Hands On the tin sheets that we use for roofing and siding homes. No one knows his name, and we’ve all even actually been over to his house for dinner. The Tin Man had all 22 of the volunteers over for a big “thank-you” dinner – I think our non-stop orders have made him pretty wealthy. Dinner that night was good; Rod (me) ate lightly for fear of fish (which was about), but had a good time nonetheless. The highlight of the evening was the brief appearance before dinner of a mysterious musical instrument which lingered on the table for 5 minutes before being taken away. It was a small wooden box (maybe 2ft long, by 1 ft high), with piano keys. A few weeks later we found out what it actually was when the “Save The Children” training seminar we were at trotted one out – its a crazy accordion-powered mini-piano, basically, which sounds like a spastic accordio-harpsichord (for lack of a better description).

Anyway – the Tin Man is a cool dude. One final thing about that night: Bangla dinner events don’t include social time after dinner. One literally gets up shortly after eating, says “thank-you” (doh-nah-bad) and head’s out. Sort of anticlimatic, but whatever works!

The Chocolate Pimp: The Bangla experience in many ways can be summarized by looking at their chocolate. Its as if someone, several years ago, travelled to a 7-11 in Kansas and tried some chocolate bars. They then returned to Bangladesh after several years and tried to reconstruct a variety from vague recollections; the result is packages that look more or less right, chocolate bars that often look the part, and a taste and texture that’s best described as “lacking.” Its seriously a bizarre and flavour-less experience.

After a hard day of digging pits, nailing tin, or whatever, chocolate is luxury you feel entirely justified in desiring. There’s three solutions to getting ahold of it:

1. Horde it: Get ahold of real Cadbury chocolate in expat grocery stores in Dhaka or Khulna and keep a stash on hand.
2. Nocilla: If your stash is empty, and no-one’s willing to share, you can get “Nocilla” – that’s a quasi-Nutella substance which when spread on Roti (flatbread) is quite tasty. Beware: you need to get the Nocilla imported from Spain, not the Malaysian stuff. Why the town of Rayenda (which doesn’t even has anti-perspirant, or many homes with electricity) has affordable and tasty Nutella-equivalent imported from Spain, I’ll never know.
3. Visit the Chocolate Pimp: The CP is a near legendary figure in Rayenda, who has *good* Bangla chocolate. I’ve never even seem him or his store myself – but others have passed along goods from him to me. I think Connie may have been there. Anyway, this dude has 20 varieties of sketchy Bangla chocolate, which Kirsty, Emma, and a few others bravely sampled until they discovered “Checkers,” “Jupiter,” and “Lake Bar” – the three palatable Bangla-bars. Hurray!

Alright – enough of the names. A quick recap: were working on a playground installation right now, which is the most intense one weve had yet. Its big and complicated, and being built on an exposed 1 acre mud plain, which means its HOT (35 degrees today), and crowded with HUNDREDS of locals staring at us in fascination. I don’t think too many of them actually know what it is were building – which provides us with great amusement.

The build is about a half-hour bus ride from our base; getting too and from is no simple task here. In the mornings, the buses are perpetually late – this morning, we gave up after 40 minutes, and hitched a ride with a passing military troop transport (in a bitchin’ Toyota Land Cruiser). Coming home, the 5:00 PM bus usually leaves our build-site town by about 5:30 – if were lucky, we’ll get room on the rooftop, so we can enjoy the terror of dodging low-hanging trees and powerlines, while being mercilessly camera-phoned by the pack of teenagers that immediately flocks to the roof when we get up there. If were unlucky, its into the bus with about 100 other people packed beside, on top, and underneath of you – 50 women in burkas, and 50 guys watching you.

Next week, were taking a 4 day break after 3 weeks on; were heading up to Khulna to stay in a western hotel (conveniently called “The Western Hotel”) with TV, A/C, room service, cheeseburgers, normal toilets and so on. Can’t wait! It is the place that everyone goes to take a break from working and from living in the base; fortunately, there’s nothing to see or do in or around Khulna, so you can just soak up the luxury – which we intend to do!

Later dudes…!

