MYANMAR

Here we go…

After a cab drive filled with detours and traffic jams, we finally got to the airport just in time. The flight to Yangon was as got as empty.
We arrived in a whole different world. It is at least 30 years behind the rest of south East Asia. The pavement is all cracked and broken up, the sewers are open, and the colonial buildings are in a severe state of deterioration and there are huge potholes. You really have to watch where you’re walking or you might vanish in the sewer.
Cars and buses are min 20-30 years old and everything on them seems to be optional. Car handles, windows… you only see old Japanese cars with cool names like Toyota Sprinter and every thinkable corona.
It is also the only country in Southeast Asia where the people still wear non western clothes. The men were longyis. (Skirts like in India) and the women put a white product (got out of wood) on their face to protect them against the sun. It makes them look like beautiful clowns


We spend our first days just walking around Yangon, changing our dollars (no ATM’s here and no possibility of getting money other then the one you brought in the country).
The Indian quarter had great food and lots of people running around but the main attraction in Yangon is the Shewedagon paya . it is a area filled with temples around a huge golden stupa. It is built on the hill in the middle of the city and it’s a very religious site.

We took a night bus to Mandalay. The city itself is nothing special. We climbed Mandalay hill in the late afternoon to watch the sunset. During the rest of the day it’s simply to hot here to do anything.

In the whole of Myanmar there is only sporadic power, sometimes a couple of hours a day. The guesthouses mostly have generators so at least there is a fan working in the room. A part from that it is quite atmospheric after the sun goes down in the cities: almost no streetlights, no houses lit, just candles.

We rented a taxi for the day to visit the ancient cities around Mandalay. Awarayra has a 1,2 km long teak footbridge that still stands strong after 200 years and Sagaing was nice too walk around. It is home to over 500 stupas and more monasteries and thousands of monks. That day I started to get sick again.
The next day we flew (as far as foreigners are allowed to go) north. The government had build a new modern airport here in the middle of nowhere, about an hour drive out Mandalay. Probably only 1/10th of the space is being used and the rest is to show off. After an hour we landed in Myitkyina. It is a very laidback town with very friendly people. You don’t see many foreigners (we saw max 30-40 during our whole month), but almost none venture this far north. So here people turned their heads when we walked by, pointed at us like we were from Mars, and waved at us the whole time. It made us feel like world-famous superstars!
The only bad thing at the time was that my fever got higher and along with it came a severe headache, joint and muscle pain and a very soar throat. It felt like dengue fever again, but I didn’t get a rash this time and my hart rate didn’t drop to 35 beats an hour like the previous time. So it could be I had bad case of the flu too. Hospitals here look more like small animal farms so I decided to sick it out. I spend to days in bed sleeping 15 hours a day in between exploring the town.
Because the water level was to low, there were no boats going southwards, so we had to take a pick up to Bhamo (200km). In theory foreigners aren’t allowed to travel overland here, but after making 10 copies of our passports and visas (which we had to hand in at various checkpoints along the way) we got a ride. It was pretty hard, no leg space and very bad roads from which some stretches are comparable with some off the worst roads in Cambodia. But the surroundings were absolute amazing, we even some working elephants in the fields (something you don’t see that often anymore). I was really happy when we reached Bhamo because I felt like shit and I had a fever over 39 degrees.

That night Laura had quite the adventure. Now, we have had had cockroaches, spiders, ants nests,… in our room before, but this story is worth telling. She woke up in the middle of the night with the feeling that something was crawling over her face. It were HUGE (longer then my middle finger) cockroaches and another sort of beetle. After she killed a handful I hung up our mozzienet so we were safe…

