Going West

November 25, 2010

to Sunamgonj

My start isn't early because it was a late night - nothing thrilling, just faffing around.

Breakfast in the Supreme is an English one: toast and jam, mango juice and a couple of boiled eggs followed by a cup of sweet tea. It's not a Full Monty, but it'll get me down the road.

Not sure where to today. From here my vague goal is a place named Sunamgonj. It's hardly a metropolis.

It's nearly 11 by the time my bike is wheeled out from the underground parking lot and in front of the Supreme, looking nice and clean after the staff here voluntarily washed it down. It needed it.

An audience watches as my panniers get attached and I pedal off towards the centre and the road west to Sunamgonj, going past the rickshaw painter's place and as luck would have it he's just opening up his little workshop.

My front rack gets a second coat and looks all the better for it... Love that electric blue paint!

Thirty-two years of doing it, the painter doesn't mess about and my wheels are soon rolling through Sylhet, which isn't Dhaka or Chittagong and it's a pleasant sort of experience here, dodging the rickshaws and CNGs whose passengers stick out their heads to get a second look as they whiz by. I'm a novelty.

Without an odometer or speedometer, it's difficult to know where I am but guess 15 km - or 40-odd minutes - and the traffic has faded and it's less chaotic and the road has become a narrow one with grass by the verge and rural homes dotting the route.

It's sunny and fields of wheat have workers scything away and others are threshing it - everything is manual - and I see washing drying on fences and on grass and it looks like they need a bit of Tide to get them cleaner.

Once in Rampur I see millions of small fish drying by the roadside on large woven mats and the smell is strong but not unpleasant and I take photos and see some faces at the market area where I buy a couple of South African oranges for later, and take some portraits with one guy looking very serious like some of them do when it comes to having a photo taken while the other in a white cap can't stop smiling.

Some rail tracks help with getting my bearings. and my map shows a road heading north to Chatak - it seems like a good idea to take it and find smaller roads, which is what my real goal is, so I venture along it and find it rutted and potholed.

It's not too far to Chatak and the rail tracks are there on the left running parallel and when I get to the town's edge a friendly guy tells me there's a guesthouse here.

However, when I ride through the centre and down market lanes it seems too early in the day to call it quits, so I end up continuing on even though it's gone 2:30 and riding west to Sonamgonj is going to make it a long-ish day, and one which will probably mean me cycling in the dark to get there. So be it.

The route west out of Chatak is a lane that gets smaller and smaller until it runs out and on my right is a river that's wide. I turn away from the water and ride through what seems like a stone factory and find a concrete road that my compass says is westerly and on I go with the sun already low.

The surface turns to packed gravel and then to hard smooth mud and eventually I'm pedaling along a footpath that reminds me of when I was a child and used to ride my three-speed along the local riverbank and if I got five miles from home it seemed like an epic journey.

I get to a village where the path splits again and some local men direct me to a bridge with all the local children are in tow, as if I am the Pied Pier, and the bridge turns out to be just bits of thick bamboo tied to oil drums that float and wobble as I get on it with my bike.

The river is about 100 meters across and no doubt deep and a lot of the bamboo is missing and the children that follow me make the bridge rock this way and that and at a couple of points the elders of the village are shouting instructions not to do this or that. It seems we'll all get very wet any second.

I make it across and pedal along a small path just wide enough for one pair of feet and the sun is disappearing and a cow blocks the way, so I take a photo of it - actually one of the group following me does, pressing the camera's shutter release when I ping my bell as I've instructed him to. Photography is always a performance, and this is a good one. There's a big crowd.

Villagers tell me it 40 kilometres - some say it's only nine. It's hard to know where I am and I just head towards the sunset, west, and know it'll be dark very shortly and wonder if I can find a spot to pitch my tent, but there's a lot of water around now -fields of it.

The concrete stops and there's a mud trail again, one which doesn't seem right to me and my compass, when I shine my LED on it, says that I'm going east of all places and this baffles me. I turn around and keep going back where I've come, along the gravel and mud or whatever it is and think an hour or more passes with me going the wrong way.

It's not that it's really late - it's 6-ish - but the scenery that was so enjoyable has vanished into the night and all there is to see now is an elliptical patch of grey light in front that my LED picks out as I double back.

I stop at some place that has lit-up stalls where I buy some water and packets of snacks and get told Sunamgonj is just two kilometers away and feel mighty relieved, but skepticism gets the better of me as many people seem to have no idea about distances.

Soon after and a man I stop tells me where the guesthouse is. The room costs me 466-taka, with ESPN on the TV. Result.

Today's ride: 55 km (34 miles)
Total: 941 km (584 miles)

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