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Bangladesh
Looking through the Yellow Pages for shipping agents in Bangladesh, you'll find hundreds. I know: I've done it.
As usual, the Yellow Pages does not give any indication of the level of naff-ness of a company, so beware. In Chittagong, anybody who has a desk, a chair, shares in a telephone, and eats fish occasionally, calls himself a shipping agent.
A chat with an American guy who rolled a similar route to me through Chittagong recently, revealed that his dealings were the exact opposite to mine.
He went through a one-desk-wonder office, spent two months in the process, had to arrange everything himself, and paid more than me by an amount that Nick Leeson would have trouble getting through in a week.
I used to a company called HOMEBOUND. They handle the DHL franchise throughout Bangladesh, and are used by the British, Australian, and US missions for shipping purposes. How much more testimony does a company need?
As with all these things, it was not without a certain amount of luck that I found Homebound. But having found them, I would most certainly use them again, and recommend them to anybody else. Especially as I could have so easily been recounting the same sorry events as the American guy. Get the contact details for Homebound in the Links section.
Using Homebound means that I have to do less typing here: they handled everything, I was a passenger.
I would still recommend that you go along at every move, attend every customs visit, be present (or better, supervising) at the lashing, and be present at the loading onto the ship. If you manage to have a drink with the ship's captain in his office on board as I did, then maybe the loading of your container will be done with more care than otherwise would be the case.
Homebound identified the agent in Singapore who would handle my import, and arranged the Carnet completion (Bangladesh export).
You must ensure that, when you leave Bangladesh (or the country from which you've shipped your vehicle) that you have both your Carent and the Bill Of Lading (BOL). The latter is the title document to your vehicle. Without this document, you cannot retrieve your vehicle from the destination port. It will have you named as both the Shipper and the Consignee. Make sure especially that you are named as the consignee, and that any payments you have made for the shipping (not the handling services, but the freight costs themselves) are correct on the BOL. Otherwise, there will be arguements about unpaid freight later.
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