Early the next morning we had to catch the ferry back to Mandalay. A horse cart had to take us to the ferry landing a couple of km out of town. Sadly enough, we got the worst looking horse in Bhamo. It was so thin that it had problems to carry us through the sandy paths, so I even got out a couple of times to help pushing the cart. we booked ourselves a space on the deck between the locals for 9 $ in stead of the 128$ cabin.the whole deck was already filled with people and of course there was no comfort what so ever. You just lay on the floor. The locals were friendly as always here and they even gave us some fruit and food. The landscape we passed was amazing (as was the sunset!). As soon as the sun went down, the bugs came out. We were attacked by millions of bugs, moths, flies, beetles, mozzies… We just couldn’t sleep with all these things crawling everywhere, so again the mozzienet brought relief (and it caused laughter with the locals)! We were told it would take around 50 hours to make the Bhamo- Khata-Mandalay but we made it in 30! We had a great time on the boat but we were happy that we didn’t have to sleep another night on the deck.we westeern people have body that is not used to sleeping on the ground. you got to have great respect for the people here in south east asia. they never put on a temper during those really uncomfortable ways of travelling (especially buses)

We took a days rest in Mandalay before heading out to the east. Because you don’t see many tourists in Myanmar (low season now, too heat till end of may and monsoon coming in June) , you have a lot of contact with the ones you meet. And almost all of them were great fun being around.
We shared a taxi to Pyin u Lwin, a hill station situated at an altitude of 1000m. So it was cooler here!!
They have the most amazing horse carts I’ve ever seen: wild west look a like wagons! And as in the rest of Myanmar horse carts are not a tourist attraction, locals use them all the time.
We left the next day to take the train to Hsipaw. It was very slow, almost at a walking pace but the landscape was beautiful so. We stayed 3 nights there and filled our days with a boat trip, walking, and relaxing.

The golden hour (the hour before it gets dark) is one of my favorite times of the day. People return from the fields after a hard day of work, women and children are washing themselves in the river and women are preparing diner in the huts as the sun is setting. And guys are playing a sort of foot volley which the play in most countries here. You can witness these things in most rural parts of south East Asia but in here it was particular beautiful

We took the fast way back to Mandalay (shared taxi) as it is the place you always pass when traveling in the north. Here we first noticed that it’s monsoon time… and after 30 min of heavy rains, the streets are filled with water. But at least with the rains comes a little bit cooler weather. And unfortunately also mozzies and they really like me. Not even the crème can hold them off.

We left early the next morning to catch a local bus to Bagan (something between a minibus and normal bus in) which of course they jam full with people. It took us 8 hours to get there and it was not a pleasant ride.
Bagan is an 40 square km big area filled with over 4000 temples. Lots of them are not bigger then the average Asian hut and lots of them were badly damaged by the 1975 earthquake. But the big ones are impressive and very nice but not that good maintained. The huge advantage there was that it is an open plain, so if you climb a big temple (only on a few you are allowed to up, too bad) you have an indescribably beautiful view: 360 degrees around, just temples everywhere with the irrawaddy river and some hills as a backdrop. We rented some bicycles and road around for 2 days. There is 1 paved road that runs in an oval, and the rest are sandy paths and dirt tracks between the fields.
We were blessed with clouded weather, otherwise it gets cruelly hot here (over 40 in the shade) but the clouds also avoids having a nice sunset or rise
We saw more cows and goats then people here. We really loved the place.

