BREAKING NEWS - It's raining ships!

Sometime back (http://entersection.blogspot.com/2008/06/bangla-chronicles-day-15.html) I had blogged about how excited I was to see a ship breaking yard in Chittagong, Bangladesh. I think I had failed to mention how dangerous it is to be in a ship breaking yard and also how difficult it is to get in since they have been getting a lot of international flak on thier inhuman working and environmental conditions.

Four out of five of us that entered a ship breaking yard by sweet talking the manager, walked in with cameras in their hands. A stupid mistake! The manager immediately wanted to kick us out for bringing cameras with us and so everyone kept their cameras back in the car. I for one, had smartly placed the camera inside my pants, good thing that digital cameras are small and light. :-)



This place was a graveyard of ships from all over the world; ships were dry docked to the beach and there were people on all of these ships using hammers, saws, and metal cutting torches, tearing away each portion of the ship and selling metal scraps and other useful equipment like kitchen furnaces, lifeboats, etc. found on them. I don't need to highlight their working condition, which is generally common to find in any developing country, but I would like to describe the beach. I'm maybe used to seeing murky sea waters in Bombay, but the water here was beyond murky. It was frothing with white stuff and the beach sand was bright red (rust) in color. Definitely not the water you want to swim in.

So, as crazy as I am for action, I convinced everyone that we should take one of the boats that these people use to get to the ships. It turned out to be a truly crazy idea! We were passing between these two ships and generally watching large chunks of the ships falling into the water, when we heard a huge crackling sound like the sound of thunder ripping through the air. The back section of the ship to our right suddenly tore away and came crashing into the water. It was like watching a piece of an iceberg falling into the water. As the part sank into the water, it created a huge waves that came towards our little boat. Everyone freaked out as our boat got rocked by the waves and could have easily overturned if we were any closer to the ship. Everyone panicked and we asked our boat guy to quickly get us back to shore less any other ship pieces fell on us. True story!! Check out the video to listen to the shocked reaction.



This was truly the wildest part of our summer trip in Bangladesh. And we had our professor along with us to acknowledge how crazy Angie and me were when it came to exploring the country. LOL!