Day 43: Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons

I was concerned about Myanmar (which I guess I've settled into calling it) at first. Not for safety or anything, but that a week might be too long, I'd be bored and alone because how many people go to Myanmar? Turns out a decent amount. They blocked blogger there, and the internet in general was too slow for using a proxy to be anything but frustrating, so I'm updating the whole week now.

I was sitting next to an Italian guy named Marco on the plane from Bangkok, and he turned out to be going to exactly the same place I was, as was the Portuguese guy, Diogo, sitting in the row behind us. Going through customs, I saw my airport pickup guy, first time anyone's been at an airport with a sign with my name on it.

First day in Yangon, I walked a huge, four hour loop of the city. Not knowing what there was to be seen, I homed in on a giant, gold pointy thing that turned out to be the Shwedagon Pagoda. Inside was nuts, like a Buddhist theme park. It was just endless, endless Buddha statues houses in ornate gold buildings. There were people everywhere, monks, kids, people there to pray, people there to scam. The gold buildings against the blue sky looked pretty awesome.






Went out that night with the two guys from the plane, and an American we happened to run into.

Myanmar differs from a lot (i.e. all).of the other countries I've been to in that there are actually people who don't see foreigners as a walking cash machine. People would say hello without trying to sell something. Not that there weren't any, the two most common English words people seemed to know were “hello” and “money”, but it was nice to hang out with people. A bunch of guys on the side of the road invited Diogo and I to join their game. It's hard to describe, but it works basically the same way as pool, you have to use the bigger discs to knock the smaller ones into the corner holes.


The second night, Saturday, Ireland were playing Italy in a World Cup qualifying game, starting at 1.30am. We set out at 9pm with the intent of ending up somewhere we could watch it. Food was first, in some tiny place that had a TV in the corner showing King Kong (the new one) and occasionally flicking around to music videos and Futurama.

On the way to check out a place to watch the game, we ran into three guys playing football on the street. It was approaching midnight, and it was dark and everyone was barefoot, but they challenged us to a game and we said, sure, why not. An hour later, I had never sweated so much in my life, I couldn't walk and I lost my socks to mud, but we won, dammit. We searched for water and found some people hanging out on the street corner that sold us some. The lady there also directed us to a place that would show the game, and we actually ended up in a different one, but they had satellite TV and chairs (and that's about all) so we settled in.

1.20am, the power goes out. They tell us that's it, no game. We leave, and ten minutes later the lights in the street and buildings flicker back to life. We return. They're closing up a bit, there's kids putting chairs away and some old guy asleep on a table, but we park ourselves back in. Ten minutes later, the power goes out again. And came back again. And then, totally anticlimactically, they weren't showing the game anyway. Lame.

I left for Mandalay the next day. A 14 hour, overnight bus journey that actually wasn't that bad. Then I didn't do anything in Mandalay, and moved on to Bagan via another seven hours on a bus with no suspension flying over potholes, with obnoxiously loud pop music playing the entire time.

They charged $10 to get into Bagan. I'm uncomfortable just handing money over to the government, but it was that or walk back to Mandalay. They stung me with another $10 “airport tax” on leaving the country, which was a huge scam too.

Bagan was lovely though, I rented a bike and just went out into the fields of temples. I didn't see a single other tourist, and barely any people, the entire time. Mainly just people herding goats and cows. I went out onto a dirt track and ran into a family who spoke zero English, but showed me a temple building nearby that had a small, almost hidden staircase that led up onto the roof, giving me a great view of the entire area. Best temples yet, and I was in Angkor Wat last week. I guess I liked that they were just there, no people at the entrance, nobody selling books or water or pineapple, just these ancient temples with hidden stairways and giant Buddha statues. Check out my bag for a sense of scale in the picture below.






Flew back to Yangon from Bagan, no 20 hour buses, thanks. I went to the movies for the first time in months (what was the last one, Harry Potter in Japan?), to see Public Enemies. I don't know what I was expecting, but the cinema was big and modern, and showed the movie as is, in English with no subtitles and no cuts as far as I could tell. And then back to Bangkok from Yangon. India countdown sits at 9 days. I'm going to find a beach in Thailand somewhere to live by for four or five of them.