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Things you should know about Bandarban, before you go

February 27, 2008 1:06 am

~story by Mikey Leung~

At the Guide Tours’ Hillside Resort, you awake to a stunning view of hills poking out from the clouds. See more photos of Bandarban here.

It’s absolutely outrageous to say this, but be prepared to be followed by the police where ever you go while visiting one of Bangladesh’s most attractive destinations, second only to the Sundarbans.

It happened to a group of us last week (all foreign tourists). Before we even knew it, we were being followed by three uniformed police officers carrying aging rifles. They were not aggressive or overbearing, in fact they were usually quite kind and curious like all Bangladeshis are, and they were simply doing their job. Nonetheless, we didn’t formally request their presence, but we got it whether we wanted it or not. It did sour our experience of Bandarban—I felt bad mostly for my group.

The bottom line:

We do not want to scare anyone with this article, as Bandarban is one of Bangladesh’s must-see destinations. We simply want intrepid travellers to be prepared for what they will encounter.

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Tags: Bandarban,Bangladesh,Chittagong Hill Tracts,Responsible Travel,security advice
Categories: Chittagong Hill Tracts, Destinations, FAQ
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Rangamati — the CHT’s most accessible destination

January 21, 2008 5:09 pm

Rangamati - Villager This local villager is one of the benefactors of Green Hill’s gravity irrigation system. His village was fully outfitted with running drinking water and is one of Green Hill’s earliest success stories. Green Hill is a Rangamati-based non-government organisation supporting the development of hill tracts people. See more photos here..

Rangamati is perhaps the most-travelled destination inside the Chittagong Hill Tracts—at least by Bengali tourists, that is. The region’s interest comes from its cultural diversity: the majority of its people are not Bengali. Instead you will find people from many different ethnic tribes. In Rangamati, the majority of people are Chakma, and are perhaps the most well off of the various ethnic groups.

The region also holds both a beautiful and a ghastly story that centers around the presence of Kaptai Lake. In the early 1960s, Kaptai Dam was built to generate power for Bangladesh’s growing electricity demands. During the construction, over 100,000 indigenous people were displaced, and many of them were never recompensated. While the lake itself is quite beautiful and peaceful, today it remains a bone of contention: the government began dealing with Bangladesh’s overpopulation problems by moving people on to indigenous lands and evicting the local people around the lake.

As a result the indigenous people began an insurgency that eventually culminated in kidnappings, ransoms and murders. In 1997, a peace accord was signed, but 10 years later many of its stipulations are yet to be fulfilled. Today it is a sticky issue for the Bangladeshi government that seems to have no resolution in sight. The balance between Bengali and indigenous people is delicate, surely becoming more and more unsettled as the days wear on.

In the following podcast we talk about what’s interesting for the tourists who visit the Hill Tracts and briefly discuss that naggling question of “Is the CHT safe?”