My experience in Myanmar was the most difficult to anticipate. Information online was often outdated and indicated there would be no ATMs, no WiFi, and that you could only arrive by air. All of that proved to be false. I was fortunate enough to have a friend who arrived in advance of my visit and told me of a hike he did to a monastery where he joined monks in watching a soccer match, who afterwards were checking out their Facebook accounts using handheld phones. It’s true, that Myanmar still has the feel of a place that has not been visited by many westerners, but the west has come to Myanmar.
The traffic from the Yangon airport was so bad that it took longer to get to my hotel than it had to fly from Bangkok, and I was starving having booked a budget airline with no meal option. After checking into the charming Mayfair inn, I inquired about where I might find something to eat. The woman made a wide gesture with her hand that seemed to indicate everywhere. It was an accurate answer for the minute I stepped out the door, there were food vendors everywhere. They were set up on crates under tarps, on top of stacked baskets and some with stoves connected to the fronts of bicycles. My favorite was the portable fondue wok, surrounded by an assortment of skewered food that people would sit around and cook their own food.
The variety of food was incredible, and almost everything I had never seen before. I enjoyed the challenge of trying to figure out what each thing was and how I would avoid the things I prefered not to try. The warm smile of a boy preparing food at one stand induced me to stop and join the locals sitting around it on brightly colored plastic chairs designed for children. As often happens when I stop at places like this, the locals quickly invited me to join them, a sense of curiosity that a westerner was about to join them crouched in a makeshift alleyway food stand. I get the sense that most westerners simply snap a photograph or miss it altogether.
I knew only two Burmese words, hello and thank you, so I ended up just pointing to the meal of another person and gestured one please. I really had no idea what was under the yellow netting he reached into with a small silver bowl, but it turned out to be pre-cooked pasta to which he also added some kind of cheese that had been grated into a pile similar to the pasta. He began adding seasonings and sauces from his other side. I was a little surprised when he began to mix the collection of ingredients with his bare hands. I could only hope that he had washed them in purified water first, but I knew that to be a false hope. He did at least have a cloth on his lap which he used to wipe his hands in between food preparation, but how clean that towell was, I could only guess.
The pasta mix and a bowl of soup were presented to me, and I dug right in. It was delicious, and I indicated so with smiles and nods to both my chef and the locals who were all looking at me with anticipation. In relief, they all smiled back and nodded their pleasure that I was enjoying my first taste of Burmese food, a meal that ended up costing me 25 cents.
I spent the rest of the afternoon walking about town and stopped in at the train station to enquire about departure times for Bagan, my next destination. I was told there was one overnight train leaving daily that took about 17 hours. This confirmed what little information I had been able to find out about trains running in Myanmar. I decided to check out my other options and walked across the street to the bus station, where I found out that they also offered overnight trips that took about 6 hours.
I’m not a fan of overnight trips on any form of transportation. Many will tell you that you that it saves money on a hotel stay and that you gain a day by traveling overnight, but I have found that I never sleep and arrive exhausted at my destination. I usually end up using that extra day trying to catch up on sleep, so I have never been sold on the idea of overnight travel. There’s also the fear that I’ll miss my stop while I’m sleeping and the constant vigilance of my belongings. Nope, I’d rather spend the day looking out the window at the scenery and arrive rested at my destination. Unfortunately, in this case, I had no choice.
I love taking trains, but everyone I had talked to, including the locals, strongly pushed the bus. They said it’s faster and smoother. The more stories I heard about the train trip, the more it sounded like an amusement park ride. People said that it bounced up and down and swayed back and forth wildly. I looked up reports online, and they all said the same including one video which showed the wheels actually leaving the track at times.
I headed back towards town going over the pros and cons of bus versus train in my head. As I crossed the bridge over the tracks, I heard the horn blow and saw the overnight train for that day beginning its journey. I looked down at the lumbering train with people’s heads sticking out the open windows and curtains blowing in the wind, and I knew I’d be taking that train tomorrow.
It was getting close to sunset, and I decided to head for the river. I’d read about a brewery on the waterfront where you could drink with the locals and watch the sunset over the lazy Ayeyarwady river. It was a challenge to find the place, and after walking back and forth along the ferry landing a couple times, I finally came upon the only place with what looked like tourists sitting around a table in white plastic chairs. I walked up to them with the enquiry, “I assume this is the place in the book?” A guy responded, “yes, in fact he’s the one who put it in the book”, pointing to the guy sitting next to him.
They invited me to join them and explained that they had been In Myanmar for several months participating in Australia’s version of the Peace Corps. As we sat drinking for the next two hours, several more joined us, and we eventually headed back to town for dinner on 19th street, apparently known for its Burmese BBQ. One of the guys went and picked an assortment of skewered meat and vegetables for the table and handed it to the waiter. Ten minutes later, our cooked kabobs were returned to the table, and we enjoyed a four dollar meal that included drinks.
