For Myisha, for pushing me to go the last hundred meter
The flight takes one night. About eight thousand kilometres. Eleven hours of old bad movies, two flight numbers and a sleepless night.
Arriving in Dhaka, I could smell where I was. The tropics announce themselves before I even see them: thick, wet vegetation mingled with exhaust, dust, and burning fuel. Life growing fast, and wearing itself down just as fast.
This time, I had a visa neatly stamped weeks before. No undecided waiting line for the visa-on-arrival, a process that can take any time between 15 minutes and 5 hours. One small certainty, one right decision that I made.
The airport is overloaded with movement: people calling, pushing carts, holding signs, negotiating space with ease. Laptop in my work bag, documents ready, I stood still for a moment, watching the flow and trying to understand the rules before stepping in. It felt chaotic. Not hostile, but just overwhelming. A familiar feeling, I had been there before.
Outside, chaos continued. Cars, buses, rickshaws, horns that sounded less like warnings and more like conversation. Someone found me and led me to a car. There is always someone to find you; it works like that. We merged into traffic that follows no lanes but ideas, opportunities for progressing. The city through the windows: concrete, colour, dust, neon, half-finished buildings, people, lots of people. I tried to take it all in, but it was too much, too fast. Vaguely familiar, yet completely chaotic.
At the hotel, doors opened into calm. Air conditioning. Polished floors. Familiar smiles. A room that could have been anywhere in the world. I unpacked my laptop, sorted documents, and tried to rest. The city waited outside, patient and indifferent to my arrival or existence.
In the following days, the pattern repeated: hotel to car, car to office, office to meetings. The neighbourhood is secure. Wealthy. For the expats and diplomats. The city beast roared outside, loud and alive, but always behind glass, always filtered. My colleagues spoke fluent English. PowerPoint slides appeared on screens. Coffee arrived in porcelain cups. We discussed strategy, timelines, indicators. Outside, the horns never stopped. Inside, the world made sense.
Everything felt chaotic, yet nothing felt truly unfamiliar.
I told people back home how intense it was. How different. How overwhelming. And in a way, that was true. But it was misleading. Despite the noise, the heat, the traffic, I was still moving inside a bubble I knew well. Airports, hotels, offices, all within a global network where the rules are shared and the language is the same.
I had travelled far in space, but not in mind. I soon realised that I had not seen anything yet.
The realisation came one morning. Same car. Same route. Same office building looming by the lake. But this time, instead of going to the office, we decided to do something more adventurous. We asked the driver to drop us in the old town; we walked towards the riverfront.
On the opposite side of the river, ships were being assembled by men moving enormous sheets of metal and hammering hulks into shape. Photo: Author
Just a few hundred metres.
The river was alive. Not calm, not postcard-perfect, but chaotic and breathing. Boats dancing on the river, engines coughed, men shouted, ropes swung. Along the narrow streets of old Dhaka, elephants lumbered past, beggars called out, and the smells of open-air kitchens, wet earth, and burning fuel thickened the air.
We climbed into a small wooden boat, driven by an old bus engine. Noisy, smelly, but powerful. It rocked under our weight, creaked with every movement, and carried us across to a completely different world.
On the far side, shipyards stretched along the banks. Men moved enormous sheets of metal, hammered hulks into shape, and built ships with nothing but muscle and fire. Hot, blazing fires burned in the open air, carefully controlled to melt propellers into their exact form. Sparks flew, mixing with smoke and sweat.
Our guide, who knew five English words, led us through alleys and workshops that surely were not covered by our travel insurance. He took us to places we should never have visited, into the raw, working guts of Dhaka.
There were moments when I was scared to death. Standing on a narrow, slippery gangway, twenty metres above solid ground, with nothing but thin slippers between me and the fall. One wrong step and it would have been over.
Of course, I survived. Otherwise, I could not write this story.
But that, too, missed the point. This was not a stunt or an exception. This was simply how people here earned their living. Every day.
Somewhere between fear, fire, noise and sweat, awe set in. A world so alive, so precise, so human, that the eight thousand kilometres of flight, the hotel rooms, the meetings, all of it suddenly felt like rehearsal.
With every step on that far riverbank, I realised how little I had truly travelled. This was the distance that mattered, the distance that transformed a number on a map into a living world.
The flight had not taken me far. Nor had the airport, the hotel, or the office. Those were small distances, carefully pampered and orchestrated. Familiar worlds transplanted into unfamiliar settings.
It was these last hundred metres that mattered.
In these few steps, I finally arrived eight thousand kilometres from home. And instead of feeling lost, I felt something better: a quiet sense of wonder.
Building ships with nothing but muscle and fire. Photo: Author
Later visits took me away from Dhaka, into small villages in the southern deltas. Again, into a world I did not know existed. Again, I travelled ten thousand mental miles in a few hours, three hundred kilometres as the crow flies, and again I realised how vast the earth really is. How much remains to be discovered and explored.
Since then, whenever I travel, I try to remember this: distance is not measured in kilometres or flight hours. The hardest journey begins only after you think you have arrived.
Sometimes, it is the last hundred metres, or a few hours in the right village, that take you the farthest from home, and the closest to understanding how vast, strange, and beautiful the world really is. It makes you humble.
Willem van Deursen is a senior integrated water resources expert and founder of Carthago Consultancy, with over 25 years of experience using modeling at the interface of hydrology, policy, and livelihoods to improve people’s lives. He can be reached at [email protected].
Send your articles for Slow Reads to [email protected]. Check out our submission guidelines for details.
