Tanguar Haor
To check out another part of Bangladesh, I went bird watching with a couple colleagues on the northern border with India, in a wetlands area named Tanguar Haor. Before I moved to Bangladesh I had heard that it was the best place for bird watching in Asia. The whole country is a river delta. The Bradt guide says "If you're supremely adventurous or a keen birdwatcher (perhaps both), Sunamganj is where you'll want to head." It also mentions that it takes four days on a boat to do the round trip from Sunamganj to Tanguar Haor, staying on the boat at night and waking up surrounded by birds in the wetlands.
A haor is a large depression in the earth, which creates a wetlands area. Water trickles in from nearby rivers and rains fill the depressions. Considering how flat and saturated Bangladesh is, a place that is even more flat and saturated is really saying something. The shallow water and abundant fish and plant life creates an ideal habitat for birds. Many Asian birds stop by during their winter migrations. There are several haors in northern Bangladesh, but Tanguar is reputed to be the best for bird watching.
It was a very long day traveling up from Dhaka on Thursday, but we made it. We drove to Sunamganj, where we had a short ferry ride across a river, then an hour in a laguna to the house we stayed in. A laguna is a CNG with a tiny pickup bed on the back. Dhaka is full of the little 3 wheeled CNGs, which can go faster than the human-powered rickshaw. CNG stands for compressed natural gas, which I try to not think about because it doesn’t take much to make one of the little things explode. The laguna got us to the house well after dark and so late I almost didn’t want any dinner.
The next morning we got up ready for action. Like all good (and nerdy) birdwatchers, we were armed with cameras, tripods, binoculars and a bird book specifically about South East Asia. We had hats and sunscreen and were ready for a day out on a boat, quietly watching birds. After a later-than-anticipated breakfast, we rode in a laguna for over an hour to the boat, which turned out to be bright red. They had obviously made a new awning for us, to shelter us from the sun. It was flashy red and yellow fabric, complete with bunting around the edges and bright red chairs. I was speechless. No bird in its right mind would go within a mile of it. (There are no hummingbirds here). But we got on, and politely greeted the four other guys onboard, who turned out to be the boat owner, boat driver, haor guide and a friend of the owner. Add them to our group of five: guide, manager of the place in Sunamganj and three foreigners. There were too many people to actually keep quiet.
Motoring up the river, on the way to the haor, we spotted lots of Brahminy kites and drongos, which can also be found in Dhaka. We saw hooded crows and sparrows, domesticated ducks and geese, starlings and mynah birds. Once in the haor I finally got to see lots of birds that I had never seen before. Some of these could be mis-identified since we couldn’t get very close and only had one book to work from. On my list are: great and intermediate egrets, Indian pond herons, coots, Oriental Darters, great and little cormorants, Pacific reef-herons, Great-billed herons, juvenile Grey herons, several kinds of gulls and terns, black kites, purple swamp hens, little grebes, fulvous whistling ducks, common potchards, common shelducks and ruddy shelducks, Eurasian wigeons, purple herons, red-crested pochards and Oriental skylarks. My favorites were the purple swamp hens. They were the size and shape of a chicken, but bright purple, with red beaks.
The best bird watching was from the Swiss research station, where we got out on foot, away from the bright red boat, chugging engine and ringing cell phones. The larks were singing and the ducks stood still in the shallows. I got a good look at a purple heron, walking up close behind some willows, watching it stalk around in the reeds, catching fish and turning in the afternoon light, so the sun caught the red neck feathers and purple wing feathers at different angles. It was beautiful.
The rest of the trip we were the focus of attention. That must be the most frequent comment about Bangladesh: everywhere we went, people crowded around to stare. Even on the boat, since we were accompanied by six local men, I always felt eyes on me. We didn’t see any other foreigners the whole time, including the road trip to and from Dhaka.
I had expected the long trip from Dhaka, but didn’t realize that from where we were staying it was another three hours of laguna and motor boat to the haor. That’s a six hour daily commute. The countryside is beautiful, and if other things had gone better it would have been okay. Unfortunately, we had other problems. The lodging was unexpected and they were obviously unprepared to host tourists. I didn’t feel comfortable there. The political situation blew up on Friday while we were out in the boat and we were rushed back to Dhaka on Saturday, in anticipation of country-wide protests and strikes on Sunday. It was a shame to have the trip cut short, but considering how it was going, we probably didn’t miss out on too much.
There were a lot of beautiful places we passed through, and I would like to learn more about Bangladeshi culture and living on rivers and around the wetlands, so I would make the trip to get there again. If there were to be a next time, I would first talk to the guide about his local knowledge (it’s never a woman) and arrange to go on a boat that we can sleep on, to save us the six hours of transportation each day.
