Two days on the water in Bangladesh's second-largest wetland: boats, hill-backed horizons, and the reason I build businesses that run without me.
Updated 3 min read
There is a moment on the way into Tanguar Haor when the engine cuts and you notice how quiet it has become. No traffic. No notifications, because there is barely any signal. Just water in every direction and the Meghalaya hills sitting low on the horizon, close enough to look like you could row to them.
That silence is most of why I go.
Tanguar Haor sits in Sunamganj, in the northeast of Bangladesh, close to the Indian border. It is the country’s second-largest wetland, a vast seasonal floodplain that swells across an enormous area in the monsoon and shrinks back to channels and villages in the dry months.
Getting there is a proper journey. Dhaka to Sunamganj takes most of a day, then you find a boat at Tahirpur and the rest happens on the water. There is no version of this trip where you arrive quickly, and I have come to think that is a feature.
We took a boat for a couple of days and slept on it. The rhythm is simple: move, stop, swim, eat, move again. Someone cooks. Nobody is in a hurry.
The water surprised me most. In places it runs a clear blue-green you would not expect from a floodplain, especially where it sits shallow over pale stone near the hills. Elsewhere it is dark and still and enormous, and you lose any sense of which direction you came from.
Evenings are the part I would go back for. The light drops, the hills go from green to grey to a flat silhouette, and the boat’s lamps come on. Sound carries strangely across open water, you hear other boats long before you see them.
I run a business that lives entirely online. Websites, email systems, ad accounts. All of it can, in principle, demand attention at any hour, and for a while it did.
Tanguar Haor has almost no mobile signal. The first few hours of that were uncomfortable in a way I did not enjoy admitting. By the second day it had become the point.
What I took from it was practical, not philosophical: if the work cannot survive two days of me being unreachable, the work is built wrong. That is genuinely why I build what I build, sites that get found while you sleep, email flows that sell while you are at dinner. A business should fund a life, not consume it. It is easy to say that in a sales page. It is more convincing when you have tested it by disappearing onto a boat.
I have travelled to a few places since, the hills of Meghalaya, the roads of Saudi Arabia, and Tanguar Haor is still the one I describe first when people ask.
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