I am somewhere peculiar. According to the volunteers who have been here a while the overall verdict is that my time in Bangladesh is going to be an “Experience”. Now, this makes me nervous. I mean abduction is an experience but I don’t know I necessarily want to go through it. The first night, after being almost run over by several rickshaws Richard, Judith and I ended up dining at a Mexican restaurant. It was in a mall with air-conditioning, a coffee shop with muffins and wi-fi and a bookshop that looked like Borders. Just outside: grinding poverty. The wealth gap between the middle class and what in Marxist terms I have dubbed ‘the rest’ is quite staggering. The rich drive around in 4x4s and live an essentially Western life of supermarket consumerism whilst 50% of the country lives on less than a pound a day.

Yesterday we went out. Alone. And lived! I should quickly introduce our gang of volunteers: Richard and Miriam (English), Job (Kenyan), Morrish (Ugandan), Judith (American). Anyway, we caught a CNG (picture a small armoured rickshaw with a cage around it and an engine) and took it down to the river and the old town. You know when kids are allowed to pretend drive on rides at theme parks or amusement arcades? Well that’s how our man drove us as he weaved and bashed his way between cars, buses, rickshaws and people like a maniac with no regard for his life or ours. Now these vehicles are little more than bombs on wheels, bumper cars with cylinders of compressed gas attached to the back of them. Good for suicide bombings, bad for commuting. And it was brilliant! We saw so much stuff and all at a ridiculous speed. See the pictures!

Then we ended up in the seething mass of old town Dhaka. Heat and smells and huge numbers of people. Any time we stopped a crowd of around fifty people would quickly assemble to watch us do interesting stuff like talk to each other, grin moronically and look at the guide book. It didn’t feel intimidating though. The people here are really welcoming and as Bangladesh is visited by just ten thousand foreigners a year we probably did look rather odd. Just as we were growing tired of the attention a man who introduced himself as Mish offered us a boat ride on the river which we accepted. It was great to get on the river away from the crowds and amazing to see all the people that live on old rusty boats out on the water.

From a rickshaw I saw these men worshipping with bags of food around them. A moment of calm surrounded by noise and chaos. People pray anywhere they can, even at work.