Getting around Dhaka

Glad I don't have to drive in this city!

 On our way into town from the aiport as soon as I arrived I saw THIS!!! This alerted me to the fact that things were going to be VERY different in this country. Perhaps I already knew that but I was pretty surprised. I thought that riding on train rooves was only for the movies these days. Wrong!

 And riding on the roof of a bus is also very common. I guess

 if you want to go somewhere and there isn't room inside the bus it makes sense (in some cultures!) to climb on top.

 Or on top of the main load. Whatever will get you there, I guess.

How cute is this little number! These look like little beetles cutting in and out of the traffic. This is called an auto ricksha (no spelling mistake, grammar snobs)

And this, of course, is a manual ricksha.

It was fun going for my first Ricksha ride. Not sure that I would attempt it on the main roads, but down the back street on the way to the girls' home was safe enough. 

Because the roads are super busy

 and the drivers drive too close and don't use indicators,

 it can be pretty hairy on the main roads

and the scars on the public transport vehicles tell a pretty descriptive story.

Rather than use indicators to let drivers of other vehicles know when they're intending to move lanes, the drivers here use horns to say 'I'm moving over, don't get in my way'. It makes for lots of scrapes and knocks and damaged paintwork.

Getting around Bishkek

I'm back home but just had a couple more blog posts to send out!

In Bishkek mostly we walked, but because of the very efficient public transport system and after a bit of orientation, we found it quite easy to make our way around Bishkek using the public transport system.

  We discovered an extremely helpful website that made our getting around much simpler than it might have been. bus.kg  We simply clicked on the map of the city, set departure and destination points and it worked out the best way to get us from Point A to Point B.

We found marshrutkas, their minibuses, really handy. Pay 10 som as you get on (about 20c) and ride as far as you want. So simple.

 They were a bit hot and airless on these 38⁰ days, but we are young enough and fit enough to survive. Young people always get up for older people. That helps.

Depending on where we wanted to go, trolley buses were sometimes our best option. We caught the number 4 or 17 to church on Sundays. Pay 8 som as you get off, about 16 cents for us.

  If we had been wanting to catch a taxi, on the other hand, we would be able to find one parked and waiting on any street corner!! Not where we would expect to see a taxi parked, is it?

We didn't use taxis very often because my limited Russian vocabulary wouldn't have been sufficient to get our message across of where we wanted to go and then not have them rip us off as we got out.

And as it is Summer at the moment and can be pretty hot (high 30's most of last week) we made use of the drink stands that appear on just about every street corner in the city. These sell a variety of local drinks for 6 som (about 12 cents), including iced tea, compote, made from fresh fuirt, Maksim and Kumys.

Maksim is a wheat based drink that Kyrgyz like to drink in the summer and is said to be particularly healthy.

Another one is Kumys - fermented mare's milk. Both of these, I would have to say, must be acquired tastes!

This girl was at the corner of our street and was a friendly face as we walked by. I bought my iced tea from her a couple of times.

For those of you who have wondered, if ever there are words in blue and 'different looking' like bus.kg at the top of this blog post, if you click on that it will take you to a website with information about what I have mentioned.