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.