Bagan

Bagan became our last destinations in Myanmar. Although we were supposed to go to Inle Lake because of Rita's food poisoning problems we run out of time. Both of us felt extremely happy though about such course of events. The 16 hour bus ride from Mandalay to Bagan was more than enough of pain and yet another to Inle Lake would have been to much. Imagine the state of the road considering that it was only 145km's from Mandalay?!

Tomek was looking forward to arriving to Bagan for one specific reason - our guide book said that Bagan has two types of food to offer - pizza and non-pizza; and pizza was supposed to resemble Italian pizza. It was more than you might possible want after a long bus ride - and this time the pizza lived up to its promises. He was delighted. The following two days in Bagan we concentrated on eating things that would not make us sick. The thought that in a couple of days we will be in London with all its goodies made every single day quite a pain. We had enough of rice, watching out for getting sick and the heat - we just dreamed about 'summer' in London. It is definitely much harder to survive in tough conditions once you know when you will move on to the less severe ones.

Bagan as such could compete with Angor Wat - it is as beautiful and almost completely tourist free. It was supposed to be a UNESCO world heritage site but the local government rejected cooperation. The ruins of Bagan cover an area of 16 square miles. The majority of its buildings were built in the 1000s to 1200s, during the time Bagan was the capital of the First Burmese Empire. We have spent two days visiting tens of temples in the surrounding area. Most of them in good shape and beautiful setting. The first day we hired a horse cart to look around and the second we roamed on bicycles. The sunset we have watched from one of the temples was beautiful.

The horse cart industry is by the way doing great in this place - every year there are more and more of them on the streets - literally they dominate the landscape at the moment. Obviously it says much about the development of the economy - and unfortunate lack of tourists. Bagan as such is though much better prepared to take in many more tourists - probably some years back there must have been bigger groups coming in.

All in all we took it easy in Bagan - we were mentally preparing ourselves for the last stretch of our trip in South East Asia - back by bus to Yangon (another 14h), by plane to Bangkok and then to London for a week of 'vacation'...

We both have come to the same conclusion about Myanmar - it is very much worth visiting and it is quite easy to travel around (definitely easier than in India which boasts millions of tourists every year). So if you can go there - people will be happy and you do not have to give your money to the government....Burmese people are very friendly and do not deserve to be punished even more by everyone avoiding their country (their government makes their lives hard enough). The sanctions imposed by international community take a heavy toll on the local population but we doubt that on anybody else...

Mandalay

UPDATE: Pictures are now available in our gallery!

Mandalay is over 600 km north of Yangon and totally unaffected by the cyclone. We made it as usual on an overnight bus. Although very long, the bus ride was bearable mostly I think to air conditioning and an easy going style of the driver. All in all it was a piece of cake in comparison to some of our other trips in the region.

In the morning we arrived to a bus station outside town which looks more like a town lined with houses and innumerable amount of buses run by different companies . How one makes sense of it is a mystery. In fact it is just like in Yangon where we took a taxi to the station and the taxi driver after 15 minutes of roaming around found our bus. In Myanmar we tend to book our hotels in advance and get a pick-up to the hotel - makes life easier after a long bus ride - the reason why pick-ups are readily available is very simple. Already during the ride to the hotel we learned that we were the first tourists since two months in our hotel (one of the more popular in better times). Together with our fellow co-travellers - a couple from Australia who we met on our plane from Bangkok, we have however probably started some better times as everyday since we arrived at least one person additionally checked in to our hotel.

Already the first days we ventured to climb up Mandalay Hill it became clear to us that this is the land of Pagodas. They are just ubiquitous and huge majority of them kept in very good shape (clearly supported by the junta as there are always pictures of the military visiting that particular pagoda). For the second day we had an organized full day program. We hired a mini pick-up taxi (car dating back to the sixties) and drove to visit three former capitals of Myanmar which are in the vicinity of Mandalay. This country has always had a tendency to shift capitals (sometimes as often as every 10 years) that the fact of moving the current capital by the ruling junta to Naypyitaw should not come as a surprise. Though I have never heard of a capital out of reach to anybody as is the case here...

In order to get Inwe (one of the old capitals) we had to take a boat and a horse carriage. There was basically no other way of going around the sites. Among one of the site we visited was a very old wooden monastery in which a single lonely monk lived and was heading a small school for kids. There we learned the Burmese alphabet which for me consists of a set of smiles in different shades (very cute!). On the way back our guide took us to a place where he gives English classes. It was in fact probably a home of the students. The group was very diverse both in terms of age and advancement. In fact they did not have any language books to learn from, just their notebooks to write the phrases into. We offered to send books but the probability that they would reach them would be very small. Anyway everyone was extremely excited to converse with us and we enjoyed it and the sugar cane drink very much.

