Author: matt

As a man once wrote, I’m on my way to Mandalay. I’ve been forewarned that it’s one big old stinking dump, some travellers say it’s best avoided altogether in fact. Anyway, I’m flying back from there to Bangkok on Saturday, as they’ve very recently begun international operations from that airport. Previously, the only way for foreigners to enter and leave Myanmar was via Yangon airport, as all the land borders are closed to aliens. I decided against going any further “off piste” on the Burma circuit, bus travel is pretty slow and expensive to most destinations and often will set you down in the middle of the night.

I’ll spend two nights in Mandalay, working on the assumption that I can actually find a place to stay there. As I understand it, Chinese New Year is imminent and there is talk that the northern part of the country will be even busier than normal. Fingers crossed… Currently I’m at this service station en route.

The road itself has been partly well paved, then a combination of very bumpy paving and dirt. Often the road ends completely, and the bus drives down onto dry riverbeds as there are no bridges, which must make travel pretty interesting in wet season I should think. In one case, over a very wide dry river, the bus actually goes on the working rail bridge that crosses it, with the bus literally driving along the rails. There did seem to be a man at each end, controlling when vehicles are allowed on, the idea presumably being to ensure that the train isn’t coming.

The bus is very civilised, by far the best I’ve used to far in Myanmar, but they have an obvious solution for when there are not enough spare seats.

Tomorrow perhaps I will take a morning boat for a day trip to Mingun, and this afternoon, if I arrive early enough as I have been promised I should, make a cycle trip out to the longest teak bridge in the world at Amarapura.

Leaving the Golden Rock behind, I bused it to Bagan, the land of 4,000 temples in the north of the country. One leg of the “bus” journey turned out to be a 60 minute ride on the back of a motorbike, from Bago to a remote motorway intersection somewhere north of Yangon. There I waited for almost an hour whilst my driver flagged down all passing buses in the pitch black, trying to find one that went to Bagan (most would go to Mandalay). This was splendid really, we drove up the off-ramp of the motorway on the bike in the wrong direction, before parking up and hanging around on the hard shoulder.

He got a suitable bus eventually, which was due in to Bagan at 6.30am, but actually arrived at 3am, God knows how as he wasn’t going that fast really. I get turfed off the bus in the market place of Nyaung U, I was the only traveller on this bus, wondering what to do next when I noticed a little restaurant that was open and full of a few locals. They also had two large flat screen TVs, one showing footie and one cricket, with the commentary in English. I got some excellent food for under 50p and decided to sit it out until morning, despite the fact that it was a little chilly, temperatures in Bagan actually drop as low as 16C at night. I made a new friend, sat on my pack

you can see him again here in the centre of the picture.

He is currently on my lap, giving me a little warmth.

Time has passed, and a tout came by at 5am and I decided to jump in his car and check out his guesthouse, especially since the power failed about 4am and the town is in absolute pitch darkness. It did me for the rest of the night before I moved to an excellent place nearby the next day. Nyaung U is a settlement within Bagan where the backpackers hang out, it’s noticeably more touristy than the rest of the country, with plenty of tourist-oriented restaurants and travel agencies and stuff. The place had a wonderful vibe all round, really. From my breakfast table I have a view of this temple, seen in the rising sun here

I hired a bike and went scooting around all the temples, which are quite literally littered all over the landscape. I never did find out why there are so many, it is almost as if each local family had their own, and there was a “my temple’s bigger than yours…” game going on.

On the first day I met Debs, a British nurse, one of the few Brits I’ve met so far actually on this trip. Bizarrely, she was born in Truro, which is my home town in Cornwall. A few beers with her, followed by some wobbly cycling home and then dinner and more beer saw a late start the next morning, but there was still time to check some more temples before meeting Idaho Dave, who turned out to be good for another skinful the following night. Sometimes beers are delivered with cigarettes. They’re not complimentary though.

A working vehicle passes by in Old Bagan. Why bother with a bonnet, wings or doors and the like, when all that is really needed is an engine and some wheels?

