Kara and Nate Buchanan document arriving in Bangladesh — their 97th country — after an overnight layover in Bangkok. The vlog covers sleeping in a capsule hotel, showering in an airport lounge, a ~2–2.5 hour flight to Dhaka, getting a visa on arrival, chaotic Dhaka street and traffic scenes, local foods (large rice platters, spicy dishes, naan-like bread, kebabs), and a travel-hack about booking a refundable onward flight on Orbitz to satisfy entry requirements. The tone is experiential and upbeat, highlighting surprise at traffic density and friendliness of locals.
Questions this video answers
Four years.
Their 97th country (Bangladesh).
A capsule hotel in the basement of the Bangkok airport.
Visa on arrival.
About 2 hours and 10 minutes (also referenced as ~2.5 hours).
Chapters
This is like sensory overload.
We're Kara and Nate.
We've been traveling full time for the last four years, pursuing our goal of visiting 100 countries. If you missed our last video, we are currently en route to our 97th country of Bangladesh. But the cheapest way to get there from Myanmar was with an overnight layover in the Bangkok airport. So we spent last night sleeping in a capsule hotel in the basement of the airport. And this morning we took a shower in the lounge, grabbed a free breakfast.
And now it's time to board our flight for Dhaka.
We made it.
To Hartford Shangaro International Airport. They will be 2 hours and 10 minutes.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have now landed at.
International airport for yourself, please.
Two and a half hours later, we have landed in our 97th country of Bangladesh.
All right, we got our visa on arrival, and we are officially stamped into the country. All right, nice to meet you.
We're here.
Okay, we'll go central. Dagger, this is the airport is north part of Dhaka. And I cannot tell you how long because we find several traffic signal. It may be half an hour, it may be one hour, it may be one and a half hours because this is Hakka, this is Bangladesh.
That was crazy.
The traffic here is next level. There are two things I recognize right off the bat, and that's that one, all the buses are just all scraped down the side, and it looks like they've been playing bumper cars. Also, the tuk tuks that they call CNGs here have cages around the outside of them. We were told it's for two reasons. One, safety for the passengers. Nobody reaches in and grabs anything. And two, so that the passenger doesn't get out without paying. So I guess they're locked from the inside. Okay, we just stopped for lunch.
You need with your hands too. All right. We are just diving in head first. We sat down at this table and had a bunch of food thrown in front of us. Really have no idea what any of it is. This is definitely the biggest serving of rice I've ever seen for two people. We also got looks like chicken, beef, veggies, and then some kind of balls, Veg balls.
Wow.
There's a lot going on in here. I think it might be potato based, but it has some major spices, like a pun. I'm just like. My tongue is just so. It's like almost too much. All the locals in here eating with their hands. I don't know if there's, like an art to it like in India, but I have to do some observing.
My mouth is on Fire.
I just can't believe we just walked off a plane, drove straight to a restaurant, and we're just doing it. Thank you.
We made it to our hotel. It is 3:30. We left the airport at 1:30 and stopped for a quick lunch. So not too bad. Let's go see our room. This place deserves a bathroom tour. So the vanity, pretty normal, but the toilet.
Is in the shower. There's no separation. Just one big room with a shower and a toilet. Very interesting. I feel like that makes this a.
Little easier to clean. Wash everything down the drain.
This city is crazy. We just quickly throw our stuff down our hotel room. We have about an hour of sunlight left. And we're just walking.
We literally just picked away. We have no destination. We just wanted to be on the street. And we're here.
Wow.
We're doing it.
Wow.
It's so loud. It's so crowded. And this is literally like right outside of our hotel room. But lots of smiling faces.
Hello.
Wow, look at this one.
Go, go, go. Follow, go.
With the police.
If you couldn't tell, this is one of the most densely populated cities in the entire world. I don't know if it's number one, but definitely top three.
So many clothes.
I don't know what it is about cities like this. Oh, it's just so exciting. There's so much going on in every direction. And all we have seen is kindness from people so far. Like people just walk up to us from across the road to ask us where we're from. We still haven't seen another foreigner. I also want to eat everything. Everybody's out cooking, making chai, making bread, frying chicken.
We've been telling people that Vietnam has the hardest roads in the world to cross.
They have nothing on daca. Like, usually you can piggyback on a local when you're crossing the road.
Not here.
They're running just as fast as we are. To get across the road without getting.
Hit, it's every man for himself holding back.
And it's never ending. Just constant traffic.
And I think in Vietnam or in most places, there's like one or two forms of transportation. You have like motorbikes and cars here. You have tuk tuks, cars, buses, double decker buses, motorbikes, rickshaws. Whoa. This guy. Look how many crates are on the back of this bike. I could stand at this intersection all day and be so content.
This gets even scarier at night.
Oh, don't die. No, no, no, no, no.
This was worth braving the scary nighttime traffic for. We just Got the biggest, hottest piece of fresh bread that tastes like pizza dough. They call it naan, but it's not like any naan that we've ever had, which is like good, savory, thick bread and.
Chicken kebabs. Ah, I think. Is this beef? Beef and chicken. I lied. We got a beef kebab. It's not a chicken kebab. This is chicken. This is the beef. It looks so good.
Oh, my gosh.
It is so tender. The outside is, like, crunchy and charred, but the inside is so soft, so spicy. Smells like ghulain. There's this really spicy seasoning on top. It is incredible. You use your hands, right?
It's like a Bangladeshi burger. I'm a huge fan. This is an excellent way to end our first day in Dakota. Lens is really dirty.
Really dirty. I'm a champ. I'm a big weenie. My mouth is also on.
Okay. We just threw our stuff down in the hotel. Oh, it's bright.
Okay. We're currently panicking. We found, like, a quiet ish part of the road to sit on our phone for a minute because we just remembered that yesterday we booked a random flight to Bangkok because we couldn't check into our flight to get to Bangladesh without a departure flight, which we didn't have yet. So we just booked this random flight on Orbitz because you can cancel within 24 hours. And that's kind of our travel hack to get into a country when we don't know our future plans. All this to say it's been almost 24 hours and we haven't canceled it yet. We're trying to cancel it, but we don't have Internet.
We don't need to fly back to. We won't be flying back to Bangkok. Heading back to the hotel.
