Sylhet

Ratargul swamp forest

Ratargul is one of the few freshwater swamp forests in the world and the only one of its kind in Bangladesh — around 3,300 acres of koroch and hijol trees standing in water that rises and falls with the season.

In the monsoon, roughly June to September, the water comes up until the boats are floating among the crowns of the trees and you push through branches at head height in green half-light. In winter it drains away to a forest floor you can walk on, and the character changes completely. Both are worth seeing; only one gets photographed.

Small rowed boats take two or three people through the flooded channels, hired at the jetty. Go early, avoid Fridays and weekends when it gets genuinely crowded, and insist that your boatman does not beat the branches to flush birds for a photograph. It happens, and it does real damage in a small forest.

Jaflong and the border hills

Jaflong sits where the Dawki river comes down from Meghalaya into a wide bed of boulders. The water runs clear and cold off the hills, the Indian escarpment rises steeply on the far bank, and stone collectors work the shallows in flat wooden boats, hauling up rock by hand and by dredge.

Be honest with yourself about what this is. The riverbed has been quarried hard for years — stone extraction is the local economy — and at weekends the site fills with domestic tourists, tea stalls and boats touting for trade. On a clear winter morning with the hills sharp behind the water, it is still one of the finest settings in the country. On a grey afternoon in the middle of a crowd, it is a gravel pit with a view.

Go early, go on a weekday, and pair it with the Khasi villages at Jaintiapur or the tea gardens on the road back, which take the edge off the drive.

The city itself

In Sylhet town, the shrines of Hazrat Shahjalal and Hazrat Shahparan are the spiritual centre and busy every day of the week. Shahjalal, the fourteenth century saint credited with bringing Islam to the region, is buried under a complex of courtyards, a mosque and a tank of enormous, entirely tame catfish that pilgrims feed. It is open to visitors of any faith; dress modestly and take your shoes off at the gate.

The Ali Amjad clock tower on the bank of the Surma, the old British-era quarter, and the tea stalls around Zindabazar fill an easy afternoon. So does the food, which is the other reason to be here: Sylheti cooking leans on river fish, citrus and satkora — a knobbly local citrus cooked whole with beef — and shatkora curry is the dish to order if you see it.

The city is also the jumping-off point for the haors, the vast seasonal wetlands north and east of town, of which Tanguar is the best known.