At one point, Tania had told me about going to visit this mosque that had turtles out the front. It's always hard to picture what something like this is going to be like, especially in Bangladesh. Tania didn't really have much idea of where it was though and doubted her ability to be able to get back there another time.
A couple of months later, I was actually reading the tourist info on a map of Chittagong that I have. Surprise, surprise - there was a picture and little blurb about the Bayazid Bostami Dargah, which they described as having a tank with thousands of turtles. Again, hard to picture what it was actually going to be. From this description, we'd envisaged a glass tank with heaps of little domestic-type turtles in it.
So we jumped in a CNG, the driver amazingly understood where we wanted to go and we were on our way to a busy mosque late on Friday morning. As we drove in, there were heaps of little stalls selling bags of bread cut up into little cubes, which puzzled me until later.
There was a pretty big pond out the front of the mosque, with heaps of people - both men and women - gathered on the steps. Men usually use the pond to perform their "ablutions" before they pray, so it was a bit weird seeing women there. Then we saw the first turtle... It was HUGE! At least 100 years old, in my marine-expert opinion. And they were funny-looking. They had snouts like a pig, so they could swim underwater and only have to stick up the tip of their snouts to breathe, rather than poke their whole head out. They were slimy from living in a pretty stagnant pond of water for ages, and their skin was white with a bit of slime on it. They had big claw-like nails but the weirdest thing was their necks... Carly was spot-on with her description, saying they looked like foreskins. Their heads kind of poked out and retracted back into their necks, with the skin indeed folding up on itself to look like a foreskin. Creepy.
The bags of bread could be bought for 10tk, along with a long bamboo stick to poke the bread on the end (like cooking a marshmallow on a campfire) and feed to the turtles. At one stage, there were about 6 or 7 turtles gathered at the steps to have a feed. People were also feeding them bananas, but the turtles didn't seem too keen on those. The little fish, however, swarmed to any food that was being thrown in. The pond had an unbelievably dense population of these fish that were a bit smaller than a goldfish. As far as we could see, there were thousands (even millions!) of these fish swimming in crazy patterns. They were quick little buggers, quickly flitting over to any new source of food or other disturbance on the pond's surface to check it out. I reckon this pond was a good symbolic representation of Bangladesh, actually - a few big fat turtles swimming around and eating up everything that the outsiders were giving, with this dense population of little fish left with the crumbs of the chunks of bread that were given.
The turtles weren't too greedy - they came to the steps, ate their fill and then swam off again before others would come over to get a feed. I reckon we would have seen about 20 or 30 different turtles, with no idea how many more were in there. There was also a guy (presumably an employee of the mosque - although potentially he just does this for fun) swimming around in the disgusting water of the pond, grabbing the turtles and bringing them over to the steps. Ew. Lots of people were touching the turtles and Carly even braved a quick run of the hand over one's shell. I wasn't so keen and kept my distance!
I'm embarrassingly un-knowledgeable about Muslim practices, but I think the "ablutions" involves washing out every orifice of the body before praying. So there was one guy performing his ablutions next to us (and a turtle in the water), putting the water in his mouth to wash it before spitting it out. I don't want to pass judgement on any practices that I don't understand... but (here I go)... ew. Seriously.
BTW - no photos, sorry. Carly and I decided we couldn't be bothered bringing our cameras cos that would mean bringing bags and it was too hot for that sort of shit, especially when there was every chance it would be crap. But this was one of the few things that has pleasantly exceeded my expectations in Bangladesh and we were spewing we didn't have our cameras. But I'll definitely take more visitors there in the future, so watch this space for photos.
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