Living up a tree

A Bangladeshi man with a head for heights has hit on a perfect solution to try and get a bit of peace and quiet in one of the world's most densely-populated countries.

Each day carpenter and aspiring writer Salim Hossen Gaus, aged 25, winches himself 30 metres in a precarious home-made pulley to a small wooden platform he has built at the top of a palm tree.

"I spend four to five hours minimum in the tree reading and writing, listening to the birds chirping," he said, adding his favourite authors were Shakespeare and the Nobel laureate, Bengali writer and poet Rabindranath Tagore.

"The isolation is very pleasing. I don't get any disturbance from people and no-one can distract me from my literary works," he said.

Gaus, from the south-west Jessore district, says he enjoys the tranquillity of his tree house so much he had even taken to eating meals and sleeping there sometimes.

"I feel a deep affinity with nature when I am in the tree writing poetry in the moonlight or looking at the sun rising or setting," he said.

Other villagers at first dismissed Gaus as insane but are now clamouring for their own tree-top hideaways.

"They used to call me mad but many people have become enthusiasts. Now they ask me to build the same kind of tree house for them too," he said.