I have to say, I love meeting Australians on tour. They are the friendliest, most inviting travelers I’ve met from any country. I remember my first hostel experience. I felt a bit odd as I walked out onto the roof terrace with several groups of young people sitting at tables. Being twenty years older than anyone there, I had the feel of being the new kid at school, but an Australian woman invited me to join their group and have a beer. It was a gesture that changed my life by emboldening me, going forward, to comfortably join other travelers since we’re basically all in the same boat.
As is always the case, I was craving dessert after dinner, and I was lucky enough to stumble across an ice cream place with a bunch of men dressed in traditional Muslim clothing. They invited me to sit down and asked where I was from. Usually the first thing people say when I tell them America is “Obama”. I am not sure if that is the only thing they know about America or that they like our president, but the guy who had asked me about my country responded with “Bill Clinton”. I thought this to be an odd response until the Muslim gentleman told me he had been working at a 7-11 in Los Angeles for 3 years, apparently during the Clinton administration. Funny, no one ever mentions Bush. For fun, I asked him how many times he’d been robbed. Without hesitation he said three. I commented, “America is a dangerous place.” “I know”, he said, “That’s why I moved back to Myanmar.”
I asked him if this was the Muslim neighborhood, and he said yes. I told him I had visited the only synagogue in Yangon that day, and that I found it funny that not only was it in the Muslim neighborhood but the caretakers of the building were also Muslim. He responded with, “we all get along here”. I was really enjoying my visit to the place, and even ordered a second dessert.
On my way home I was impressed that the number of food vendors had actually increased. A road that had originally been three lanes in each direction was now one with the other four being occupied by people selling and eating food. If there is one thing everyone in the world seems to have in common, it is that they love to eat. I never plan meals when traveling as I know there will always be someone serving food wherever I go, and Myanmar takes it to an extreme. By the volume of food vendors in the city, my guess is that the houses don’t even have kitchens.
The next day, I made my way to the train station. Since nobody takes the train in Myanmar, I thought it would be fine to buy my ticket the same day. I was informed, to my dread, that the sleeper class was sold out and that the best seat I could get was second class. My only consolation to myself for taking an overnight train trip was that I would at least get a sleeper so I could lie down. I know I can’t sleep sitting up, and I reconsidered the train at that moment. Unfortunately, the rest of me had committed to the trip, so I bought my second class ticket. It was half the price of the sleeper class, but I would have gladly paid the extra $6 for a decent night’s sleep. I even considered bribing someone out of their first class seat.
Things could have been worse. At least I wasn’t in third class. No matter which car you’re in, you experience the same train trip; the classes just define the amount of comfort you will have. First class, or sleeper, has nice foam cushioned seats that fully recline into a bed. Second class has thinly padded seats which don’t recline, and third class has hard wooden benches with no padding. I have no idea how the third class passengers survived the trips without a broken coccyx.
The trip was everything I’d read it to be. Once we got out of town, the train began to sway back and forth, at times so violently I was sure the train would derail. When the train wasn’t able to eject us from it that way, it began to pelt us with our luggage. Since none of us had done this trip before, we didn’t know it was necessary to strap our bags to the luggage racks overhead, and backpacks were thrown on unsuspecting passengers before a mad scramble was made by everyone to secure their belongings to the rack.
Once we’d been lulled into a sense of security, the train began to bounce up and down. We were literally thrown upwards off our seats by at least 3 inches. I was beginning to get the feel of what it would be like to be a bull rider and hoped this would not end with be thrown from the train. It was entirely possible too, as all the windows and even the doors were left wide open for the entirety of the trip. It was necessary given the heat of the Myanmar summer, but you don’t want to be close to any of these openings when the train goes into one of its convulsions.
At some point I looked at my train ticket, and there were three things that made up the total cost of the ticket. The cost for the train, the government taxes, and the last thing: life insurance. Before I got on the train, I would have laughed at this item, but now I saw its purpose.
Naturally, I didn’t sleep the whole night. In addition to the movement of the train, there must have been a pipe underneath our car that was not fully strapped to the bottom because at irregular intervals throughout the night it would slap against the floor with a huge thump. I thought to myself, “would it really be so hard to wrap a metal strap around the pipe and secure it to the train?” We did stop for an hour while they apparently fixed something on the train with what I heard was a plastic bag and some rope. It was not the pipe, however, as it began its knocking again shortly after we left the next station.
