Mr. Zia, our guide, picked us up at the Dhaka guest house on Friday morning to begin our three-day driving tour of the northeastern part of Bangladesh before we head to Chittagong on Sunday. The 7-hour, 222 km drive from Dhaka to Sylhet was the most fascinating and terrifying road experience Kevin and I have ever had, anywhere in
the world.
Getting out of Dhaka alone took over two hours. Bumper-to-bumper doesn’t even begin to describe the traffic here. It is pure and simple mayhem. There are no traffic rules except to honk as you overtake whatever is in the road in front of you—be it a car, bus, truck, bicycle,
mother and child crossing the road, rickshaw, motorized rickshaw, man pulling a cart laden with any number of goods, cow, goat, or sleeping dog. Oh, and the other rule: be sure to pull back into your lane right before the car, bus, truck, bicycle, or whatever else is in the other lane barrels into you.
Natural selection plays a part; the bigger your vehicle, the more right of way you have. The working assumption is that you have the right to overtake anything in front of you and that you will dart back into your lane when something larger is approaching. This means no looking in the rearview or side mirrors. There is no time. Instead, you have to constantly look ahead, negotiate, move around, and stay ahead of others while avoiding oncoming traffic. It is assumed that the moving “thing” that is trying to overtake you is going to veer back into your space any moment. So driving is this constant: braking, accelerating, honking, veering left, veering right, all over pot-holed, rubble-strewn roads. What’s funny (maybe disconcerting is a better word) is that after the first hour of looking like Kevin McAllister (giggle) in Home Alone (mouth in open “O” shape silent scream, hands to each side of face), you get 
used to it. So what if your driver is overtaking a van that is overtaking a rickshaw, and your vehicle is way over on the wrong side of the road, with no shoulder, and a truck is coming at you, overtaking a bus, overtaking a cow, in the rain. You know that somebody is going to give way (probably not the cow), just in the nick of time. Driver: “Oh, yawn, my cell phone is ringing – let me answer it.”
And what is even more mind-blowing is that yesterday was a holiday, and the traffic was “light”. Just can’t wait for today’s drive on a normal traffic day. And yup, we are passing a big truck in the rain while a bigger truck is headed right for us. I don’t know how we didn’t die, as I just closed my eyes. Did I mention we had no seat belts?
