Mandalay

Mandalay is probably the best known city in Myanmar by virtue of its name.  But there's no bay (as in the hotel in Vegas) and Kipling never visited here for his book. It's definitely less crowded than Yangon but still a bug city. Mopeds are allowed here (they weren't in Yangon) but things are spread out. There's agriculture interspersed here.

We saw more pagodas -- I'm already pagoda-ed out so I can't say much. The big one on the hill here was built by a king who was a reincarnated ogress who had cut off her breasts and offered them to Buddha. It is one of the for places that had been a capital here.

We visited a gold leaf shop here. They showed how it's made. They put gold between sheets of bamboo paper and hammer it for five hours to flatten it to very thin leaf. We felt the package they were hammering and it was very hot to the touch from the expansion.  I bought my first souvenir -- a gold gilded leaf. The gold is generally used to affix to a Buddha statue in one of the pagodas as a form of worship.

Shwedagon pagoda and Chinatown

A quick post while I have a few minutes. Last night, we went to the Shwedagon pagoda, a very old pagoda up on a hill. It's a place that people go to at sunset to catch the sun on the pagoda's umbrella, as they call it.   The canopy is made up of gilded gold, two tons of it, all donated by people.  The size is impressive for sure.

Afterward, we walked in the night market of Chinatown. Fruit and vegetable of all types and lots of people. We had roasted cashews and beer at a streetside cafe.  Between that and jet lag, we slept at the hotel and ended up skipping dinner.

The money...

I have a few minutes at the airport so let me write a bit about the money.  It's about 1300 kyat to a dollar.  But the largest bill is 10,000 kyat, about eight dollars.  So I ended up with quite a stack of bills when I changed $200. Some guy next to be had a stack two inches thick!

They don't really use credit cards here except in high-end restaurants and hotels.  So you're stuck with cash. There are ATMs and a friend used one, but the fees are high. 

Things are cheap though especially if you go to a local place.  Wet had a big bottle of a stout (Black Shield, a local beer) and it was 2000 kyat, about $1.50. They recommended $50-100 a day in cash, but I don't think I'll come close to that, although they expect $15/day in tips between the driver and guide.

There still is the disparity between tourist wealth and local incomes, though. A local government official only earns $200/month so that beer wouldn't be too cheap for them...

Okay time to board a flight to Mandalay.

Exploring Yangon

The past two days have been busy exploring Yangon (fka Rangoon and once the capital of Myanmar). Yesterday, I asked all over the city with Stephanie, someone I met on the plane from San Francisco. We both had a free day so it worked out well. It also helped keep me awake and battle jet lag.  Today, we had an organized tour in a car.

It's mainly been a slice of life exploration with some pagodas tossed in.  Burmese people are very friendly. You can tell that Western tourism has just started to take off. People did double takes when they saw how tall I was -- I'm about a foot taller than most people.  And when we were at one pagoda, we had about ten pictures taken of us with locals.  It's very safe here, although the condition of the sidewalks isn't great.  You have to be careful bit to twist your ankle.

You don't see a lot of foreign companies -- the only American place I saw was Tony Roma's. No Starbucks or McDonald's.

The markets were interesting. Of course almost every street had fruit, cell phones, and random things like saws for sale right on the sidewalk.  Traffic isn't terrible -- not as bad as Bangkok but it's getting worse.

The pagodas were okay. Nothing exceptional even if they are two thousand years old. We saw a forty year old reclining Buddha that was about fifty meters in length.

We also took a train around town. It was a very old train, reminiscent of an Indian train.  Unfortunately you also saw a lot of garbage strewn around the tracks along the way. You don't see abject poverty but there were some shanty towns.  People seemed happy with their lives.

Tomorrow we leave for Mandalay. Tonight we have a visit to another pagoda.

Strand Hotel

Hello from Yangon!

