Bangladesh: The sleeping beauty

Venture beyond the steamy, compressed capital of Dhaka and you'll discover a land of ancient palaces and shining rice fields. Christian Walsh took to the road with his in-laws - who better to reveal their homeland's attractions

'This is just like home at 10 times the cost," said my wife repeat- edly, as we drove through Bali's picturesque paddy terraces. "Next year we'll make a road trip across Bangladesh. You'll see, it's just as beautiful as Bali!"

I scoffed. Having once visited Dhaka, the steamy and compressed capital of Bangladesh, I couldn't believe it was the gateway to a pastoral idyll. The following February, I was literally on the road to conversion. But this wasn't your classic road trip. My companions were not grizzled, whooping deadheads, but my parents-in-law, possibly the nicest people I've ever been related to.

Leaving Dhaka is an involuntary experience. It spits you out. Gigantic crumpled buses charge through the city's half a million rickshaws like tractors ploughing a field of garishly painted tin cans. Not yet the glorious open road and endless horizons. Instead, a windscreen permanently pushed up the backside of a snarling Tata truck, the air infused with fumes and the incessant bleating of hyperbolic horns and trilling bicycle bells.

With heart-stopping precision, our driver Babul careened through the traffic, his right thumb hammering the horn like a PlayStation, until we were ejected into the glowing rice fields of rural Bangladesh. Over the mighty Meghna River we drove, above ragged-sailed fishing boats and barges laden with fresh-baked bricks. The flat watery horizon was punctured by dozens of tiny islands - tufts of trees and earth that sheltered small villages. Come the monsoon, they would become isolated from the mainland. It was a charming scene, particularly in the late afternoon light. But it wasn't Bali. Not yet.

We were heading south- east, towards the ship-breaking port of Chittagong, where decommissioned hulks are brought to be dismantled by bare hands. Our final destination was Rangamati, a lakeside town in a hilly area close to Burma.

There are recommended tour groups that can provide a much more luxurious form of transport than being jammed into the back seat of a Toyota Corona. But as a way of getting on intimate terms with your in-laws, I couldn't fault it. I was soon grappling with key dates in Bangladesh's war of independence, a subject never far from local lips, particularly as the prime minister and the leader of the opposition constantly cash in on their association with the liberation movement to win votes.

A few miles from Dhaka we pulled off the highway on to a track that led past dusty shacks, to the semi-deserted dwellings of Sonargaon. This was once the seat of power in south Bengal. But little attempt has been made to preserve the splendid nawab palace or 16th-century mosques. Particularly evocative is a short high street of sumptuous merchants' mansions which are built in the colonial style, with wrought-iron balconies and rococco trimmings. This once wealthy quarter - which resembles a decaying Venetian boulevard - is almost overcome by jungle, and is the only evidence of Sonargaon's boom time as an exporter of fine muslin. We reflected on why so little had been done to preserve the country's heritage.

Our spirits were lifted by a short stop at the excavated seventh-century Buddhist monastery at Mainamati. We weren't the only ones in good cheer, and we were quickly reminded that it was Valentine's Day as nearly every one of the 115 monk's cells revealed a furtive couple, trying to find some privacy behind the 2ft high walls. It was all quite innocent, and the cultivated gardens chirruped with the sounds of giggling girls looking like exotic birds in lime green, turquoise and red saris, while groups of young men strutted self-consciously in smartly laundered shirts. This carefree scene suggested a generation of Bangladeshis who appear unaffected by poverty and the segregation of the sexes.

In the silky, late afternoon light we explored the country lanes north of Feni, through a serene landscape of banana trees, bamboo huts and fields glowing with the iridescent gold green of young rice shoots. There the landscape was in that perfect pitch between the cultivated and the wild, a tamed Eden. My conversion was well under way.

The next morning our drive took us close to the Bay of Bengal. Roadside shacks were piled high with pickings from the Chittagong ship-breaking yards. Forecourts were strewn with fluorescent orange life-jackets; copper portholes hung from the eaves of roofs; huge segments of machinery stood collecting dust among the fruit trees. This was recycling on a massive scale, co-ordinated flotsam from around the world - toilet seats, emergency flares, soft furnishings, and piles of delicate instruments, presumably for mapping the ocean floor and avoiding icebergs.

Heading east, we entered the border area named the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Only 20 years ago this region of forested valleys sheltered tigers and elephants. As the terrain changed for the first time on our trip, so did the look of the people, many of whom are Chakma, a tribe of Mongoloid descent.

The town of Rangamati is distributed haphazardly and prettily over islands and lagoons, on the edge of the huge Kaptai lake. We decanted from our car into a speedboat, which took us past a honeycomb of wooden houses clustered around the shore's edge. The boat thumped across choppy waters towards the shore where six bamboo huts constituted the eco resort of Peda Ting Ting.

We ate an excellent lunch of indigenous specialties - chicken baked in bamboo and grilled fish fresh from the lake - a menu that reminded us that we were far removed from the predominantly Bengali culture of the delta. Looking out across the lake, the neatly terraced hillsides fell into shimmering waters, palm trees standing like windmills on the cliff-edge. I could have been in Bali.

British Airways (0870 850 9 850; ba.com) offers return flights from London to Dhaka from around £600. The Guide Tours (00 880 2 988 6983; guidetours.com) can arrange tours of Dhaka and the surrounding area. Visitors from the UK are required to obtain a visa, which costs £40. For tourist information see bangladeshtourism.gov.bd