This bus is on fiiiiree!!!

This bus (not this girl) is on fire..... This is getting real! There is a bus on fire 100 meters from our home. I am assuming it is part of the newly declared 60 hours hartals! Needless to say that there is nothing that could excite Vlad more than this.

Buckle up, I am sure we have not seen the end of it!

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J91ti_MpdHA

Comilla

It been a while, but I am trying to catch up. We took a day trip out to Comilla!

This is a city about an hour and a half from Dhaka, without traffic. With traffic, the story changes. Anyway, great opportunity to get out of the Mega City and see something on a nice weekend.

We went with the Munteanu's Travel, a group we hadn’t used before, because I had not discovered my hidden talents for organizing tours.

Big bus, big group.

One of reasons to visit Comilla is to see the Maynamati War Cemetery. It’s strange to think about WWII being fought here in Bangladesh, but the cemetery exists as a result of the Allied Forces being based in the region in an effort to stop the Japanese invading India via Burma during WW II. Interestingly there are even 24 Japanese buried here. 

We continued on to the ruins at Mainamati. The first stop was at an ancient Buddhist monastery called Salban Vihara. To me, the site is interesting because it shows the long and impressive influence of Buddhism in Bangladesh. Now Buddhists make up only a fraction of a percent of the population.

After all any  chance to escape the smog of Dhaka for the natural green of the countryside is a God given gift ! Just being on the road and watching the rural landscape is a nice change of pace.

Don't call me, I will call you

We are entering interesting times here in Bangladesh. We just hit an important date: October 25th. Political crisis is mounting over the next general election, which must be completed between October 25, 2013 and January 24, 2014. Prior to the incumbent changing the Constitution, it was necessary for the government in Dhaka to resign and form a non-party interim government to run the national election.

The Prime Minister Hasina has made crystal clear she would not go for a caretaker government and declared that the upcoming elections would be held under her Awami League led incumbent government as the Constitutional amendment had already scrapped the caretaker or interim government.

However, the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party maintains its demand that the government should bring a neutral government and that the present Parliament must be dissolved before the general election.

So what do we have here? A huge political impasse! Not to worry, Hasina promised she would call the opposition leader Khaleda Zia to settle the issue. For days everybody was holding their breath, hoping the ladies would get together and sort it out.

In the breaking news today: "Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina called Opposition leader Khaleda Zia this afternoon to invite her to a dialogue over polls-time government but failed to reach. The prime minister called the opposition leader at her red phone at 1:15pm but could not talk with her as no-one picked up the phone for half an hour."

Shucks, we missed a huge opportunity. But, wait, there is another breaking news now:

"BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia will call Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina at 6:00pm today".

So there is still hope after all! Once we get done phone tagging.

Angkor What? Angkor Wat!

As I am writing this back home in Dhaka, I am still thinking about Angkor Wat.

Angkor Wat! To say that it was one of our most anticipated part of the trip would be an understatement. I was holding back the excitement since landing in Laos and being here finally is indeed a dream come true. Angkor Wat and the whole Angkor Complex is Shockingly Amazing! It is glorious. You feel dwarfed being in front of such a great work of genius but at the same time overjoyed as a witness to its grandeur and enduring magnificence. After all this is the Eighth man-made Wonder of the World.

At the height of Angkor Kingdom, the population was thought to have peaked at around 1 million. Angkor,until today,is still the largest religious building. It wasn't the first constructed but it is the mother of all temples in the Angkor Complex where thousands of temples are to be found.

 

 

 

The long, tiring day templed us out, but exhaustion was matched by a lingering sense of wonder at the magnificence we witnessed throughout.

Ta Prohm: man-made temple vs mother nature!

The Ta Prohm temple is just incredible. It is impossible not to bring out the inner explorer in you! It is raw, mysterious, wild, and it takes you into another world and time.

The temple was neglected and swallowed by the jungle of Cambodia for centuries. Today, it looks very much in the same state as when the French explorers stumbled upon it more than a century ago. Efforts were made to reclaim the temple from the jungle, but the jungle would not completely let go. It embraces the temple tightly like a possessive claw.

 

 

 

Built around late 12th by King Javayarman VII, who dedicated the temple to his mother, the temple is nicknamed today the Tomb Raider’s Temple, thanks to its appearance in Angelina Jolie’s movie.
The temple’s most prominent feature are the massive tree roots that are sprawling all over the temple. Gigantic trees grow from the towers and corridors of the temple. They are just so intertwined with the temple that it would destroy them both if you tried to remove them. So it was deliberately left for mother nature to claim it, giving it a really different, authentic , a bit eerie yet magical feeling.
It was weird how these trees grew over the walls. And as I marveled over how majestic nature could be, I took a moment to appreciate and be grateful for this experience.