1000 Days of Spring: Travelogue of a hitchhiker

by Tomislav Perko

  Competition, competition, competition. Always the same story, from our birth to our death. The world would be a much prettier place if instead competing with each other, people would simply cooperate.

  “Actually, I didn’t want the race to have a competitive aspect,” I said, “you could even get extra points if you ended up in a village, slept out in the open and stuff like that. Those are the moments you cherish the most at the end of a journey, the ones you remember the most. Travelling would be awfully tedious if everything went according to plan. The whole adventure of moving, the getting from point A to point B would be ruined. We would be left with only one half of the experience: the one you experience in the destination itself.”

  “Are those experiences the reason why you travel the way you do?”

  “Well, since I don’t have any money I basically don’t have any other option,” I continued. “If I had money perhaps I’d be staying at hotels, eating in restaurants. In that sense, the only journey that was different was my last one, the one to Bangladesh...”

  Day 732.

  “If you ever want to feel like a movie star, go to Bangladesh”, was the quotation I'd come across just as I was in the middle of my preparation for the trip to that country: from taking vaccination against different diseases I could catch there to hitchhiking to the Netherlands and back in order to go to the embassy of Bangladesh so they would issue me the tourist visa for Croatian citizens.

  When I was flying to Dhaka, the capital of a country twice as big as Croatia but with an impressive number of citizens – 160 million, I discovered the story behind that quotation. I was the only Caucasian in the plane: everyone was watching me. When we touched down and I got out of plane at an airport enclosed by barbed wire and military men with machine-guns in their hands, I realized that I had just entered a totally different world.

  I put my small backpack on since I’d lost my big one somewhere on the Zagreb-Zürich-Barcelona-Doha-Dhaka route and, with a new camera around my neck, started exploring my first destination outside Europe.

  The road leading to the city was packed with small, green vehicles called CNG’s (the name indicated their fuel, compressed natural gas), also known as tuk-tuks or moto-taxies; overcrowded buses with bumps on all sides; personal cars which kept on honking irritatingly every few seconds; and pedestrians who kept on running over the road playing all brave, but really they were playing with their lives.

  When I arrived in the suburbs, the scenes I was surrounded by became even more memorable: motor vehicles were now replaced by rickshaws, while car horns were replaced by the sound of rickshaw bells. There was a small improvised food stand or a tea-serving stand at every corner; electric cables connecting the electric pillars created inseparable nodes; stray dogs and their faeces dominated the side streets; and every now and then you could easily see scenes like a six-year-old lifting a barrel full of trash, at least twice as big as he was, and shaking out its content into another barrel and digging through the trash in search of something valuable.

  ‘Don’t feel sorry for us, we’re happy with what we have’ seemed to be the words that I read in the eyes of the passers-by and from the smiles of the children dressed in rags playing in the muddy streets and posing readily for a few photos. ‘If you’ve come here to be sad, then you better go back to where you’ve come from.’

  I decided to take their advice.

  I felt good in the role of a photographer, so I tried to catch reality through the lens of the camera, no emotions involved; just the reality that wasn’t similar to anything I’d ever seen before. I gave up my negative thoughts, I no longer felt that I’d come to a place where I didn’t belong, I gave up the instinct to sit on the sidewalk and start crying over the destiny of those people, and I stopped listening to the voice that was telling me to take off the camera and to give it to a passer-by who could sell it and with the money earned, feed his four-member family for an entire year.

  I decided to try to fit in with the locals, just as on every journey before. Be one of them. A local, not a tourist.

  I knew that it wasn’t going to be an easy mission in a place like this.

  Hey Thomas,

  We’re downtown, around the University, finishing our school assignment and observing the celebration for the Victory day. We’ll be back tonight. Feel at home and feel free to take a nap in the back room, everything is set up. If you need anything, call us.

  Christy, Keith and Matt

  That was the note waiting for me on the door of my hosts, three Americans who had been teaching English in Dhaka for several months. Besides them and my friend Samai ,who would be getting married in ten days, I didn’t know anyone else in the country. Also, I didn’t have any idea where I would go after Dhaka.

  All I knew was that I didn’t want to spend much time in someone’s apartment. So, I dialled the number they left on the note and headed for the University.

  I sat on a three-wheel bicycle, got myself comfortable, and watched a local with a frail build pedal unstoppably, manoeuvring skilfully through the obstructed streets. If I thought that the streets were dangerous on my way from the airport, being an actual participant in the traffic was a whole new experience. Noisy CNG’s were rushing from all directions, fearless busses, cars with front and back steel bumpers to minimize the damage, which, in the chaos that governed the streets of Dhaka, would eventually occur - it was only a matter of time.

  A couple of months before, during my stay in Istanbul, I heard a saying: If you can drive in Istanbul, you can drive in any city in the world. I pictured the author of that saying getting into a car in the capital of Bangladesh and after the first few metres starting to sob.

