The hotel is nice and the Internet is fast! Webmaster comes back to life and finally can update after several days. Very good buffet lunch and then Situ, our tour guide picks us up. It took him and the driver over 1 1/2 hours to come here: traffic jam! We leave the hotel and see it ourselves what it means: we are stuck immediately! After a while we see the new Parliament building and continue towards old Dhaka. Stuck again. In old Dhaka we see the Lalbagh Fort with a mausoleum of another Bibi: Pari Bibi: Now the rickshaws start: first few of them - then you stop counting. It looks like nobody knows how many of them are in Dhaka! The roads get narrower and narrower and soon there are only rickshaws! We the only car and only white boys. And it is getting chaotic; stuck in a rickshaw jam!! We never experienced something like this and are happy to be in the van and not have to walk around out there!! How you spell chaos: old Dhaka!!!
Of our four hour tour we are stuck in the car for 3 hours. So we skip the cruise on the river and go back to paradise: our hotel room where it is somehow quiet, clean and no traffic jam! Taking a shower immediately and realizing that 99.5% of the people we just saw don’t have this luxury of taking a hot shower! How lucky we are!

Dhaka’s city population is around 7 million with the population of its metropolitan area double that This places it in the top 20 largest cities on earth, but perhaps the most worrying statistic is that Dhaka’s seemingly irrepressible growth rate shows no signs of abating; and despite its already enormous dimensions, the city continues to expand at a greater rate than most of the world’s other large cities. The Far Eastern Economic Review has predicted that by 2025 Dhaka will have a population of 25 million people. And you don’t wanna get stuck in traffic then!!!

What is now called Bangladesh is part of the historic region of Bengal, the northeast portion of the Indian subcontinent. Bangladesh consists primarily of East Bengal (West Bengal is part of India and its people are primarily Hindu) plus the Sylhet district of the Indian state of Assam.
The earliest reference to the region was to a kingdom called Vanga, or Banga (c. 1000 B.C. ). Buddhists ruled for centuries, but by the 10th century Bengal was primarily Hindu. In 1576, Bengal became part of the Mogul Empire, and the majority of East Bengalis converted to Islam. Bengal was ruled by British India from 1757 until Britain withdrew in 1947, and Pakistan was founded out of the two predominantly Muslim regions of the Indian subcontinent.
Tension between East and West Pakistan existed from the outset because of their vast geographic, economic, and cultural differences. East Pakistan seceded and the independent state of Bangladesh, or Bengali nation, was proclaimed on March 26, 1971. Civil war broke out, and with the help of Indian troops in the last few weeks of the war, East Pakistan defeated West Pakistan on Dec. 16, 1971. In Feb. 1974, Pakistan agreed to recognize the independent state of Bangladesh.