I took this photo a couple of years ago at a little café near an intersection in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. When I say “café”, I mean a bamboo shelter where you could get a cup of tea, some bananas and rice before heading on the next section of the journey. And when I say “intersection”, I mean the place where the track meets the walking trail that is the main route to Boga Lake, Mount Keokradong, Sunsawng Para and numerous other villages.
Boga Lake is set into a crater. There is no river flowing in or out, but it holds a consistent water level throughout the year. We fished from the bank using the most simple of equipment - a hook on about two metres of line attached to a reed. The fish we caught were small, but the size of the fish scales on the grass indicated there were some monsters out deeper. It didn’t matter. The natural beauty and peaceful sounds of birds and frogs were reward enough.
The small town on the edge of the lake was similar to other villages in the hill districts in the south east of Bangladesh. Buildings made of wood and bamboo, some with iron roofs, informally scattered around a network of dirt paths. A collection of chooks and dogs, a few pigs. The sounds of children laughing. At the end of town was a corrugated iron building – they were fortunate to have a primary school. A row of guest houses facing the lake catered for tourists coming from Dhaka. Some of them had generators, and a few of the houses had solar panels attached to the grass roofs, but mostly the community managed without electricity as they had done for generations.