A large marketplace is right outside the Ananda Pahto, one of the larger and best preserved of Bagan’s temples. This stall appears to be the Burmese version of screwfix

There’s only so many temples one can take in a sitting, so I will be heading off to Mandalay, which will be my last major stop in Myanmar

It feels like it’s been a while – the infrastructure here is very temperamental, power failures typically occur a few times each day, and the internet connections are up and down like yo-yos. Anyway, from a rather pleasant lunchtime garden halfway between Old Bagan and Nyuang U I’m having a go at writing as I eat fruit, for the second time today (which is some achievement, as anyone who knows me well enough will know) So, on arrival to Yangon I arrived at my guesthouse to find I actually did have a reservation, which astounded me. A class establishment with a room with a door and bed and everything. No windows or bathroom or anything of course, but who needs such luxuries? In fairness, having no window was probably an advantage as it’s a hell of big old noisy city. The view from the hall was this, of the Sule Paya.

You used to have to change money on the black market only, by changing pristine US dollar bills (no folds, pen marks or other defects, or they won’t be accepted) with a man on the street or a taxi driver or someone. These days though, there are a handful of official money changers, including at the airport, and in Yangon, a very recent addition, within the last few weeks, are a couple of ATMs which will take Mastercard and Visa. Here’s what $100 looks like when changed into kyat, tastefully contrasting my bed sheet:

That evening I hiked up to the Shwedagon Paya, and enormous temple frequented by hundreds of locals coming to pray.

On the way back, I crossed over the railway track, it has a really crumbling infrastructure and people play chicken with the train

I made a bolt for it to Mt Kyaiktiyo the next morning, an event in itself. The owner of the guesthouse recommended to get a local bus to the bus station, which is probably about 20 Km away, a snip at 200 kyat when a taxi would cost about 8000. When I eventually correctly interpreted the Myanmar digit symbols that represent 43 for the route I wanted, I was given VIP treatment by entering the bus through a special door and getting to sit with the driver. The traffic drives on the right, but almost all vehicles are right-hand drive.

The bus dropped me near, but not at, the bus station, for some inexplicable reason. Slightly perplexed, I chartered a tramp that I found lying on the street, to lead me the 20 minute walk to the bus station for the price of a coffee. Bless his heart, he took me to entirely the wrong part of this massive bus station, which is more like a village really, with people there fixing buses, hundreds of shops and cafes, taxis and people everywhere all over the dusty streets. Anyway I eventually found a bus that would take me, although not all the way as it turned out, they loaded me onto the back of a motorbike to cover the last 20Km or so.

Kinpun, the base camp as such of the mountain, is not at all what I expected, I thought it would be a little traveller’s outpost, but in fact it was quite a busy village, and very dirty and noisy, with terrible restaurants. You ride on top of a small truck to ascend the mountain with about 50 other people, a pretty frightening trip up and down steep and twisty turns. They’d be fairly screwed here if they ever got snow and ice, that’s for sure. At the top of the mountain is a whole village and community as well, again unexpected, and you hike for a while to reach the actual Golden Rock, a pagoda perched on this precariously balanced rock which has been painted gold to represent the head of Buddha. After a certain amount of misinformation, I was led to believe that the golden rock itself was closed and covered up for refurbishment, much to the bemusement of myself and this crazy Polish guy I was with. It appeared to be here

But I later found out this was a different spot, the real McCoy was around the corner, so to speak, so I never saw it in the flesh in the end. The clue was that you could actually see it from the town and my guesthouse. Always these things are obvious with hindsight…

Part 1 of Burma complete, I am finding that trying to write more and more is playing havoc with the piece-of-string internet connection.

Just a quick, boring “I’m alive” post as the connection in this remote place is almost non-existent. I spent one night in Yangon, visited the Shwedagon Paya, an enormous temple atop a hill just outside the city centre. Next day I moved to Kinpun, a village at the foot of the “Golden Rock” which is actually covered in cladding for refurbishment at the moment so you can’t actually see the gold rock itself – nice one!

There seemed to be some sort of pilgrimage going on the other night, as there was music akin to that in a Chinese restaurant with a motivational speaker over the top of it coming through a really stratchy tannoy system ALL night, accompanied by another unfeasibly loud tannoy system from the truckstop next door to my guesthouse, where seemingly thousands of people were going up the mountain in the night. Thankfully last night it was blissfully silent…

Nonetheless it was a nice ride up and a long hike back down, passing by scores of homes on the way down, all of which double as their workplaces, be it a food stall, or a place that makes little wooden racks and guns and whatever. Amazing how they have to make a roundtrip of a few hours to get to the village, to get all of their supplies, including water!

