9 Day Heritage and Cultural Tour - "We have been fortunate enough in having the opportunity from the start of our adventures in Bangladesh in meeting Mahibur Rahman and him becoming our go-to guide. We have done three tours with him including this "9 days World Heritage tour of Bangladesh" and have never been disappointed in the least. He is very organized, itinerary meticulously planned and agreed to in advance and always felt safe and secure. The tour was very interesting based on culture and heritage of Bangladesh. Mahibur makes sure all needs are met and if not goes out of his way to ensure that they are. Even when he is under the weather, as he was during our latest trip, he made sure that our wants and needs were taken care of. We definitely would recommend this tour and him as a tour guide and have given his name to colleagues and friends. Thank you Mahibur for being not only our tour guide but becoming our friend as well."

Trip only recommended for very adventurous people. - First of all: You should generally refrain from traveling to Bangladesh until at least February 2024. Because of the election in January 2024, there were protests in November 2023 with dangerous situations and restrictions on our travel itinerary. General: We did not expect the trip to be quite so easy. Most of the journeys are made by tuktuk. Sometimes up to 70 km a day and bad roads. What we found particularly dangerous were the tuktuk and car journeys at night. Here you should definitely change the plan to avoid this. There were also no belts in the car to fasten yourself. You should also only have backpacks with you because traveling with suitcases is very arduous (you always have your luggage with you during the day)! The suitcases were almost easier to transport in the tuktuk than in a car journey. The accommodations are very simple. In Bogra, for example, the Momo Inn (5* on Google 4.5) was swapped for a motel (Parjatan Motel on Google 4.0). Considering that when booking as a couple you only need one room but pay as an individual traveler, better accommodation could be booked (some of these were very moldy, worn and had lots of insects). In general, you wonder why the trip is so expensive when you consider the prices for hotel rooms (40 euros per night) or for the 3-day cruise (with permission on the ship without AC, which was rather simpler than the other ships that were on the way, for 150 euros per person). Since you otherwise use the train (5 euros per person), public bus and tuk-tuks, the price of the trip is simply too high. The tour guide was a bit difficult to understand, and an American on the cruise also had a poor understanding of his English. There wasn't much information about the country and its people. You were also very strongly patronized about what to eat, what, where and how to take photos, etc. We personally found this exhausting. But this seems to be the general mentality in Bangladesh. Most of the time there were options to decide, although it was usually clear which was the right one and which was ultimately made. If you are OK with all of this and know what you are getting into, then it can be a really intense, authentic experience. We have certainly never been so close to the local population as we were on this trip. What really spoiled the impression in the end was that the police in Bogra gave us the choice of staying in the motel in Bogra for 2-3 days because of the protests, with an uncertain outcome. Or driving back to Rajshahi immediately because it was too dangerous in Bogra. Our tour guide told us this and said that he was also very scared, which worried us a lot. We drove 120 km at night with the driver, who had already been on the road for a total of 16 hours. At the same time, we were pressured to book flight tickets from Rajshahi to Dhaka, which we were supposed to pay for ourselves (approx. 30 euros per person). We would have preferred to have the tour guide pay for the ticket as well. We did not understand why the agency did not take care of this, especially since the costs for another transfer and a day's program were not covered. In any case, we then brought our departure forward. Our tour guide was very surprised because we had another trip to Dhaka the next day. We were very surprised by this, first they spread great fear and then everything was completely unproblematic. It also didn't fit that we were taken to the airport with a police escort. We had already experienced at the train station in Rajshahi that the situation can change quickly, just seconds after we left the station, a group of demonstrators drove into the station. It was also sad that Travel Trips, as a tour operator, no longer responded to a WhatsApp regarding the flights that we had to pay for ourselves. It didn't bother us, but just for your information, in Dhaka the tours were/should be carried out in a larger group (i.e. not a complete private trip).