Bangladesh was on my list. The keyword here is was. That’s  the past tense of is. It’s not that I don’t want to go to Bangladesh. I do. I just decided that this isn’t a good time to go to Bangladesh. The reason why is the $160 visa fee for Americans. While I’ve paid more than $160 for a visa, I’ve never paid $160 for a visa to a country where I only intended to stay somewhere between 24 and 48 hours. On this trip, my journey to Bangladesh was simply going to be a run across the border to get to see Dhaka and to get an entry and an exit stamp. I had no idea that one of the poorest countries in the world was going to want me to give them $160 to get into the country. I’m glad I found out before I went too far forward with my flight reservations. I discovered the issue when I was working on my plans to get a multi-entry visa for India. What I had planned to do was to fly to Madurai, India from Colombo, Sri Lanka. I’d take in the sights in Madurai and then make my way up to Kolkata where I would catch the train to Dhaka, Bangladesh. I’d spend a day or two in Dhaka and then head back to Kolkata where I would catch a plane to Bangkok.

Sounds simple. Normally, I would show up in India and get a visa-on-arrival at the airport. But, the visa-on-arrival for India has changed. It’s actually gotten a lot better and a lot cheaper. The problem is that there are only a select group of cities in India where the new, electronic, visa-on-arrival is acceptable and Madurai, the one place I wanted to go in India this trip, was not one of that group.  Madurai is not one of India’s major centers for entry into the country. To further complicate the issue, the visa-on-arrival is no longer a multi-entry visa. I was uncertain if I could have gotten a multi-entry visa that would have let me into the country multiple times on this trip when I arrived in Madurai. Further, the Indian government now has a visa that costs $120-$150 depending on how it is obtained. All the above factors made India and Bangladesh less attractive from a cost-per-day standpoint.

When I started looking at the negative issues surrounding a trip to India and Bangladesh it seemed to me that they were really the result of my not having enough time to justify the cost. With this in mind I decided to delay my trip back to India and my first trip to Bangladesh until I had a bit more time. Plus, I felt that it would be more practical to do the trip when I could combine it with a trip to the “countries” of Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, Tibet and Kashmir, countries I have never visited. It would be much simpler to try and do Norther India with side trips to the places I have never been before. The die was cast. I book airfare from Colombo back to Kuala Lumpur and then on the Phuket, a location that had not been on my original list of places to visit but one that had always tempted me. Bangladesh and India would have to wait until next year. Or the year after, Or the year after that. Or…