In the next days we have visited lots of other interesting places including the Manadalay Glass Palace. Although it has been restored very poorly it was amazing for us to see the pictures and main characters of the Glass Palace book by Amitav Ghosh. It was really for some reason surreal.

We have also been lucky to see the workshops were marble Buddha statues of gigantic proportions were made. In fact the artifacts were wonderful and cheap and we were tempted to buy a 150 kg marble lion but could not figure out how to get him out of the country :)

On other occasion we were taken to goldsmiths were gold is flattened into very thin sheets (by hammer by a guy who does not need a workout for his body). The sheets so thin that they glue themselves to any surface one put them onto (usually Buddha statues here). We bought some sheets since they are also very good addition to drinks.

We had also the pleasure of visiting the famous banned Moustache Brothers who spent years in prison camps for their politically incorrect performances. We met personally two of them. They still cannot perform in public but they do shows at home without costumes for foreigners. Unfortunately they did not perform for us as they were in the middle of preparations for sending rice they gathered for the cyclone Nagris survivors.

All in all we spent quite a few days here and once we were about to embark on the 14 hour boat journey to Bagan, traditionally one of us got food poisoned (there is hardly any electricity here - it is worse than in Nepal and I believe the food storage conditions are terrible). This time Rita got sick so we had to wait two days for her to recover before moving on...

Yangon

Yet, another early wake up at 4am - we have almost gotten used to it. This time we were to embark on an exciting trip - back to Bangkok airport to catch a flight to Yangon in Myanmar. We were sure that we are going to be the only passengers on the flight but to our surprise the Boeing 737 was full. Later on we have found out that nearly half of the plane was aid workers (had a special visa counter in Yangon) and the rest monks and a very few tourists. Passport control was very quick and our luggage did not get checked at all in a very modern airport building. We quickly found our pick-up guy from the hotel and drove to the hotel. There are not too many cars on the streets (by the way all Japanese from the 70'ties & 80'ties in the best case) and that the traffic is much more organized; no constant blowing of the horn or overtaking at most awkward places. The mystery of very light traffic quickly revealed itself to us - bicycles and motorbikes are forbidden in the city except for the monks and the military.

If we had ever complained about too many tourists Yangon proved to be almost tourists free. One could meet one or two persons who looked like tourists per day at best. We have criss-crossed the city several times on foot - especially the center and found it to be a little bit like India - perhaps because of the smell of Indian spices (although lots of Indian's fled Myanmar after several rounds of unrest one can still find living Indian districts). There are many other ethnic minorities in Myanmar resulting in an exciting "cocktail" of over a 100 different languages. Yangon at the present does not reflect what western media convey. The city is cleaned from befallen trees and damage caused by the storm and the streets are full of sellers selling tasty food, vegetables and fruits and whatever one sells in South East Asia. It seems that at least in Yangon there is more than enough food - in the Delta Region the situation must be much worse nevertheless this city has already the worst behind itself. We have tried excellent food in the ubiquitous tea houses around the town and also went to what was to be one of the nicest restaurants according to our guide book with reasonable prices and great local food. The place proved to have something of a typical Polish country side wedding atmosphere if you know what I mean. Except that again there was nobody except us and the food was just so so.

For the time being we cannot upload any pictures since Yahoo, Hotmail and Google are blocked by the government. Of course all the Internet cafe's go around it but it makes internet very slow and unreliable. We have lots of very nice pictures which will be showing up gradually in our gallery. In general the whole government versus society issue is kind of a mouse and cat game where the people openly criticize "the tiger" and black market exists with very little control.

Anyway going to Yangon as a tourist poses no threat - there is enough water & food of all sorts at VERY reasonable prices. People are extremely happy to see foreigners greeting them with blinks and smiles. It would be great of course if more tourists came and left their money there. Great choice for anyone who wants to escape the main stream tourism and see some stunningly different cultural heritage.

One may get more than enough of paya (pagoda in Burmese) and an overdose of stupas, but these golden gilded upside-down bell-shaped buildings do give a unique ambiance to the city. THE place to visit in Yangon is the Shwedagon Paya, built 2500 years ago (though archaeologists argue whether its origin dates to the 6th - 10th century) and is as much a landmark of Myanmar as the Eiffel Tower to Paris. It dome rises to 98 m enshrining some of Lord Buddha's hair. Depending on the day you were born you can choose one out of the shrines dedicated to the 8 days of the week (Wednesday is divided into morning and afternoon in order to overcome the dilemma of matching a 7 days week pattern). Sule Paya and Botatung Paya are the second and third mostly visited sites with more Buddha hair relics and an educative demonstration of varieties in pagoda and stupa architectural stiles.

