A trip to the tea capital of Bangladesh

 

A personal account of a one-day tour of Sreemangal

One of the most beautiful and fun regions of the nation is Sreemangal, a hilly region with tea farms, lemon orchards, pineapple, and rubber plantations. Tea farms cover the steep hills for kilometers in a continuously green carpet, making it the only place (apart from the Sundarbans) where it's possible to gaze around and not see a single person. You'll probably count a few days spent among its tea estates and neighboring villages and forests as some of your most valued moments in Bangladesh.

Our trip started off from Dhaka airport railway station on a train journey. Although the train was 2.5 hours late to the platform but that did little to dim out my excitement about the trip. As soon as the train arrived and I boarded the train I could feel my heart jumping out with joy. This was the first time in a very long time that I was on a trip.

The train journey took over 5 hours to reach Sreemangal. As soon as we got down on the platform, I could feel the cold breeze of the night. It was late in the night and we had a pre-arranged auto that came to pick us up from the train station. The search for a hotel room that would accommodate us to spend the night started, it wasn’t a very enthralling adventure to find a room as we got one very easily not far from the train station.

 

The next morning started off with getting breakfast at Panshi restaurant (well acclaimed among travelers). Then, we started off our day long journey with our reserved auto. First, the attraction that we reached was none other than the popular Lawachara National Park. The park was as beautiful as it has always been described in different mediums, it even has a railway line passing through it. Soon we were on our way to reach the next attraction which was a plateau among the tea gardens, the view from the top was mesmerizing and breathtaking. After getting the view and capturing a few pictures on the top of the plateau we reached a rubber garden known as Finlay rubber garden. It was my first experience with a rubber tree, I had the opportunity to see the raw rubber liquid dripping from the tree as they are being collected in a container for the very first time.

Raw rubber being collected as it drips from the tree

Our next destination for the travel itinerary was the famous Madhupur lake. It was a large lake surrounded by tea gardens on all sides. As the day proceeded, we went on the visit multiple tea estates which were the Nurjahan tea state and the National tea state it is hard to define just about how much land in Sreemangal is dedicated just to the growth of tea. The last destination in our day-long tour was the Lal mahar as the locals call it due to it having red sand, on the summit of the hill was a Hindu mandir that was very popular among people of surrounding unions.

By evening we were done visiting all the places we had on our itinerary, we went to get some locally processed tea before heading off to the resort that we had booked to stay the night at. The next day came with a very foggy morning and we were on our way to Dhaka by afternoon.

To sum it all up, Sreemangal is definitely of the top tourist destinations of the country and it rightly deserves to be, all the people that we came across during our travel were super friendly and helpful.

 

Should you require help in making up an itinerary for your own one-day tour visit Sylhet - Srimangal Tour - Authentic Experience (deshghuri.com), you may also find Srimangal one-day tour with a Local tour guide for the best experience (orientecotourism.com) helpful.