  If Dhaka has fifteen million inhabitants, I believed that day there were at least ten million of them on the streets. Green flags with a red circle in the middle flew everywhere, people wore the jerseys of their national football team, their faces coloured green. They were celebrating Victory Day, the anniversary of liberation from the Pakistani regime. I still couldn’t spot a single Caucasian on the streets.

  “How am I supposed to find those three with all this chaos?” I wondered as I was approaching the University and giving my chauffer 100 taka (approximately 1 Euro) for his half-hour pedalling. Among the thousands of people I noticed a commotion in an area where a curious mass of people gathered: I wanted to fit in so I joined them.

  I expected to see Bollywood superstars, but instead I was facing – my hosts!

  “Ha ha, welcome to Bangladesh,” Keith said, referring to the chaos around him, “what a great day to be here.”

  I met Matt and Christy and joined them in answering questions to the curious crowd. Where are you from? What’s your name? Do you like Bangladesh? Literally, there wasn’t a moment where someone didn’t ask us a question accompanied by a handshake with a local who was brave enough to attack us with so many questions.

  They were so simple, nice and curious. Each and every one of them.

  Until they became a bit annoying since not even two hours later they didn’t stop following us wherever we went and asking the same questions. So, in order not to get mad with them we chose a smarter way out – going back home.

  “Uh, that was intense,” Matt sighed once we got into a bus that had a wooden floor. “During all the months spent here we’ve never experienced anything like this. I hope it hasn’t been overwhelming for you.”

  “No, on the contrary,” I said, “most of the time I like being the centre of the attention. It’s written in the stars.”

  “Ha ha, then you’ll love it here,” Christy added.

  I laughed and looked through the dirty window at the street. The river of people kept on flowing down the streets, coming from all directions, while the lights of the vehicles illuminated the faces of the children who, with their parents being absent, slept in cardboard boxes at the corner of the street. I could smell smog, burning and poverty in the air.

  The smile vanished from my face.

&
nbsp; Day 735.

  I was in the bus for the old part of Dhaka when I spotted an interesting detail on the bus driving next to us. There was an irregular downward line under every window, as if someone had painted a yellow-brown line using a thick brush from every second or third window. No matter how hard I thought about it I couldn’t discover the origin of those lines.

  And then a woman riding in the bus revealed the secret. She leaned through the window and – threw up, leaving an identical mark to those I’d noticed earlier on. No one in the bus blinked.

  “It happens quite often,” a man sitting next to me told me as he noticed me observing the situation, “women aren’t very good in standing the heat in the bus. And if you take into consideration the fact that we’re in Bangladesh, they’re probably pregnant.”

  Having said that he laughed and I joined him.

  “Nurislam, nice to meet you,” he offered me his hand.

  “Tomislav.” We shook hands.

  “Tom-Islam?” his eyes were wide with surprise.

  “You could say it like that,” I accepted my new name readily.

  He started asking me all those questions I was accustomed to in Dhaka, and I answered.

  “Let me be your guide around Dhaka,” he suggested as we were getting closer to our stop, “I could show you some interesting places that you wouldn’t be able to see on your own.”

  He took me by the hand (not literally, even though it wasn’t a rare thing to see two men holding hands on the streets of Dhaka) and we went to the river Buriganga, which served as a transport platform for more than a million people every day. In addition to being one of the busiest rivers in the world, it was also one of the most polluted.

  “This is the poorer part of the city,” he began explaining as we crossed to the other bank of the river, the southern part of the city, in a wooden boat that reminded me of Venetian gondolas.

  I didn’t have any reason not to believe him. The soil was completely covered with all sorts of trash, the amount of which was so great that the sand that was hiding beneath could barely be seen under all that paper, plastic and God-knows-what other materials. It stank.

  The only clean surface was a small football field where half-naked and bare-foot children were kicking around something that looked like a football. Their laughter and happiness in such surroundings seemed quite surreal.

  We walked around a shipyard, found our way through the muddy alleys between the shacks where numerous families lived, crossed over wooden bridges that overhung a liquid that couldn’t possibly be called a river and, finally, ended up in a textile factory.

  I already knew that Bangladesh was the country with possibly the cheapest manual labour in the world and that, consequently, large brands moved their production facilities here, where the income from the textile industry was probably the biggest of all branches of industry. I’d heard about the inhumane working conditions – now I was there, in the hot spot, ready to see it for myself.

  The first thing that caught my attention was the great number of women and children, mostly teenagers, working there. The working rooms usually had no windows, and the workers sat in uncomfortable chairs or even on the concrete floor. The fabric was scattered all over the room and you were left with the impression that no job could be done there. In one corner of the room I noticed two women who used the space under the sewing machines as a place to take a rest. They would take a nap between two shifts.

