Myanmar: the land of thousands of ATMs and WIFI hotspots

Following the completion of our placements in Vietnam my friend Emily and I flew to Bangkok where we stayed at a nice hotel and went shopping and stuffed ourselves silly with icecream. We caught up with my friend Vorapong, a mate of mine from law school and Ormond College, which was lovely. I also had my hair dyed even blonder than it was in December, just because I really feel like being a bottle blonde is the right thing for me at this stage of my life.

Other than the above-mentioned activities, we spent a substantial part of our weekend trying to prepare for our 12-day trip to Myanmar. The information that we had been given about Myanmar – from friends, guidebooks (no we did NOT buy the USD 40 2-year out of date Lonely Planet), web forums etc – led us to believe that several things such as ATMs and internet would be largely unavailable to us whilst travelling around the country. As such, we were trying to prepare by collecting large amounts of cash and exchanging it all into large denomination, post-2006 greenbacks without any visible markings, creases or other damage. This was quite a pain in the arse, but we managed to figure this out in between ice cream sundae binges.

Shortly before heading to the airport I mentioned on facebook that I was about to head to Myanmar. Kyi, a friend of mine from medical school, saw this and contacted me saying that her family is in Yangon and would love to help us with some things, such as sending somebody to pick us up from the airport. This turned out to be particularly helpful, as there was not only somebody to drive us to our hotel (which is nice when you are tired and in a completely new country without any local currency available to pay for a taxi), but also Kyi’s father met us at the airport, which he really didn’t have to do, but was very kind of him. I’d told Kyi that we still needed to book our internal flights (it is impossible to do this over the internet) and her father called a travel agent as soon as we were in the car and he helped us book all of our internal transport (all up: one overnight bus, one ferry down the Irrawaddy river, 2 flights, one local bus, and one special tourist bus (it turns out we were the only foreign tourists as this was essentially a religious pilgrimage bus)).

We spent our first night in Myanmar in Yangon. We arrived quite late in the evening, but had all day the next day to look around. We managed to visit two places of interest: Sule Pagoda, and Shwedagon Pagoda. Sule Pagoda is quite impressive in its own right and, refreshingly, is not full of tourists. It was the central landmark around which massive protests were held in 1988, which adds to its interest (even though there is no information about the protests on display at the Pagoda itself). Shwedagon Pagoda is the main tourist site in Yangon, and is impressive in its scale, grandeur and preservation. Here are some photos:

Shwedagon Pagoda

That evening we caught the overnight bus up to Bagan (actually up to Nyaung U, the main town for midrange hotels in the Bagan region, as Old Bagan contains only upmarket hotels). Catching the bus was quite an experience in itself. First off, the bus station was not really in Yangon. It was a 90 minute grid-locked taxi ride from our hotel to the edge of town. Other than the fact that we were a bit concerned about missing our bus this was quite an enjoyable journey, as our taxi driver was an eccentric man who loved kitschy love songs from the 80s and 90s, and also loved a bit of an off key sing along. After boarding the bus an attendant walked around with a jar that had “raincoat” written on it and was full of small bits of folded paper. She indicated that we should each select one. Emily and I both pulled out pieces of paper saying “calendar”, as did everybody else seated around us. A few minutes later the attendant came around the bus again, this time handing extremely bulky calendars (complete with pictures of the various buses owned by the bus company) to all of the passengers who pulled out calendar, and then one raincoat to the lucky passenger who had apparently won the lucky dip.

I took a phenergan tablet as I get terribly motion sick. I actually don’t really like taking these and think that I probably need to take the paediatric dose (I have trouble metabolising many pharmaceuticals and often have to take a lower than regular dose). As such the phenergan made me quite stoned and completely incapable of doing anything other than sleeping and making a fool out of myself at midnight toilet stops. This was a problem because at about 11.55pm the bus pulled over at this desolate area of highway and we were all herded out onto the side of the road. Our bus journey was on New Year’s Eve, and we had expected the moment to pass by without ceremony, so what followed came as a great surprise. The bus attendant produced a large number of hand-held fireworks and handed one to almost everybody from the bus (she skipped me, which is probably a good thing because I clearly could not be trusted to hold explosives in my condition). She then waited until about 30 seconds before midnight and started lighting all of these fireworks. Wanting to get a good picture (an unrealistic aim seeing as my camera options were iPhone 3 (circa 2008) and iPhone 4 (circa 2010)) I walked into the middle of the circle, pretty much to the place where everybody was pointing their fireworks (luckily up into the sky, not directly at me). When they started erupting I was showered with hot embers and rapidly reconsidered my viewpoint. Later in the night, at a toilet stop somewhere in rural Myanmar at around 3am, Emily and I discovered that one of the embers had fallen onto her prescription glasses and burned a fault into the lens. We are probably quite lucky that we both got off with minor little burns, and also that the unexploded fireworks that were loaded into the luggage compartment for the remainder of the (bumpy) journey did not explode.

