Day Trips23.8103° N 90.4125° E
01 / 03Dhaka is not an easy city to like from a taxi window. It is loud, close, and among the most densely populated places on earth, and the sights are scattered across it with several million people in between. That is precisely why a full day with someone who knows the traffic is worth more here than in most capitals. This route strings together the buildings that explain the city — Mughal, colonial, Hindu, and modernist — and ends at the water, which is what the whole place was built around in the first place.
We start early to get ahead of the traffic, at the National Parliament — Louis Kahn's last major work, and a building most architects would fly here for. Then Dhakeshwari, the national Hindu temple that gave the city its name, and Lalbagh Fort, an unfinished Mughal complex from the 1670s with a tomb at its heart. Lunch is optional and local. The afternoon belongs to Old Dhaka: mosques, churches, the bangle-makers' lane and whatever the streets happen to be doing that day. We finish at Sadarghat for sunset over the Buriganga, then drop you back at your hotel.
8:00 AM
Visit the iconic National Parliament House.
10:00 AM
Bangladesh's national Hindu temple.
11:30 AM
Mughal-era fort and gardens.
1:00 PM
Optional local restaurant stop.
2:30 PM
Explore mosques, churches, and historic streets.
5:00 PM
Sunset at the river port.
6:30 PM
Drop-off at your hotel.
from
$145/ adult
Old Dhaka · 6+ hours
A full day on foot and by car through the oldest quarter of Dhaka — the Pink Palace, the Star Mosque, the Armenian Church, the narrow lanes of Shankhari Bazaar, and the river port that has kept the city fed for four hundred years.
from$72/ adult
Reserve
Khulna Division · 3+ days
Three days aboard a boat in the largest mangrove forest on earth — a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the last stronghold of the Royal Bengal tiger, and the only way to see a landscape with no roads in it.
from$433/ adult
Reserve