Shortly I will embark on a 3 hour bus to Bago, lay over there for another 3.5 hours, then take another bus for 12 hours to Bagan up north, which really ought to be a lot of fun.

Spent the last two nights here, met some guys and had several beers the first night as my stomach finally nearly feels better. Consequently spent the next day in bed and took an evening boat trip around the island we’re on, stopping off to visit a few temples, including Wat Phanan Choeng, with a seriusly big Buddha in it. If you look closely at the pic, you’ll see a man’s head just sticking up above the Buddha’s fingers, to give you an idea of scale.

Today I’ve been out in a push bike, visiting a few more, and now relaxing on a riverside restaurant awaiting a late breakfast. After this I’m catching a train back to Bangkok, at the moment there are delays due to signalling failures it seems, so I feel just like being at home 🙂

Tonight I will hopefully be reunited with my passport, if I can remember which one of the 10,000 travel agents around Khao San Road I took it to. Tomorrow morning I fly to Yangon in Burma, where the real entertainment should begin. A German guy I met yesterday has just been and was telling me great things about it, so the general consensus so far seems to be that is _the_ place to be at the moment.

This is the famous Khao San Road

But I’m not staying here, given that I’m over 20 years old. I’m actually staying in Rambuttri, just next door but vastly more civilised. It’s been a fairly uneventful couple of days, I’ve felt a little sick just with acclimatisation issues, but they’re passing now. Seeing this farang down a back alley, exercising by jumping up and down on a tyre whilst looking at himself in a mirror really made my stomach churn..

I eventually sought out a good travel agency for sorting a visa for Myanmar, so my passport has been whisked away until Wednesday when it should come back with a shiny stamp in it, but the guy’s English was so bad I could go back there to find a pizza waiting for me for all I know, although for 1500 baht it’ll have to be damn tasty! He seemed to say that they’ll contact me before noon tomorrow if there’s a problem, but whether that’ll be an issue at the embassy or that they’ve just run out of pepperoni remains to be seen.

I’m getting quite excited about Myanmar now (that’s Burma to you and me, by the way), it’s supposed to be a throwback to ancient SE Asia and very backward. There are a load of concerns, including having to turn up with pristine condition US dollars to change on the black market to kyat, but I was just chatting to a German guy who has recently been who assured me that everything was very easy going and the country is wonderful.

In the meantime I’m going to head tomorrow to Ayutthaya about an hour north of here, an old historic centre of Thailand to get a little culture.

Early to bed for me tonight then, so I’ll sign off with a cheesy screen print of the weather. I’ll allow myself just this one indiscretion 🙂

You know you’ve arrived in Asia when you get to wipe your bum with a hosepipe…

I decided on the cheap option for transit from the airport which includes a train followed by this boat:

It’s not for the faint-hearted, but it does get you downtown for 45 baht, which is almost a quid at today’s terrible exchange rates, but it still not bad considering that the airport is over 30 Km away.

Having settled into my rather decent hotel in the middle of the action, I’ve been out for dinner and a couple of drinks, followed by the obligatory massage. So I’m pleased so say I’ve been well and truly violated on Day One.

On the more productive side, I’ve visited a few travel agents to check on options for getting a Burmese visa, and I think I will be able to make something work out, somehow.. No doubt I’ll chew over the options during a foot scrub tomorrow.

Oh, a special note for my UK friends, it’s half past midnight and currently 27C 🙂

This wee map should hopefully show roughly where I am and where I’ve been (if indeed I even have the faintest idea where I am)

[travelmap-map]

Armed with not much more than this bag, sunnies and a number-2-all-over haircut I’m off to Bangkok this evening. Beyond that, nothing is really planned, apart from a return flight from Hong Kong 3 months later and I’m in possession of a Chinese visa.

The very rough plan I have is to visit Burma, then a couple of Thai islands, then onto Indonesia, Borneo, the Philippines and finally China before returning to Hong Kong. More of that to come later,  for now I’m going to kick back and relax on a plane for the next 16 hours or so. Errr…..