I had expected that since it was an overnight train that it would have a dining car and was a little concerned that I didn’t see one when I was waiting to board the train at the platform. Around seven o’clock, someone asked the conductor if we’d be stopping for dinner. He said soon, and we all breathed a sigh of relief. The relief was short lived however. When the train pulled into the station that was to be our dinner stop, a bunch of young vendors jumped onto the train and began an urgent push to sell food out of styrofoam containers. Wanting a better meal than that, I hopped off the train to look around but was immediately grabbed by a conductor who pushed me back towards the train that was starting to leave the platform.
In an immediate realization of what was happening, I shoved money into one of the vendors’ hands and grabbed a styrofoam container as he leaped from the train near the end of the platform. I had no idea what I’d just purchased, but I realized it would be my dinner.
Shortly after our dining stop, people began to settle in for the night. Some of the windows were closed as the night air began to cool, and over the course of the night I found that the stranger sitting next to you became your pillow and source of warmth. Nothing was said, you just found yourself leaning against them or someone’s legs stretching across to rest on your bench. By morning, the train looked like a den of puppies wrapped around each other for comfort.
Though everyone was exhausted from the night’s trip, there seemed to be a buzz of excitement as the sun rose. Windows were reopened and people began watching out the window, mesmerized, as the first rays of the morning sun made their way across the dusty plain to warm our cold cramped bodies. We sat motionlessly lest any movement let cool air into the cocoons we’d made with wraps, shawls, or blankets. This is why I had taken the train; to enjoy the countryside, feeling the wind against my face and smelling the fresh morning air over a landscape that even now seemed surreal dotted regularly with golden pagodas and ploughed by teams of oxen.
A few hours later, the train arrived at the station, and before it had even stopped, young men were jumping on to ask if we needed a taxi. You had to admire their initiative. I found a couple that was traveling to the same part of town as I, so we decided to split the cost of a cab, and after checking in at the hotel, I settled in for a nap in attempt to recover some of the sleep I’d lost on my overnight train trip.
Bagan is a sleepy town known for its hundreds of pagodas built across a flat tree strewn plane. It looks like the remnants of an ancient city. People most often try to climb one of the pagodas to catch sunrise or sunset. I opted for sunset because, well, I was too lazy to get up for sunrise. I’m sure if I showed you my pictures and asked you what time of day they were taken, you couldn’t tell the difference.
I rented an electric scooter as it seemed the most efficient way to see as much as possible in the one day that I would be there. I managed to go through two fully charged batteries throughout the day as there were several sand pockets when driving from one pagoda to the next. In fact, I got lost a couple times and found myself driving through weeds or fields of recently harvested plants. I have a feeling that this is most likely the cause of my going through batteries so quickly.
The town itself lacked the street vendors of Yangon, but being the biggest tourist attraction in Myanmar, it did have several good restaurants, including one that gave me food poisoning. I find it ironic that I have eaten at food carts positioned over sewage troughs, but the only times I’ve ever gotten violently ill have been after eating at traditional restaurants and the majority of those in the U.S. Fortunately the episode was quick, and I was up early the next morning.
At some point I decided that Myanmar was going to be a place in which I’d try as many types of transportation as possible. I don’t know what inspired this. Perhaps it’s just that Myanmar has many modes of transportation for getting from one place to another. My next journey was a ferry boat up the Ayeyarwady river to Mandalay. It certainly wasn’t more efficient than the bus at 12 hours, but it provided me with an opportunity to see the country while relaxing in a deckside chair under the warm Burmese sun.
The trip began at 4:00am. This is the time I had to get up in order to catch a taxi to the boat dock for a 5:30am departure. Naturally it was dark when the taxi dropped me off so I had to be careful as I walked down the dirt embankment to the two wooden planks I needed to balance on in order to get to the boat. Having a backpack that offset my usual center of gravity did not help the situation, but I am pleased to say I made it onto the boat without a morning dip in the river.
I’d never traveled on a boat in the dark, and it had a mysterious feel as we left the dock and began to chug upriver with a crewman upfront scanning the water in front of us with a searchlight. I was told the river was only seven feet deep for the most part, so the captain had to take care to avoid running us aground or into an unlit fishing craft.
Around sunrise, my fellow passengers rose from their chairs and headed out to the open deck to take pictures. It could not have better met my expectations of a sunrise from a ferry on a river. We passed fishing boats and colorful cargo barges as we continued upriver. You also got glimpses into the lives of the Burmese people living along the riverbanks in tiny makeshift fishing villages. Apparently, you can take an overnight cruise that stops for the night in a town along the river, but I didn’t think I could handle two full days on a boat. Still, I really enjoyed an entire day of napping, reading, and sunbathing. I decided that no matter how much cheaper the bus would have been, I’d made the right choice.