  “It’s the factory of a friend of mine,” Nurislam said proudly, “the working conditions are great, the quality is top-class and the workers are satisfied.”

  I took another look around the dark room, lit by a couple of lamps, and calculated that there was one worker per square metre, doing their job without lifting their heads.

  I wondered what a factory with worse working conditions looked like.

  “Everyone works eight hours a day here and they have one hour off for a lunch break,” he said as if he was reading my mind. “Many employers force their workers to work twelve hours a day and they pay them the minimum wage imposed by the government.

  “And that would be?” I asked.

  “Thirty nine dollars,” he said, “a month.”

  “What about the children?” I wanted to know, wondering how anyone could survive with monthly wages so low, even if they did live in one of the poorest countries in the world that was, at the same time, one of the cheapest countries in the world. “Why aren’t they at school?”

  “They aren’t at school because they have to feed their families,” he said as if it was the most normal thing in the world for nine-year-olds to work, whatever the reason for that might be. “Employers like younger workers because their sight is better, they’re handier and they complain less.”

  Now I could finally understand the happiness of those kids from the playground. Even a dirty and stinky environment was better than this one, dark and exploitative; unfortunately this was necessary for many of them, young and old, healthy and sick alike because they all had to find a way to maintain their families.

  Leaving the factory I was thinking about the poverty circle in which those people were trapped. On one hand, rich companies from rich countries, in order to increase their profit, move the manufacturing facilities to countries where they can pay workers less money. In order to give these companies the lowest operating expenses possible the governments of these under-developed countries embrace them whole-heartedly, making it easier for them to enter the market by offering them different tax benefits and less rigid control of safety conditions, health insurance and so on. The workers, on the other hand, are grateful to have jobs because living in a small country with more than 160 million people, one cannot choose what to do. That is the reason why they keep their mouths shut, accept all the conditions so that the companies are satisfied, so that corrupt governments are pleased, and so that rich Caucasians from other parts of the world can buy a T-shirt for $9.99, made in Bangladesh.

  Consumers form part of the poverty circle, too. Even if they are aware of the whole situation, if they boycott products made in under-developed countries they would be doing anything but good: if no one bought their products, they would lose their jobs and have no place to go. If the government raised the minimum wage and increased the responsibilities of the companies, which would then have to take care of the safety and welfare of each worker, the company would only move their facilities to another country, justifying their actions by increased operating expenses. So, the only ones who would suffer would be the workers.

  Damn money.

  Nurislam and I visited his four-member family, who live in a three-room apartment that they share with two other families. They had one room and half of another, a large wooden bed, and a bathroom that they shared with the other tenants. They shared their lunch with me and a few kind words, after which I returned to my hosts.

  I wanted to run away from that city desperately, from the filth, noise and misery. I felt helpless simply observing everything without a solution to change things for the better. Since I’d promised myself, and the others, that I wouldn’t feel sorry for them I had to do something else.

  “I have a week left until the wedding in Dhaka,” I told my Americans that night, “do you have any suggestion; where could I spend the time while waiting?”

  “You could visit the amazing national parks,” Christy suggested, “but, I’m afraid you can only do that if you go through a tourist agency: you have to book in advance and the package tours may be expensive, which you wouldn’t like very much.”

  “What if I visited those places on my own?” I tried to make a compromise.

  “It’s not allowed,” Keith said, “there are Bengal tigers everywhere; on average, they kill a man every three days; and there is a lot of kidnapping and organ selling.”

  “Wonderful,” my face darkened. “What is your favourite place in Bangladesh of the places you’ve visited in these past few months, where you don’t have to go with someone
and where you won’t lose a kidney?”

  They remained silent for a moment, exchanges looks and then answered together:

  “Kushtia.”

  Day 736.

  One of the most terrifying experiences of my life was behind me: a bus ride in Bangladesh.

  I gave up hitchhiking when I realized that there was no point in trying to explain to the locals what a white man was doing by the road with his thumb stuck out. All locals, no matter how poor they were, paid for transportation. I didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t follow their example.

  Everything was okay as we were leaving Dhaka, but once we got onto the highway the horror started: avoiding pedestrians and rickshaws moving close to the curb, overtaking other buses somewhat slower than ours, zig-zagging to avoid accidents just at the last second and, the cherry at the top of the cake, overtaking a bus, which was overtaking another bus, while rickshaws and cars coming from the opposite direction had to move to the dusty part of the road to save their lives.

  I was the only one on the bus who considered this driving style dangerous. The driver whistled nonchalantly and maintained a rhythm with the bus horn while the other passengers didn’t seem to pay much attention to what was going on: they talked among themselves or slept with their mouths wide open. Every now and then a woman threw up through the window, with her vomit probably hitting an innocent passer-by.

  I followed their example and hid myself behind the seat in order not to be able to see what was going on in the traffic. That was the only way to survive: don’t look, believe in the driver and in his sixth sense.