Angkor Wat

Arriving to Siem Reap from Phnom Penh by bus was comparable to travelling in North India; on the stops you could buy deep fried spiders and crickets double the size they are in Europe - if at all they live there. On arrival rickshaw drivers almost broke the bus window to be the first choice. Luckily we organized a room from Phnom Penh with a pick-up from the bus, so we thought and let the only driver with the business card with the name of our guesthouse to take us. We did not drive long when we understood that we are victims of an obvious scam; if you do not commit for a whole day ride the following day to visit temples, the ride is not free to the guesthouse. This made it clear that we are sitting on the wrong vehicle and after some fuss we got on two motorbike taxis and arrived to our planned destination.

The same evening we went on a sunset watch trip to Prasat Trapeang Ropou and observed that the best way for us to discover the ruins will be on bicycle. Tomek came up with the idea that the following morning we should start at 4 am in order to be the first to arrive to the main temple of Angkor Wat and see it in the rising sun. After a one hour ride in pitch dark we arrived together with hoards of toursist, none on such a sporty vechicle though... Newertheless the temple was mesmerizing as the first rays of sun gave color to the ancient stones. We were among the first to enter the center piece of the temple, which was hypnotic in its silent peace. We continued our discovery on the so called "small loop", which is a 17 km circle passing by the most important ruins: Angkor Thom with the Bayon, the Terrace of Elephants, Ta Prohm. By 1 pm we felt totally wretced and decided to pedal back to Siem Reap.

On the next day we rented a moto rickshaw to visit Kbal Spean and Banteay Srei, a good 60 km return trip mostly on dirt roads full of red dust - and of course some tropical rain. To visit the Thousand Lingas, the phallic symbols of fertility in Kbal Spean you should trek an hour and a half in the jungle. The Citadel of Women, Banteay Srey on the contrary is a very easy access. Though it is small and the last temple we visited it could still surprise us with its distinctive carvings and structure.

To finish our trip we settled in a Sports Bar to watch how the Poles perform in F1 and the European Soccer Championship. At 3.30 in the morning we had a romantic walk to our guesthouse to have a blink of sleep before we depart to Bangkok at 7 am. With the hope to have a tight sleep on the bus we placed our hopes in the driver - not for long. After 1 hour of sitting on top of our backpacks in a totally crowded and hot bus the driver entered to a shouting competition with one of the passengers and started the engine only after making sure he is expelled from the trip. The road is less thatn 200 km to the border, but it took us 6 hours, just to learn that we are not going to make it through the border. Visa on arrival is not available contrary to the information we gathered previously, so the devil was laughing at us having another 6 hours in front of us back to Siem Reap. Besides the obvious pain we felt about this mess we were about to miss our next day flight from Bangkok to Myanmar. I will not enter into all the details of finding the way to fly to Bangkok, but for certain if one thing goes wrong there will be as many following it as it is possible. Only the departure tax we had to pay per person at the airport was double the price we paid for the bus to Bangkok, but the airport in Siem Reap is tip top - no doubt. Arriving to Bangkok, rushing through our To Do list gave us another 4 hours to sleep before we headed back to the airport to fly out to Yangon.

Southern Coast

We left Phnom Penh on a motorbike though we were really reluctant how is it going to be to ride a dirt road motorbike (no others seem to be available for rental). Since neither me nor Rita has ever sat on such a bike we had our concerns (mentioning the fact that we do not have a driving license for motorbikes should excuse our shyness). The rental agency guy sensed our reluctance and offered to teach us how to ride a bike in case we do not know how to do it - no problem just pay for the bike and off you go :) - it does not make you feel to confident about the skills of other participants of the traffic...

Anyway we decided to make life a bit more challenging and rented one bike instead of two - I became the lucky one to be the first to get the responsibility for acting us the "driver". We have not made more than 500 meters when on the first traffic lights Rita made me cross the red lights since as she put it "all the locals do it so I should not obstruct the traffic flow". A moment later we got stopped by the police and my driving license (for the car of course) got confiscated and a certain ransom was communicated to me...