I got in late last night. In staying at the Strand Hotel. It feels like something out of a Graham Greene novel. The hotel dates back to the British era, built in 1901.  All sorts of historical figures stayed here, like Rudyard Kipling and David Rockefeller.  The rooms are luxurious with wooden floors and fans running from the high ceilings.  It's centrally located, making a good starting point for a walking tour.

The pictures are of my room and the lobby. The instrument played in one is a xylophone though it's a series of wooden slats hanging together rather than the ones we see in America.

Wandering Once More. Destination:Myanmar

Given some freedom from work, I'm taking advantage of the time to resurrect my travelling.  It's been a little while since I've posted on this blog so I may be rusty.

Tomorrow, I'm off to Myanmar, once and sometimes known as Burma.   It was something of a last minute trip.  For one, we wanted to wait to make sure that the presidential elections there went peacefully, especially once the opposition party had a resounding victory.  All looked good, so we went ahead and planned the trip -- Myanmar may very well turn out to be more peaceful than other places in the world right now.  Oh, I'm travelling with Julie this time.  I last went with her to Malaysia and Singapore in 2010 -- there are blog posts for that trip if you go back far enough!

I'll fly through Incheon in Seoul, although I'll only have a 1.5 hour layover.  On the way back, I'll have 8 hours and I may try to take a tour of the DMZ.  That's one of the places I didn't get to visit during my previous trips to Seoul.   It might be tight.  8 hours is an awkward amount of time.

I get into Yangon (fka Rangoon) late night and a day before the tour starts.  So I'll have some time on my own to explore after resting up a bit.  This is a very nice tour, so we're staying at some of the nicest places.  In Yangon, we'll be at the Strand Hotel, a British-era hotel.

Anyway, I had better get to packing.  I've cut and pasted the summary Google search so people know where Myanmar is and a little about it.  Let me know if you're reading this!

Myanmar (Burma)

Country in Asia

Myanmar (formerly Burma), is a Southeast Asian nation of more than 100 ethnic groups, bordering India, Bangladesh, China, Laos and Thailand. Yangon (formerly Rangoon), the country's largest city, is home to bustling markets, numerous parks and lakes, and the towering, gilded Shwedagon Pagoda, which contains Buddhist relics and dates to the 6th century.

Capital: Naypyidaw

Currency: Burmese kyat

President: Thein Sein

Population: 53.26 million (2013) World Bank

Continent: Asia

In the hills above Minca

It's been a few days since I've posted. Part of that is that I was off the grid at the hostel; part of it was that I hit that ennui where you get lazy about writing about things.  I did manage to last most of the trip now.

Minca was about as different as all the other stops of our trip as it could be.  We were on the middle of a forest atop hills in much more basic conditions than any of our other places.  It probably was the first time I've stayed in a hostel in over fifteen years. I actually liked that aspect.  You really do get to meet a lot of interesting people from all over the world. At the hostel, I met people from Australia, Hungary, England, Ireland, France, Amsterdam, and the U.S.   Many of the people were very recently removed from college and amidst months long journey through Colombia and other Latin American countries on a shoestring budget.  It was nice to see quite a few Americans. I like that there are people from the U.S. that don't have that visceral reaction about visiting Colombia that many people do.  This country is really an amazing and safe place (more about that in a post when I get back).

It was a fairly laidback stay at Minca. We had one home to a wonderful waterfall before getting caught in the rain five minutes from town. We ended up sheltering under the eaves of an aluminum siding roof with a few locals.  We had lunch at Lazy Cat, a burger and quesadilla place that was pretty good. I had climbed down the hill at night with my headlight and a few Irish girls and an American guy for dinner at the same place the previous night. It was so much easier taking that hill without the encumberance of bags!

The weather was a lot better than Santa Marta and Cartagena, being up in the hills. Unfortunately, my hope of it being a bug-free destination was in vain. I was okay but Kathy got eaten alive.  :-(

I personally enjoyed the stay at the hostel though I imagine more than a few days of shared bathrooms, cold showers, and paperthin walls would have gotten to me. Still, it was a nice change of pace...