This girl had evidently just been burnt in the face

As an American, Emily is clearly a fan of gunpowder

We spent the following two days exploring Bagan. Bagan is situated in a bend of the Irrawaddy River and consists of 3 towns (Old Bagan, New Bagan, and Nyaung U) and thousands of historical sites. Several years ago the residents of Old Bagan were forcibly moved to the newly established New Bagan to make way for expensive tourist developments in Old Bagan. Nyaung U also seemed to be a fairly new development, created primarily for the purpose of tourism (most of the mid-range hotels including our hotel were located there). We spent our two days in Bagan exploring the ruins, which were sometimes stunningly beautiful, sometimes horribly restored, and often a little bit repetitive. On the first evening we visited Shwe San Daw pagoda for sunset at the suggestion of our driver. In theory, this was a great idea, as this pagoda is central, has multiple viewing platforms, and is ugly. So, you can get a centrally located sunset, from a high vantage point, with the relatively aesthetically unpleasing pagoda cropped out. The problem with this idea was that about 1000 other tourists had the same idea. The viewing platform at the top of the pagoda (where we had prime sunset photographing positions) became hazardously crowded. One woman was almost pushed off by some horrible man who arrived just before sunset and pushed roughly through the crowds trying to get a more favourable position for himself. The next evening we went somewhere much less crowded (I can’t remember the name) and had a much more pleasurable experience, even though the view was slightly less spectacular.

I risked my life for this photo

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I didn't risk my life for this photo

On our second day in Bagan we went to all of the non-central ruins and visited the towns New Bagan and Old Bagan (both of which I found charming in their own light: New Bagan for the fact that it had a genuinely Burmese vibe and wasn’t overrun by tourists, and Old Bagan because of its physical beauty and great desserts and WIFI that we found in the restaurant of a fancy hotel). I had insisted on visiting these more remote areas as I had seen footage of a site near Bagan in a film (Samsara) and wished to visit that specific place even though I did not know its name. Alas, we could not find this amazing place so I settled for amazing desserts instead. That evening after much searching on extremely slow internet we figured out the name of the place (Mount Popa) and the fact that it was 50km from Bagan. I was devastated to have missed it, so came up with the idea that we could do it as a day trip from Mandalay (our next destination). It was quite a long drive there from Mandalay (just under 200km) but the roads in Myanmar, at least in the central plains region, are now excellent, so we had a lovely day trip there. Mount Popa is not actually a Buddhist site but rather a Nat (spiritual) site of more ancient tradition than Buddhism.

Emily in Bagan

Mount Popa

When planning our trip we had decided to spend a day catching a ferry down the Irrawaddy River. I’ve always wanted to visit the Irrawaddy River and thought that catching a ferry would be an interesting experience and also a welcome break from structured sightseeing. The ferry departed at 5am and to my disappointment was entirely set up for tourists. I thoroughly enjoyed this day however, apart from some time that I spent locked in the ferry toilet (getting locked in public toilets is a recurrent problem of mine that I just don’t understand the aetiology of) and when the stoner who was in charge of our lunch orders got my order wrong (out of the two options). It was freezing cold when we boarded the ferry, until about lunchtime, so Emily and I sat wrapped up in my sleeping bag except for a brief moment when I decided to get sunrise photos. I spent the day reading most of the new Bridget Jones novel and just watching the passing banks.

We had two days in Mandalay, the first of which we spent on our day trip to Mount Popa and also visiting U-Bein Bridge for a stunning sunset. This is an old teak bridge, part of which collapsed a few years ago and was replaced by an ugly concrete replica that bears no resemblance to the rest of the bridge. I have seen photos of this bridge from around 8 years ago that showed a bridge with a smattering of robed monks walking across it. Unfortunately there are now so many tourists (probably part of the reason why the bridge collapsed, that and the rotted out posts) that it’s hard to get a good “monk on bridge” shot. Here’s the best I managed:

We hired a small boat for about half an hour for sunset. The price that we agreed on with the guy who was paddling the boat was 6000 kyat (about USD 6), however then he found another tourist who was also looking for a boat and what resulted was a big argument about the price (he still wanted to charge the two of us 6000 and then charge the third guy an initial 3000 kyat, despite the original price being 6000 for the two of us privately in the boat) with him ultimately prevailing as he was the last remaining boat and we really wanted to see the sunset from the boat (it turns out that persistent time wasting bargaining until you’re the only option for the other person is a great strategy, that I have now adopted myself with taxis). The sunset was spectacular, but the extra passenger kind of detracted from the whole experience by virtue of the fact that he clearly did not understand boats and the simple fact that you cannot just stand up and attempt to walk around in a 3-person boat without seriously destabilising the whole thing.

Sunset at U-Bein Bridge

On the second day in Mandalay I was bedridden with pretty bad food poisoning. I won’t go into this in any more detail because nobody wants to read that.

After Mandalay we flew to Heho and from there drove to Inle Lake. Inle Lake was my favourite place in Myanmar. We had 2 ½ days at Inle Lake, the first half day we spent sleeping (Emily was exhausted and I was still quite unwell). On our second day we did a lake tour on a speedboat. When we booked this tour we were quite specific about wanting to see the southern part of the lake including In Dein, and not wanting to be taken to a bunch of shops. We’d done our research (Emily had done our research) and people were writing that lake tours had become a tourist trap with the main itineraries being “factories” where you are given a cursory tour of the working area and then paraded through a showroom where you are subjected to the hard sell. Despite the clear itinerary that we were told when we booked the tour, we were nonetheless subjected to this northern lake shopping tour. When we raised this with our guide he wanted to double the price of the tour in order to take us to the southern lake (an offer that we refused). Nevertheless, we had a great day and saw some beautiful scenery.