We sailed into Mandalay around sunset, the last rays of sunlight reflecting off the tops of hundreds of pagodas that dotted the city’s few hillsides. Like our embarkation, our landing took place in the dark and we again had to cross a plank to walk across the deck of a barge and up the steep steps of the landing embankment. I’d agreed to split a cab with a couple of people I met on the ferry, and we negotiated what we thought to be a good price to our hotels. That was until we saw that what we had negotiated was a seat in the the bed of a pickup truck. The trip to the hotel was only 20 minutes, so we just chalked it up as another travel story.
The next day, I rented a bike from the hotel and headed out to explore Mandalay. It turned out to be a good decision as I completely underestimated the distances between points of interest downtown. The culprit was the main palace, which was at the center of my tourist map. I have been to many palaces, and I made the assumption, that it was about the same size as those I’d visited before. As it turned out, the palace occupies four square miles in the center of the city; so a bike ride I expected to take 20 minutes took closer to an hour!
Later that afternoon, I rode about 45 minutes to a lake south of the city. I was getting bored with pagodas and decided to check out what I’d read was the longest teakwood bridge in the world. As I wove my way through potholed city streets, I finally felt like I was getting off the beaten path. I stopped at the top edge of the lake and walked my bike to the shore where I watched fisherman walking wide circles to ensnare wish within their hand woven nets. It is a very effective practice, I noticed, because on my way to the shore I passed a fisherman with a net full of squirming fish.
Continuing along the shore of the lake I made it to the bridge. By the number of tourists there, this wasn’t exactly off the beaten path, but at least it wasn’t another pagoda. I was able to leave the tourists behind by walking the entire length of the 1300 yard long bridge. Besides sheer laziness, I wondered why others hadn’t made it this far, but I did notice the supports beneath the bridge at the other end were pretty rotten, one beam completely disconnected from the piling. It was still a pretty impressive wooden structure at 200 years old.
I took photos of the bridge and the surrounding farmland being worked by teams of oxen and women in conical hats, the hazy orange horizon making the perfect background for their silhouetted shapes. Something I loved about Myanmar is that it packs in all the stereotypes you expect to see in SE Asia. If you were to travel to only one country in SE asia, Myanmar would be the place to take all of your photographs.
I watched the sunset from the shoreline and headed back to the city on my bike. The trip was made all the more exciting by the fact that I didn’t have any lights on the bike. It doesn’t seem to matter. Drivers here are always expecting to see something foreign in the road, whether it be a cow, a dog, or a bicyclist; and they simply go around, sometimes tapping their horn so you know they’re passing.
The morning of my departure from Myanmar, I took a ferry across the river to see an unfinished pagoda. At the time of its construction, it was supposed to become the largest pagoda in the world, but due to the death of the king who commissioned it, the structure is simply referred to as the largest pile of bricks in the world. At least it gained superlative status in some category.
I made it back to the hotel early enough that I decided to walk to the airport, something I’d always wanted to do, and with an evening flight, I had the time. Realistically, I figured I’d catch a local bus or motorcycle taxi, but the true motivation was avoiding the $15 taxi ride. It’s not that $15 is a lot of money, but it’s the principle of the thing. Why pay for a taxi when you can take a bus with the locals for a fraction of the price? And in Myanmar, $15 covers a lot of food.
Several minutes after I started walking, a guy on a motorcycle pulled over and asked where I was going. I told him the airport, but he didn’t seem to understand that, so I tried to indicate that he should just drive and I’d tap him when I was ready to get off. There was still no real recognition of what I asked for, but he handed me a helmet and we took off down the road. A couple times he stopped to ask people for directions, and eventually we pulled into a travel agency so he could determine where exactly I wanted to go.
The travel agent informed me that the reason the driver was confused is because the airport I was asking him to take me to was no longer used for commercial flights and that the new airport was one hour outside of town. We all agreed that riding on the back of a motorcycle for an hour was not the best way to get to the airport so I handed him a couple dollars for his efforts, and he went on his way.
The travel agent called me a cab and told me it would cost $10, but when the cab arrived she said I also needed to pay her a $2 commission for getting me the cab. This was something I was happy to do since there are so few cabs in Mandalay, you have to book your trip to the airport a couple days in advance, and I knew I was lucky to get one at the last minute. I arrived at the airport an hour later, disappointed that my way of getting to the airport had only saved me $1, but as always, it made for a good story.
I boarded the prop plane ready to leave Myanmar and was surprised when the plane pulled from the gate 30 minutes ahead of schedule. I looked back to see an almost empty plane. Of the hundred seats on the plane, only 22 were filled. I’d ridden a taxi van with more people. Myanmar is still a place to be discovered, and I was glad to finally be ahead of the curve.