Our last trip was a long journey, which started about a year ago when our friend Murad gave us the wonderful news of him getting married in Bangladesh, in his native village. He did not just invite us to his wedding, but he also asked us to be the official photographers: how could we have refused such an opportunity? Combine the two faces of Altripiani and merge them into a single story of a traditional Bengali wedding with more than 600 guests and all the typical rituals.
We immediately started to get ready: vaccines, visas, various readings and many meetings with Salewa, to be able to create a photo and video reportage for the company in Bangladesh.

Finally the day of departure arrived, we are awakened by Murad who calls us at 7 am to ask us to keep some space in our backpacks for the excess weight of his packages. He spent the whole night packing gifts for his family, the agitation for the wedding, the excitement of returning home after three long years.

Murad has been our friend for a long time, he became the chef of a renowned Venetian restaurant where he cooks excellent typical cuisine in spite of the amazement of anyone who looks out the window overlooking the kitchen and sees a team of Bengali people cooking excellent traditional Venetian dishes.
We are very happy to pursue this journey with him, we feel privileged because this time we will not have to make any effort to get in touch with the locals, the whole village already awaits us and probably this wedding and our presence will be the two events to be remember in the annals of the history of this village lost between rice fields and the water that flows from all sides.

Bangladesh, in fact, is a state of Asia where there are no real boundaries between the land and the sea. Its territory is crossed by hundreds of waterways which define its geography and people’s way of life. The country is bordered on all sides with India except for a small stretch, in the far south-east, where it borders with Myanmar. On the south it is washed by the Bay of Bengal and there are three main rivers that keep the land fertile: the Ganges, the Brahmaputra and the Meghna.
The Bengalis immediately learned to live together surrounded by water, “trapped” between the Himalayan ice that melts in the north and the Indian Ocean in constant rise in the south.
Here the water is gradually submerging one of the most densely populated areas in the world, indeed Bangladesh has a population of 169 million inhabitants of which about 20 million live in the capital city Dhaka alone, without resources and in extreme conditions in constant search for work.

The check-in line is about to end, we are the last but Murad is still not here. We begin to look around us, when here he is, with a desperate face, exhaustingly searching for the purse with all the documents inside, including the passport, lost or stolen a few minutes before.
This cannot really be happening, why does the bad luck always happen to those who least deserve it? Murad cannot remain on the ground, he must go to Bangladesh, to his family, to his mother who is waiting for him anxiously.

“What do we do now? Shall we go without him anyway? ”
“Yes, we have the job with Salewa.”
“Ok, let’s go, but I’m sure we’ll see him getting this plane with us.”
“Okay, let’s check in.”

The first cry at the boarding, the second when we realise that life is not a movie and that we will not see Murad enter the plane’s door at the last second and take his place followed by a moving and epic soundtrack.
We take off towards a big question mark and our Altripiani starts even before we get there.