Well it's been quite a wee while since my last entry, so rather than try doing several weekly ones I've plumped for doing 1 big update covering all of Christmas and the 1st week of January. That may sound like laziness, and that's because it is. Sorry!

The holidays for me sort of started the last weekend before Christmas when Sarah came to see me with a friend of her's from back home called Harry (a girl). It was in fact the first time that Sarah had come to stay with me, and I suppose Harry wanting to see some of Bangladesh's countryside was as good an excuse as any to make the trip north into the cold. We didn't do anything spectacular really, just the usual limited sights of the region (nice Hindu temple and ruined palace in Dinajpur with lunch at the Chinese), but it was nice having some real visitors for a change. We all headed back to Dhaka together on the morning bus on Saturday, which gave me around a day before my family descended.

Oh yes, my family, along with dear friends of ours called Ann and Tony, made the long journey to the Indian sub-continent to spend Christmas with me! That's pretty impressive now I come to think about it, bearing in mind the myriad of other more appealing ways they could have spent the same amount of money on a Christmas break. Fortunately for all concerned they were staying at Dhaka's, nay Bangladesh's finest hotel, the Pan Pacific Sonargaon, where yours truly gets his hair cut for that occasional sensation of luxury. Their trip was all arranged through a travel agency in London, and I had thrown in my own views of what was being proposed. Despite this veneer of organisation, not to mention the presence of a local travel agent to guide us, I still felt a tad responsible for them all while in Bangladesh.

The trip was broken into 4 phases: 1) Dhaka with a short trip to where I live, 2) Chittagong and the Hill Tract area in the south-east, 3) Kolkata and the huge mangrove forests in the Sundarbans, and 4) Darjeeling and Sikkim in north-eastern India. I was to accompany them up to the end of the Kolkata leg before returning back to Dhaka while everyone else headed up to Darjeeling and the Himalayas. Having already been to Darjeeling the year before I didn't see any point in going again as a) my parents were picking up the tab, and b) I really had to get back to work!

Sooo, let's start with Dhaka then. We did a city tour, which bearing in mind that Dhaka is pretty much devoid of any buildings of historical interest or beauty, went pretty well. The most interesting thing about Dhaka is the way things work there (or don't). Coming from the UK, with little to no experience of what a huge developing Asian city represents, in can be quite an assault on the senses just being driven around the town let alone attempting to walk down a street. By 3pm we were all well and truly ready for a beer by the pool at the hotel, and who was I to dissuade my charges from this entirely medicinal change to the established programme? Apart from that I took them up to see the BAGHA one night (we got fairly pissed actually) as well as my favourite restaurants (can you blame me?). Probably the highlight though was the boat trip we did on the river. Regular readers with a good memory may remember me doing this back in February with a few friends, and how peaceful it had been. That was obviously a result of doing it during a public holiday period as the river was teeming with boats this time. Just walking down to the riverside gave everyone a pretty full-on taste of what Dhaka can be like, and a few photos were taken of a road just full of rickshaws. I think the boat trip actually lasted 30 minutes before a few voices said that they'd experienced all they needed to thank you very much and could we please now return to the hotel? It was a bit hairy in places when big boats went past us, and just confirmed that these things are best experienced in short intense bursts before retiring to compare notes in the safety of an alcoholic sanctuary of international standards.

The first disappointment of our holiday also came in this first phase as we weren't able to go up to see where I live in BRIF. We got to the airport in good time on what appeared to be a clear winter's day, but 6 hours later we were finally told that our often delayed flight had finally been cancelled due to fog at the destination airport in Saidpur. By the time we heard this we were all ready to go back to the hotel anyway, my father in particular who has suffering a little from what we later deduced to be side effects from his anti-malarial tablets. Everyone was very good about it all, even a few friends of mine who heard about it later, but I was rather gutted. Habib and some BRIF staff had by all accounts gone to quite a lot of effort to ready things for my family's arrival, but really it was all about showing my closest relatives where I had been living and working for the past year. I suppose I wanted them to appreciate first hand what it's really like, what the daily difficulties are, and so better understand where I'm coming from sometimes. That didn't happen, won't ever happen, so there's no point dwelling on it eh?