Today was nuts: the first day of a new type of build. The build was  playground, about and hour-and-a-half trawler ride down the river, or about a 30 minute bus ride. We took the trawler there with our enormous load of lumber; the lumber took an hour and a half to load, starting at 7:30 AM. The boat we’d hired was overloaded, and we actually needed to call up a second trawler. Note: that’s a lot of lumber. We got to the riverside near the build site around 10 AM, and then spent 2+ hours hauling huge heavy boards through the forest. Ouch. The rest of the day was spent digging the pits in which the playground’s main structural beams will sit – a hot gruelling afternoon. Of particular note: huge crowds of kids. We had no less than a hundred around us all day.

One other quick note: Bangladesh has my new record for enormous spiders. Absolutely gigantic, and fast, and (apparently) harmless. Yay!

Today was Friday and the Muslim day of prayer and therefore a day off again. A group of us hired a boat to make a trip to the Sunderbuns (?) – the famous mangroves supposedly full of bandits and tigers. OOOOhh exciting. We left at the ungodly hour of 6:45 in the a.m. The boat travelled at about 2 knots per hour. It was almost like being back on the house boat – with a little cabin below and a roof that we sat on the whole trip there – roughly 4 hours.
We had been told that we would have to bribe park officials to let us into the park without a permit, and then hire an armed guard to protect us from tigers and bandits.
We arrived and were told that park officials were not there and so would not be allowed to enter the park. But we were allowed to take a walk around the compound with a man with a gun (to protect us from the tigers). The walk was to last an hour. We all agreed to be extremely quiet so as to no scare away any ferocious beasts that we might be so lucky to see. We began walking (after we all took turns getting pictures with the guard). We walked for about 2 minutes and then the guard stopped. We all stopped in anticipation, peering into the forest ahead in anticipation of what we were about to see. We waited and waited, until someone finally asked, “What are we looking at?”. It turns out the we had reached the edge of the compound and our adventure was over. Then our guide pointed out what looked to be mud but were told it was tiger scat. Was it? I will never know. We took our lunch on the mud lawn of our friendly gun-man’s home, and then were off back to Rayenda. We were lucky enough to see some wild pigs, some bald eagles and some water buffalos on the way back.

Laura and Scotty (the friendly Canadians) made us supper tonight. We got a break from rice, dhal, and carrots, tomato and cucumber, and were treated to an awesome meal of spaghetti with tomato sauce (made with ichiban noodles), cawliflower and cheese sauce (made from a jar of cheese whiz that Laura had lugged all the way from Canada).
All in all – a fabulous day!

Day # 2…

One hard day of work (actually not that hard, given that it rained on and off all day), and one day off.

The microphone man has now been going for 4 hours!! The microphone man is the guy at the local mosque that started yelling into a microphone (which is attached to megaphones that broadcast to the entire town) at around 6 pm this evening, and hasn’t stopped yet – current time is now 11:07 pm.

Today we had the day off because it was a National Holiday – in fact we were told by a local that it is an international holiday celebrated by 189 countries (National Mother Language Day). Hmmm – I think we need to start observing this Canada!

So the day off – not much else to do except wander into town and go to the market. This is not an ordinary stroll into the market. Two of the other Canadians here, Laura and Bill, were heading off so we decided to go with them – thankfully as it turns out. As soon as you emerge from the “safety” of HODR headquarters you are immediately surrounded by old and young alike all singing “Hello!”, “What is your name”, “Where are you from”, over and over and over again. And then they start following you, the little kids often grab your hand and walk beside you for your entire journey.

We went back in the afternoon to pick our newly made bedding. Along the way Rod and Scottie both picked up stragglers who held onto there fingers the number of followers who joined the procession to the mattress kiosk grew and grew – it was like the pied piper! Our mattresses weren’t ready so we opted to keep strolling. Soon Connie picked up two little sisters who both wore frilly dresses and sported short hair – sorted of reminded me of me when I was young. But I can’t imagine having grabbed onto a complete strangers hand and walking through the mall with them on their shopping trip. The parents even encouraged their kids to follow us. With mattresses in hand, we headed back and one by one our little companions left us to return home. How cute.