We bought a car! At least, we think we did. It’s not here yet.
So, if you read the last post you know that driving here is a bit of a dilemma. While car shopping we had a major debate between getting the largest SUV possible – more intimidating, which helps force your way through the traffic – and getting something a little smaller that could squeeze through the crowd.
We initially thought that an SUV would be important for all that back-country off-roading we have planned for the weekends. However, so far we’ve been pleasantly surprised to discover that the roads in Bangladesh are really remarkably good. On our previous trips, which took us up to six hours outside Dhaka, we have not encountered a single unpaved road, and only a few places where disrepair presented problems. In a developing country, this is really a notable achievement. For the sake of comparison, in Costa Rica I lived maybe 30 minutes from the capital, two blocks off a major highway, and my street was a dirt road. There, anytime you turned off the four-lane highways (which were not terribly numerous) you also left any semblance of concrete. Bangladesh doesn’t excel in modern, fast-moving thoroughfares, but they have a solid transportation infrastructure that has honestly exceeded my expectations.
So we decided we didn’t need an SUV. For trips outside the city, unless we really want to find the most isolated village in the most isolated corner of Bangladesh, we are pretty confident that a regular old car with normal clearance can handle just about all the roads here. Generally we think that the roads they have can get us everywhere we want to go. Again, that was really a pleasant discovery.
So with pretty decent roads the major issue is the traffic. Roads built for two lanes regularly accommodate 4 – no one is sure how, but it happens all the time. Passing on a two-lane road doesn’t mean waiting until no-one is coming, it means somehow getting all the vehicles to fit side-by-side during that split second when all three or four are zooming past each other and sharing the same narrow space of road. (One tip – pick a wide section.) In the city, as mentioned, things are usually pretty stop-and-go; traffic is a given. People measure distances in both with- and without-traffic times: “It takes maybe 15 minutes to get there without traffic; about an hour with.”
This has a couple implications for car buying, but they really come into play later on. First, almost everyone who has a car also has a driver. This seemed strange to us – I’m buying a car to drive it – but everyone has told us that the reduced stress and lowered blood pressure is well worth paying someone else to drive. So we’ll probably end up hiring a driver. This means that when buying a car, you should think more in terms of back-seat space than front – you’ll usually end up riding in the back. How strange is that?
The second implication of the terrible traffic is that all the cars have massive metal bumper-protectors on their car. They’re like big metal cages for your bumpers, both front and back. In the inevitable fender-benders they might just save you some paint. You can’t actually buy cars with these, but we’ll get them attached before we venture out onto the road here.
So how do you actually buy a car in Bangladesh? Well, you can buy from a friend who is leaving, but we couldn’t find anything we really liked that was available right now. So, you turn to Japan – tons of used cars, pretty inexpensive, and they also drive on the left side. So far, so good. How do you actually get one? Obvious – on the internet. I have to admit, it is a little strange to me that you can actually buy used cars online, just like shopping on Amazon – go to the dealer’s webpage, check out the pictures, and when you find a car you like, you simply wire them 10 grand and you get a car in the mail. Unlike Amazon, you don’t get free shipping.
Here’s the car we picked! Ours will be a wee bit older, but it is still “everything you want in a small car.”