So that brought us to Christmas itself, which I spent between my family for the main events and Sarah and a few other volunteers for various evenings here and there. The VSO Christmas party for instance, which I took my brother to, was not the greatest and a poor follow-up to last year's top do. While I'm not entirely objective, I couldn't help seeing a link between the glaring difference in success and the fact that Sarah had a big hand in organising the event in 2003 but not in 2004... I've said it before - she organises a mean party. How bad was the party? Well, one of the VSO staff had taken it upon himself to invite a few men from the NGO Affairs Bureau which approves volunteer visas etc. and these "gentlemen" spent the evening staring at the female volunteers and stealing the butter for dinner. When I say steal I mean they literally took whole unopened blocks of butter and tucked them into their pockets. One of them was caught in the act by a volunteer, but the apparent lack of butter later on indicates that we didn't spot every thieving act that went on. Seriously, who goes to an organisation's Christmas party and steals butter?! Once the main ceremonies had finished we scarpered to Sarah's flat with a few friends and drank some beer there instead.

Boxing Day (that's December 26th for the non-Brits) we were supposed to leave Dhaka early morning to drive to Chittagong and start the next leg of the trip. I say supposed to as the main opposition political party decided to call a general strike or hartal that day so travel was effectively banned between sunrise and sunset. To travel to the hotel to meet up with everyone that day I had to take a rickshaw as opposed to the usual 20 minute taxi journey. In the end it worked out at about the same price and only took 10 minutes longer as the roads were so pleasantly empty. Think of London on Christmas Day and you're not far off what it was like. We hence had to travel to Chittagong in the evening, arrived at our hotel around 11pm and just collapsed into bed. Leaving late also meant we couldn't follow in the footsteps of Michael Palin and visit the ship breaking yards, who by all accounts passed through Bangladesh as quickly as humanly possible on his Himalayas trip.

The next day we went up into Rangamati which is one of the Hill Tracts districts. Strictly speaking VSO policy actually forbade me from being there unless for professional reasons due to the security advice given by the pansies at the British High Commission in Dhaka and its staff who seem to live under a permanent bunker mentality. There are VSO volunteers based in these areas and they apparently aren't at any risk, and the fact that visiting tourists like my family with no appreciation of the local situation are allowed in just makes the policy risible. So we went, passed through the various police and military checkpoints, and before doing a very pleasant cruise on Lake Kaptai, we picked up our 3 person armed military escort. Again, the lake cruise was arguably the safest part of the day but the only one for which an armed escort was deemed necessary! Total nonsense.

After the relaxing cruise and passable lunch we went into town then off to a large Buddhist monastery. On the way we made a wrong turn and had to backtrack to the main road to take the right turning. As we came to the junction a 4x4 started turning into our road and effectively blocked our exit. Now, we were in a tight lane with a few parked taxis so 2 vehicles couldn't pass each other. In other words, someone had to give way. Seeing as we were right at the junction and the other car had only half turned in we assumed that the driver would see sense and reverse a little bit to let us out. It would have taken a few seconds and we'd have all been on our way almost immediately. Did this happen? No. Why? Because the other guy was a tosser. Initially we waited for a few moment for him to reverse, but he didn't. Then we indicated that we wanted to pass but he just waved back with a really annoying hand gesture that we were clearly inferior and should let him through. After a few minutes of this our guide got out and went to chat to the guy. He explained the width of the road, the lack of passing points further down and the difficulties we would have reversing with a minibus in such a tight space, but all to no avail. As the guide explained when he got back into the car and we started reversing to let the idiot through, our adversary was on the district council and I quote "gets to do whatever he likes around here". In the end I think it was as much about not losing face in front of the crowd that formed during our face-off as being a total wanker. Top bloke.

We had a good day though, and when we got back to the hotel we had a few beers in the bar watching Bangladesh beat India in their 2nd 1 day international! The next morning we flew off to Kolkata and arrived at easily one of the nicest hotels I've ever stayed in. If you ever have the opportunity to stay in an Oberoi hotel my advice is go for it as they are classy. In the afternoon we went for a wander around the local shops, and once we'd shaken off a few hawkers (almost in the physical sense of the word for one of them) we walked over to where the hotel told us the nicest restaurants were to be found for dinner that night. On the way, I felt a firm hand land on my shoulder and turned to find the smiling face of an Australian guy called Daniel who had only a few weeks previously spent some time at BRIF! Spooky! He'd been there for a week and was on his way south. We continued our walk, bought computer text books (seriously, we found this shop and they were so cheap that all us guys bought something while the women waited patiently) and I picked up some headphones for my iPod. Hardly what you usually bag during a trip around India is it?!