At 4h30 the local bus left Bagan for Inle Lake (our last stop before heading back to Yangon). The first 5 hours were bearable but when we reached the mountains it became… well, interesting. In would take us another 6 hours to cross climb the mountains on a very small road that used to be paved 50 years ago. There were a lot of bends and steep pieces, and all of this caused a young boy to throw up (not special here, it happens all the time that people get sick on bus rides in the mountains). But this boy threw up over his brother. His face and hair was totally covered in vomit. A Swiss couple had front row seats to the whole spectacle (and especially the smell). When we stopped in Kalaw where the Swiss had to get out, they noticed that their backpacks were open and 200 USD was missing, which is a year’s salary here for most people. Their bags had been on the roof the whole with ours (be we looked them).
So the bus drivers helped them searching the boys that were sitting on top of the bus for the whole ride. The boys weren’t talking but after inspecting their bags and bodies they found other stuff from the Swiss, but not the dollars… they must have vanished. They asked them just to give the money back or tell them were it went too, that’s all the wanted, no police or military. They either did it themselves or they saw who did it because they had been sitting on the roof for the last 10 hours.
By this time it had became quite spectacle by now with a huge crowd, so without anybody asking the police and military showed up. The boys were handcuffed and taken to the station. The police doesn’t laugh with stealing and especially not if it’s from foreigners.
We saw the Swiss a couple of days later and they told us that the 16 year old boys were still in jail and were getting beaten by the cops because they didn’t tell the truth. They begged the police not to prosecute the boys but they said they would at least get a min of 6 years in jail… the Swiss felt really bad about it because nobody wanted this to happen. Based on the facts (not closing bags again, leaving stolen stuff hanging around on the roof, not jumping off after they took that kind of money…) I would say they were opportunistic firs timers whose lives are ruined now. We didn’t expect this to happen here. The people are so friendly and honest here, you can’t imagine it. If you forget something they bring it to you in stead of keeping it.

Since traveling had been hard on the system, we decided to stay near Inle lake for 5 nights. By doing so we would not be able to do some trekking around Kalaw. But then, it is the first country here we will definitely visit again (the whole coastline and the northern most part near the Indian and Chinese border were the Himalaya is) because there is so much more to see and it is just really beautiful with the most friendly people imaginable.

The Inle lake area is very nice and we spend our days reading, walking around, biking the area and taking a boat trip. We visited lots of villages on the lake which is surrounded by hills. The nice thing is that the houses are on the lake and on sandbanks or higher pieces of land, and there are no roads, just waterways. So no bicycles, motorbikes or oxcarts here. It kinda looks like if a village has just been flooded by heavy rains.. The east side of the lake was cultivated. There were huge vegetable gardens (kms long) and people sit in canoes to plant seeds, harvest,… The only negative thing was that we stopped at all the local, traditional handicrafts stuff (umbrella, cigar, weaving, silversmith,… ) with attached shops. So we really enjoyed sitting in the boat and viewing the landscape.

It was time to get back to Yangon. Laura was fed up with all the long and hard bus rides and since it was raining an hour a day for the last week, the journey downhill was going to be no joke. So she decided to take a taxi to the nearest airport and fly to Yangon.
I on the other hand endured another 20 hour bus ride. That way I could save a lot of dollars to dive ;-) and I don’t mind sitting in a bus as long as I have my music and a book.
For some parts the road was washed away and we almost got stuck in the mud a couple of time, but we made it down in once piece. Luckily I Canadian girl we met earlier was also on the bus, so at least I had someone to talk during on the breaks.

Myanmar was an amazing and humbling experience. It is one of the poorest countries I have ever been to, but the people were just amazing: laughing, waving, just genuine friendly. The less they have, the more they give. But of course they can’t talk about politics to us, it is too dangerous. Most people lack just about every material thing. The government controls everything. It is a military dictatorship and they control the economy. Every time there is some form of unrest or resistance (there were bombings the last months, which you of course almost never hear about) they shut down the universities, and like they did when we were there, shut down the main power supply. That’s why we couldn’t go on the internet the last weeks. It also controls banks, so the peoples savings can we wiped out (and have been!) when the rulers feel like. So still not many tourists come here, partly because of the international boycott against their government. But locals want us to come and you just have to try and give as little money as possible directly to the government. Only use privately owned services.


But enough politics…

So back in Bangkok now... They are making the final preparations to celebrate the 60th birthday of the king’s coronation. It is a huge thing here, they love their king. And all the main boulevards around his palace are covered with lights. It kinda looks like Christmas.

I will fly to Borneo (Malaysian part) to make my way to Semporna (getaway to SIPADAN!!) in the northeast and start diving. Laura made different plans…
Take care we’ll be in touch!!

Btw as I typing this I am listening to Pinkpop, damn I am gonna miss the festivalsummer!!!!