On our second day in the Inle Lake area we spent the morning chilling out, receiving the worst imaginable head massages (it was so bad I almost started laughing) and then that afternoon hiring bikes and riding to a local winery called the Red Mountain Winery. I actually hadn’t ridden a bike (other than an exercise bike at the gym) in almost 10 years, so I was extremely rusty and kept getting off to push my bike whenever any traffic approached. The winery was lovely. Here’s a picture. That evening we flew back to Yangon.

Completely natural and unposed sunset photo that I didn't have to pay money for 

In Dien

Village on Inle Lake

From Yangon we then did an overnight trip to the Golden Rock at Kyaiktiyo. Despite the fact that this is listed as a tourist attraction in Yangon on TripAdvisor, it is actually a lot of hard work to get there, and, in my view, not possible as a day trip unless you hire a private car and have a really long day. We caught a 4-hour public bus to the bottom of the mountain range where the rock is located. This was quite pleasant apart from the absolute lack of toilet stops and the fact that the girl sitting across the aisle from us vomited all over the aisle 2 hours into the journey. From the town at the bottom of the mountains (Kyaiktiyo) the transport situation became really interesting. The only, and I mean only, transport option up the mountain were these refurbished dump trucks. The big trays on the back, originally designed to carry loads of rubble and then mechanically tip those loads out, had been converted to hold lots of very small people. Seven “benches” (planks of wood) had been erected, and the man managing passengers insisted that we sit 6 people across. The problem was that Emily and I were significantly too large for this and the 6^th person in our row (an extremely malnourished man) was forced to squeeze into the 10cm between my greater trochanter and the edge of the truck. Effectively, he was sitting on my lap, which was not a problem in terms of weight (there was no way he weighed more than about 35kg, I think he was cachexic) but it was nonetheless extremely awkward and uncomfortable. We had initially tried to purchase tickets in the front with the driver but were told definitively that we had to ride in the back (ticket price was $2.50 for the back and $3.00 for up the front. The price sign stated that these prices included life insurance, which confused us until we started the journey and began to realise that many people had probably collected this insurance pay out).

Red Mountain winery near Inle Lake

The Golden Rock

It turned out the lack of personal space in the truck was the least of our worries. The road was absolutely treacherous; by far the most dangerous road that I have ever seen, and I’ve been on lots of dodgy Cliffside roads in India and Nepal. Luckily, due to the over-crowdedness of the truck, I couldn’t see the road too well, but I could sense how dangerous the whole situation was. Up the top of the mountain we asked around for alternative transport options for the trip back down the next morning. It turned out that only these broken down 1970s trucks were licensed to do the trip and we had no option but to get on another one to head back down the mountain. This time I insisted on riding in the front carriage with the driver due to motion sickness and because I had this theory that at least up the front we had a roll cage that would protect us in the event of the truck rolling over, which I thought was quite likely as it had frequently tipped onto two wheels on the way up the mountain. Riding up front I realised just how crazy the whole situation was. The truck’s brakes kept failing, activating the emergency brakes, the road was in much worse condition (sometimes with an incline in excess of 45 degrees) than originally estimated and the driver was chewing khat, a mild hallucinogen and driving like an absolute mad man. We made it down alive and then caught the “tourist” bus back to Yangon (we were the only foreigners on the bus, it should have been called the “upper class” bus instead). I had to take another phenergan on the bus back to Yangon, so the rest of the day is a bit of a blur to me, but apparently I went to bed at 7.30pm, which is classic phenergan behaviour.

The death trap tip trucks

Some interesting observations about Myanmar:

• -       They drive on the right hand side of the road yet drive cars designed for driving on the left hand side of the road, which makes overtaking (a common practice) extremely dangerous
• -       People are extremely friendly and welcoming
• -       Prices are extremely expensive. This would rate as the equal most expensive country that I’ve travelled to alongside Cuba in 2010 when there was still no private enterprise and there was a strictly segregated currency for foreigners
• -       One of the reasons for the high prices was the high number of tourists. Everywhere we went (except for the golden rock) was overrun with tourists. It’s clearly a new hot destination, but the problem is that tourism seems to be changing the place in a negative way (eg endless souvenir shops around tourist sites and aggressive touts). It’s also a very difficult place to travel in a flexible way. When we booked our hotels back in September (I’m a microorganiser) some places were already fully booked for January. We met several tourists who’d wanted to book as they travelled but had ended up having to choose between paying $300 a night for a luxury resort and sleeping rough
• -       There is a certain amount of excitement and anticipation about the 2015 national elections. I wish them all the best and hope that they elect some strong leaders that help the country achieve a lasting peace and prosperity.

This post is long overdue (I actually didn’t have time to write it when I was in Indonesia) but expect another one documenting my time in Indonesia shortly J