Our trip all in all was a success - we enjoyed the south as it somehow felt it was just left to us (pretty much everyone else visiting Cambodia must have traveled to the north I guess). We have visited sleepy Kampot where we found the house in which my father used to live, forgotten Kep where we met the first real Hungarian during our trip (who has just opened a great Hungarian restaurant called Eldorado), went to Bokor Hill where we saw destruction and beauty of the nature in one and chilled on the beaches of premier beach resort in Cambodia - Sihanoukville. All in the span of five days.


There was something fascinating in each of the places - Kep because it could be a very successful resort town but there are so far no tourists there. We also had a great dinner there - eat a huge crab - our business with eating this beast took us two hours.

Bokor Hill due to the destruction of what used to be a beautiful hill station with a casino and a hilarious road there and in the end Sihanoukville with great accommodation and nice beaches. To Sihanoukville I arrived sitting on the back of the bike - Rita made the whole 150km trip. My task included finding a bungalow for us - so we safely arrived, I went into a hotel to check our place while Rita stayed sitting on bike - when I came back I found her right at the moment when she was falling together with the bike - Murphy's law I guess :) - she is alright so no needs to worry...

The road to the south was much more easy that we suspected - although we got lost since there are not too many signs on the roads we also managed to see beautiful country side, establish that 4-5pm is not the best time to be on the road since the cows, buffaloes and kids from school are heading home...and practice riding in torrential rain (you do not get cold since the temperature anyway does not drop below 30 degrees).

We got back to Phnom Penh where we made a fatal mistake as to what concerns visa issues...

Phnom Penh

Arriving to the capital of Cambodia was a little bit like landing in Bangkok; another surprise, especially considering what nightmare this country went through not that long ago. First of all it is huge, you can drive for hours and still not reach your destination and it is very nicely resaturated. Funny though that instead of names the streets have numbers, but actually I liked it this way; very logical and almost totally apolitical - save the Mao Tse Tung Boulevard :) To be fair, the country is very far from anything like communism, the competition created an excellent value for your money, much less "copy pasting" in business and no price cartels at all, unlike in Laos. So we like the place.

After squatting at the budget travelers hot spot on Street Nr. 93 at the Lake Side we started out with the Royal Palace, which is a real beauty. Nicely renovated with manicured gardens it is the sister of the one in Bangkok, but somehow more serene and peaceful - maybe because there are hardly any tourists. The next day we rented a motorbike and immersed in the local traffic, which bears the same traffic characteristics as any of the other SEA countries we visited so far; if I will not lose my sense of humor I will compose a post about the "Alternative Traffic Rules in Asia".

But anyway, the driving was not more chaotic than before, except that we did not have a real map and the signs are really really poor. After driving an extra 10 km finally we found the Museum of Killing Fields, which is a terribly sad memorial of something similar to what happened in Europe under the Nazis. Except that this outrageous mass crime was committed within one nation, not even between ethnic groups, but grotesquely the "New People" against the "Old People". (Old People stood for everybody without discrimination who lived in a city and/or was considered part of the intelligentsia, the New People meant everybody, who lived in the countryside and was basically illiterate) The referred museum is built on mass graves, prison and forced labor camp - one out of hundreds throughout the the country with a tower like pagoda filled with the bones and clothes of the deceased. If you want to know more about the Red Khmers and this part of Cambodia's history, there is a museum in Phnom Penh about the period in a former school, which the Red Khmers used as their torturing and exterminating institution. We rather choose to see a documentary film, "Death and Rebirth" in the Meta House made by former East German film makers in the beginning of 80's - not totally free from socialist propaganda, but still extremely informative about the happenings in Cambodia under the Pol Pot regime.

Though before you rush to participate a program in Meta House I would like to warn you, that there is a probability, that something similar will happen to you, too: half an hour after the advertised starting time one of the organizers stood up to announce, that she is terribly sorry, but she does not have the film. A second later it turnes out that the film in question supposed to be shot the day before; after some confusion it turns out that the organizer does not know what the day is and finally relieves everybody with a cute laughter that everything is all right, she thought it was Sunday, though it is Saturday, the film will be soon shown. Until another half an hour passes and she makes another announcement that no one finds the DVD in question. By this time half the audience leaves, luckily we entertain ourselves respectively with a gin and tonic and beer, undisturbed by these events and about two hours later to our greatest surprise the planned film began.... Now had I done something so silly it would not have been a great surprise, but this was a lady in her late 60's, obviously the director of the institution. :)

As our last program in Phnom Penh we visited the former Russian Market, where some years ago you could buy hash or for the more aggressive a Kalashnikov. Today the range of choice is equally wide, though illegal in a different, somewhat more sophisticated way: you can acquire any of the latest softwares for as much as 2 USD and on the next stand you can choose from pig's ear and Khmer antiques....

