Traffic in any Bangladeshi city is a complete chaos. There are no road rules, not even the keep left thing; it comes down to who is more brutal than the rest, and who can sound more horns per minute than the rest. Thousands of rickshaws, CNGs (autorickshaws, ie. a semi motor bike with a cage built around it), delivery wagons, motorbikes, small cars, giant fourwheel drives (90% of the time belonging to the mighty UN), rusty buses, and the occasional animal all share the road - the main boulivards are actually very wide, but when they are all here scrambling to get through from A to B, it is impossible to see where you are going. All this aculmunates to dusty and fume filled air and an earful of screaching beeping, swearing, screaming and the odd crash here and there.
Old beaten buses, mainly imported from other countries after their use-by-date has been long gone hoon the streets, with their paint scratched from hundreds of near accidents and their metal frames rusting away into a dark orange. Passengers young and old are packed inside like chickens in a cage and spilling out the side windows and side doors with a few hangers on at the back or half way up the roof resembling a circus human pyramid stunt. Imagine my self-consciouness when a bus and a half load of people like this all starring at you with their wide open eyes the deep black against the pale white bewildered and possibly petrified.
The personality of your rickshaw or CNG (autorickshaw) driver really shows when you put your life in their hands. There's the timid young guys who always get bullied into giving way to others whenever they push in and never argue with you about the price at the end of the ride, and then there's the (I'm sure he was) retired fighter pilot types who looks pretty harmless on the outside but will shoot through any traffic jam in record speed just so that he doesn't have to put up with the touts hassling us trying to sell anything from popcorn to colouring-in books to the latest pirated Harry Potter book (not that JK Rowling needs more money anyway). Who needs Disneyland when you can take a ride in Dhaka?
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