Seven layers of sunshine and sweat

Srimongol sounded great - tea plantations, coolness and peace. It definitely wasn't cooler, but it was pretty. We were scooped up straight away by Khaled, a pint-sized, cowboy-hat-toting camp little fellow with an endearing stammer. Khaled runs a tour company which once owned a map, but lost it. We were allowed an afternoon on our own once we'd promised to spend the following day being shown around by him.

We went off on pedal bikes in search of the world-famous seven layer tea - I read about it in a tea magazine in Nottingham, no less - it's a top-secret family recipe only to be supped in Srimongol. It was delicious - each layer had a different taste, from ginger to lemon to extreme syrupy goo. Rejuvinated, we cycled through rice fields to be greeted by shy women and a mob of children, who shoved goats into our arms and chased us down the fields as we departed.

The next morning we set off with K-k-k-khaled in a rickshaw. Our first stop was a rainforest where pungent gibbons swung from trees and terrifying spiders the size of my hand strung webs across the path. We drove through lemon, pineapple and tea gardens and visited a picturesque lake full of l-l-l-lotus flowers. It was lovely but all too much for three weaklings from blustery grey isles - we were collapsed in our beds with chronic heat exhaustion by 4pm. Yikes.

Leaving Srimongol was pretty funny. We sat on the train platform with our bags to wait, and were soon surrounded by a circle of gawping faces, a crowd three deep. They just didn't know what to make of us. It would have been fine if the crowd hadn't been slowly increasing the temperature to about 50 degrees, but thankfully the station manager rescued us. He plonked us in his office behind his board of nonsensical flashing lights, sneered at our third-class tickets then made sure we were upgraded to a nice private carriage on the train. That barely stemmed the stares - cheeky little faces kept peeping through the millimetre of gap in the door, while some sneaksters just hauled it back to take pictures of us. There are a lot of sweaty mobile phone photos of us floating around Bangladesh now, that's for sure. So this is what it's like to be famous...