It is during the month of blockades in Bangladesh when most of the roads from the country were difficult to travel for the political unrest. I don’t want to move to far from Dhaka for this reason. That’s why my traveling has halted and it is only limited inside or around Dhaka by doing bird watching or flower observation.
Today is another big day, a day of Spring. The winter has just passed but still the chilling feeling is available at the morning and evening. But the day is still hot like typical Bangladeshi spring. This time I have made a crazy plan. Walking from Dhaka towards Rupganj (রূপগঞ্জ) and return back to Dhaka from there by walking again. See, the road blockaded are not a big deal for us!
We have started our walking from the Trimohoni that is near to Dhaka. The walking was through the less dense village road, not surrounded by too many houses around. Farmers have just planted the paddy on their field and that looks a vast green field. As we were progressing the heat was increasing accordingly. The road was slightly parallel with the canal but wasn’t visible always for the trees and houses.
At one stage the canal has joined with the river Balu (বালু নদী) that is probably the boundary between the Narayanganj (নারায়ানগঞ্জ) and Dhaka (ঢাকা). It is not a busy area and not too many people cross the river around that place. So there was only one boat and that helped us to cross the river. The water was too much black like other rivers around Dhaka.
I thought there would be a walking road at the other side of the river. But in fact there wasn’t any. It was only the farmer’s cultivated fields around with various type of seasonal crops (i.e. radish, cauliflower, broccoli, etc). We had to walk through the border of the fields and those were too much narrow sometimes.
During this walking we have seen lot of farmers were working for different purposes around the fields. Some of them were working alone, and few were working in a group. It is so near from the Dhaka, but still giving us the feeling of a raw village with all the properties. There were lot of common birds like Starling, Black drongo, and Sparrow around the fields.
After having a reasonable amount of walking through the fields we have finally found a road for walking. Amid of the road we have found a lot of sparrow like birds were flying around and we have almost ignored them. But the behavior of the birds were different than the regular sparrows. So we have stopped walking and found that they were not sparrow, but the Baya weaver birds (বাবুই পাখি). Most of the weaver birds were female and only found one there male (identified by the yellow breeding plumage on head). But that was only for few seconds and couldn’t take any photo of that!
Initially the roads were dusty specially for dry spring, but later the condition has improved. This time the road was having lot of trees at both sides and providing us a nice shed. Lot of small birds were chirping from those trees which were packed with green leafs. It was very difficult to locate the birds. So we gave up and enjoyed the calls from the birds. The call of the Common Iora bird was very interesting as it was calling like fotik-jol fotik-jol continuously. And for your information, the name of the bird in Bengali is Forik jol (ফটিক জল).
During our walking, we have found a small bazaar on our way. It was around the mid day and we have given a pause on a small stall and had some snacks. After that we have started walking again. This time the beauty of the road was even more than previous. It was slightly straight line like road with lot of greens around. The road wasn’t crowded with too many vehicles either. During this walking we have found lot of Indian pond heron, Little egret, Long tailed shrike, etc common birds.
Despite of the heat, we were still enjoying the walking for the natural beauty around. Our walking ends when we have reached at the bank of the great Shitalakkha river (শীতলক্ষা নদী). We have crossed the river with the regular boats from the river bank. At the other side of the bank, it is the great Murapara Jomidar Bari. I have visited this place before in 2010. But still we have explored the old edifies.
We have found the starling with crest inside the mansion. They were in a great numbers there. We have taken few photos of those birds. After that we have reached at the back side of the mansion where there has a small pond. We were standing there and watching around. A Brahminy Kite (শঙ্খ চিল) was perched on a high branch of a tree at far sight. Few little cormorant (পানকৌড়ি) were seen too.
That area was having lot of water lands around (few for farming fish). We have found several Bronze winged jacana (জল পিপি / দল পিপি) birds were foraging over the wet lands. We didn’t expect such bird on there. Apart from the birds, there were few vegetable plants were available around. We found few were with flowers, so collected those too.
Before leaving the old Jomidar bari (জমিদার বাড়ি), we have seen a couple of Parrot, a Spotted owl, and a Small minivet (ছোট সহেলী). The orange color of the minivet was like a fire. They were 3/4 in numbers and was moving restlessly. Also the naughty kids from the village were chasing the birds with slings too. They have even caught a starling and later skinned that out and carrying that with them. I didn’t like that slaughtering!
Now it’s time to return back to Dhaka. We have decided to return back through another route. This time we have taken a rickshaw and asked him to drop us farther from there so that we could use the alternate route. We have used the rickshaw to avoid walking through the Rupganj (রূপগঞ্জ) town. Again we have crossed the river with a boat, and started walking!
After a few minutes of walking we have found a nicely designed house on the road side. On a such village like area, that kind of house was interesting. It was having very high wall around. But slightly can be seen inside through the gates. We have seen that lot of people have gathered around that house and there were also few of small mobile stalls (foods mostly) selling to the people. It was funny that people has considered that places as a time passing place (recreation spot)!
It was the day that was started closing. So we have started moving faster to reach Dhaka within the daylight. We were laughing at one stage about thinking where we going! We were going to Dhaka by having a walk? Crazy, isn’t?
This article has written by Lonely Traveler,
for the blog https://alonelytraveler.com/
