New Gallery — Neal Hendrix

Dhaka, Bangladesh is the most densely populated city on the planet. Over 10 million inhabitants packed into a crushing colorful expanse with no freeway and no metro. The most packed parts of New York City are 1/20th the population density of Dhaka. A blinding blur of color, from the rickshaws clogging the city streets, to the ancient looking wooden boats plying the waterways. Another thing about Dhaka, it smells awful. There is no escape from the smell of open sewage and massively polluted waterways. The people of Dhaka however, are absolutely beautiful. Bright flowing clothes, and beaming smiles greeted me everywhere. Everyone wanted their photo taken, and when I showed them the photos in my digital camera they wanted to pose for even more. I realized some of the kids I took photos of had probably never seen themselves like that before. They probably don’t have a mirror. Maybe at best they have seen a reflection in water or on glass, so they always lit up at the view of themselves on this foreign strangers expensive digital device. When the strange guy with the camera walked by they often grabbed their friends for a group photo, or sometimes a stray animal wandering nearby to join the photo. After walking by the same groups of kids 3 or 4 days in a row and never seeing a change of clothes, I realized most of these kids lived in these alleys and streets that were packed beyond human comprehension.

Every day in Dhaka I went down to the river where the water was packed with sketchy long distance ferries and small rowboats used as water taxis to cross the river. I’d find someone that I could hire to row me around as I shot photos of the shoreline, the people in other boats and the giant rusting hulks of ferries bound for points far away. For the boat pilot, it was a sweet deal, they would get paid for an hour or two of work and not have to hustle for passengers on either side of the river for a bit. They were happy to take a few bucks from an adventurous voyager and all of them nicely answered all of my probing questions. Once, as we were heading down the river, my boat driver told me he needed to pull over to shore to buy cigarettes and asked me to wait in the boat for a couple of minutes. He quickly returned and told me the people at the cigarette shop up the hill on the shore had never seen a “white foreigner” before and asked if I could come up and say hello. I went up the hill with him and stood proudly as he showed off his strange looking client. Laughs and smiles all around and we returned to the boat. After heading down the river for a bit, as far outside of the center of the city that I had been my captain told me that we’d have to hitch a ride back to the port where he picked me up. At first I was alarmed, but he said it was normal and he often caught a ride on a freighter heading into town. I had no idea what he meant, but at this point I trusted him and didn’t really have a choice anyway. We saw a large bulk freighter coming towards us on the river and he started to turn our small rowboat to intercept them. As they came closer he maneuvered our boat to pull alongside and quickly and crudely tied our small boat to the side of the freighter where there was a space to climb up to the deck. There were 3 or 4 crewmen on the deck, and when my captain exchanged pleasantries with the men I realized that hitching a ride on this crowded waterway was a common practice. Having a strange gringo tourist tagging along wasn’t so normal and the crewmen were baffled that this strange man with a giant digital camera was joining them on the last couple miles of their journey into the center of Dhaka. He suggested we walk to the front of the freighter where I could take better photos off the front of the ship, the only problem was to get to the front of the ship we had to walk across a weather worn rotten 2x8 piece of wood laid across the ships cargo covered with a tarp. I’ve made it this far, so I followed him across the sketchy board to the front of the ship balancing against the bobbing river waters. The ride was only 10 minutes or so, but hitching a ride saved my skipper from rowing against the current for a bit. As we entered the central Dhaka port area, we said our goodbyes to our pleasant freighter crew friends and made our way back down to our dinghy and soon back to shore and the chaos of the streets of Dhaka.

It blew me away that in a place with such distressing poverty, over population, over pollution and despair that every single person I encountered on this trip were beautiful, helpful and charming.

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