Probably the highlight of my trip (apart from the time spent just relaxing in the hotel) was the tour we did of Kolkata. Unlike Dhaka there really is an awful lot to see and understand. There are historically significant buildings (HQ of the East India Company), beautiful structures (Victoria Memorial and Birla Hindu temple) and an awful lot of British colonial history that we sort of know but don't really. For instance, we visited the memorial to the Black Hole of Calcutta which is now located in a forgotten corner of a church yard as the actual site of this tragedy is now part of the main post office. For those who have no clue what I'm talking about, the Black Hole of Calcutta was literally a small airless dungeon, measuring 4.6 x 5.5 m (about 15 x 18 ft), in the old Fort William of the English East India Company in Kolkata. According to a contemporary British account, after the fort fell to the nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Dawlah on June 20th 1756, the 146 British prisoners taken by his forces were herded into the cell and locked up overnight; in the morning only 23 were alive. As related, the incident aroused outrage among the British, who used it as an excuse for harsh retaliation. Later study has indicated that only 64 prisoners were kept in the hole, of whom 21 survived (source: Microsoft Encarta). It was amazing to me that this piece of colonial history, whose name is so well known to the British, was somehow "reduced" to a small ill-maintained memorial. Just across from there was also the forgotten tomb of the man who had basically turned Kolkata into an international centre of trade when he chose what was then a village as a site for future factories in 1690, Job Charnock. Even more amazing was that in an office in the very church in whose grounds the memorial stood, a British servant of the crown had governed most of India for over a decade!

The next day we embarked on what would be for me the last leg of the holiday - the Sundarbans. This area is actually spread across India and Bangladesh and represents the largest mangrove forest in the world. We were told it covers 8000 km2, 2/3's of it being in Bangladesh. We were also told that it was best visited in India as the tourist facilities would be better. Well, after 2 nights in a shitty old wooden lodge whose selling points included western toilets and monkeys everywhere, I would beg to differ. Apart from the natural beauty of the area and the huge rivers that flow through it, the real reason for our visit was to see some wildlife. Once again fate was to decide otherwise, and as external factors go the Indonesian quake and subsequent tsunamis didn't leave us much room for negotiation.

We were in Dhaka when the quake happened, and Tony says he actually felt something! Bangladesh was fortunate as it was barely affected, and we didn't see any destruction resulting from the tsunamis anywhere along our trip. We did however get talking to a British women in the hotel in Kolkata whose family owned a house in Thailand and had lost 10 friends in the disaster. By the time we arrived in the Sundarbans the main concern was waves resulting from after-shocks, and the Indian government was being extremely cautious having not really seen the initial waves coming at all. The result was that the forestry department refused to issue permits to tourist boats like ours to go into the national park or even head down stream a little. I should perhaps point out that we were 80 km inland and the area did not seem to have been affected by the first waves at all. In the end then we had to make do with cruising around the rivers, with the occasional stop to walk around villages and enjoy the countryside. It really was beautiful there, and while basically the same as Bangladesh, things just seemed a tad more developed and organised. We were after all in West Bengal, an area almost identical to Bangladesh in many ways, but life just seemed marginally better some how.

So it was, rather relaxed and with a bit of sun in our cheeks, that we returned to Kolkata dreaming of having our first full wash in 2 days and celebrating the New Year with some good food and a few drinks. Which we did. The next day I said goodbye to everyone, told them that Darjeeling would be much better, and enjoyed my last few hours of hotel luxury before flying back to Dhaka. That first week of 2005 was half spent catching up with Sarah in Dhaka (she'd been to India too but to see the Taj Mahal and take "a few" photos) before returning to BRIF and the office. Sounds straightforward doesn't it? In reality, a few days after I got back Habib was in a bike crash and cleanly broke his femur (that's the thigh bone to you and I, so a pretty big one really). Luckily, if you can say such a thing, a British volunteer had just arrived at BRIF to do a work camp and she was a qualified doctor! Better still, she worked in casualty! Sooo, the very next morning she was dispatched to his hospital to find that no one had put a cast on the leg or anything to fix it in place! The way she describes it she had to basically bully a few doctors into buying some plaster (they didn't have any!) and put the cast on. He's now been transferred to a hospital in Dhaka and will be operated on in the next day or so.

The more professionally alert amongst might be wondering how this will affect me, especially bearing in mind I only have 3 months left with BRIF. Well, at the moment I don't really know as I don't yet have any information about how long Habib will be in Dhaka, what the recovery process is, and whether he can work during that time. With a bit of luck he'll be able to have visitors a few hours a day for the next week or so, so I'll head for Dhaka and prey on his immobility to complete the strategic plan and staff manual! He can't possibly get away with a leg in traction you see, and he needs to work on his patience anyway. If he really is out of action and touch for a few weeks at least then I do have a serious problem, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Fingers crossed eh?