Mekong Delta

We have learned a bit on our past adventures with crossing the borders (remember our crossing to Nepal and horse carriage?) and decided to buy two day tour from Saigon to Phnom Pehn through the Mekong Delta. It cost next to nothing and we assumed it will save us a lot of hassle.

The first day of our trip was relatively easy going - we were on the bus most of the time but also visited a floating market where you can buy wholesale and retail quantities of fruits and vegetables straight from the boats...in other words you are on a boat in the middle of the river and trade with other boats also floating in the middle of the river. We have also seen how all kinds of coconut candies are made, sort of popcorn from rice in local villages etc.

We spent the night in a rather grim town next to the Cambodian border, Chou Doc - the next day we had a very early wake-up and right after a light breakfast were taken to a boat as we were to arrive to Phnom Pehn by boat. Obviously not on a luxurious Caribbean line cruiser but on something but floats. On the way we visited very interesting floating fish farms - houses under which fish are being held so to say and a Cham minority village where Muslim population lives. Almost each of those houses had a satellite TV although otherwise they were very poor. As we have learned the satellite TV's are being subsidized by the Vietnamese government as a contraceptive. There are two reasons for it - people watch TV instead of having sex and the second that TV takes space so on small boats there is less space for kids...Supposedly it is effective.

Now, the trip was supposed to be quite smooth and fast - it did prove smooth but definitely not fast. We spend four hours on the first boat cruising pleasurably through the Mekong Delta - it was great although the sun was really strong. We then arrived on the boarder in a middle of nowhere, had lunch and crossed it on foot. On the Cambodian side another boat was waiting for us - we assumed that it will be a quick ride but it took another 3 hours plus around two hours with a bus to our final destination in Phnom Pehn. During the second boat trip at some point the air stopped moving and it became so hot we could barely stand it - of course right the movement we were to disembark it started to rain...

Phnom Pehn was a shock to us with lots of nice buildings, clean streets and a western look - we did not have expectations as we knew that they started from zero in the beginning of nineties. We went to the tourist ghetto for budget travellers called Lake Side were we found nice accommodation right next to lake for 4 USD (for one or two USD more you can have a room with TV). Of course, if you wish you can have a room for 200 USD as lots of new hotels have been lately constructed.

For the rest of Cambodia we decided to follow the steps of Tomek's father who was stationed in Cambodia with the United Nations in the beginning of the nineties.

Ho Chi Minh City - Saigon

Saigon is definitely the most modern and biggest city of Vietnam - it has a much more metropolitan feeling than Hanoi. From time to time it is nice to be in a big city. We have arrived to the city right in the middle of the afternoon rain showers that now became very frequent. They basically start always around 3pm and last for 1-2 hours. Of course we have arrived directly to the tourist ghetto since almost every South East Asian city has one. There you can feel a bit like at home (whether you like it or not).

In the city we decided to make our lives easier and rented one scooter to go around the city. It is kind of liberating experience but on the other hand also a bit stressful. The good thing is that once you get into the traffic it becomes much less intimidating than what it seems when you are a bystander - perhaps something like jumping into the river and let the current take you with it... To make it simple we choose a full automatic scooter :)

We were set to see a couple of landmarks in the city - though to be honest there are not too many. Saigon has nice parks, Notre Dam Cathedral (French legacy as in most bigger cities of the former French colonies) some nice pagodas especially in the China town and all the modern buildings etc. which you would expect in a 21st century city. We decided to take it easy and go to botanical gardens which turned out to be more of a zoo than the botanical garden. Nevertheless, the animals were kept in captivity under what we would call good conditions (if you can say anything like that about keeping anybody in captivity) and there was a nice variety of them. The thing that shocked me thought the most was a little rabbit sitting undisturbed in a relatively big aquarium. It would not have been anything special except that in the other corner of the aquarium there was a huge snake chilling and I guess waiting for a good moment to eat the poor black rabbit for dinner...


Anyway we have also found the best dinning experience in Vietnam so far. Perhaps even during our trip - at least from the culinary side. It was a very nice restaurant in an old villa, with cooks all around the compound preparing traditional Vietnamese dishes. Then we would be helped by the staff to get to know how to make wraps etc. Excellent service and great food and very reasonable prices. Absolutely a MUST for everyone visiting the city. This was the first place we got to know how to eat things that are sold on the street but you have no idea what to do with them. No wonder the restaurant is always full...(Quan An Ngon Restaurant- 138 Nam Ky Khoi Nghia street in District)

This would be our last destination in Vietnam - we would only see the Mekong Delta and head to Phnom Pehn.