Myanmar Part 1

 We welcomed in the Lunar New Year (Tet) with my good friend and freshman year roommate Jessica...in Myanmar.  And let's get this out of the way first: we got sick in Myanmar.  Really really sick.  Sick enough that we googled symptoms for cholera and dysentery because they seemed like reasonable searches.  And, we were sick multiple times.  These were the low points of the trip.  But the trip, which was a brief 12 days (with only 3 given up to our lady of gastric maladies), was full of wonderful high points too.  Too short to get but a tiny taste of the country, we made the circuit almost everyone does - Yangon to Bagan, to Kalaw, to Inle Lake.


Landing in Yangon we were immediately struck by the silence of the airport (which also smelled of cigarettes and had carpet that couldn't have been changed since the 70s) and the flatness of everything.   The colors were matted - arriving at noon in the beginning of the dry season bleaches out tones.  The buildings were low and the terrain itself was without hills.   That changed as we made our way into the city and life, with all its noise and pigment, crept back into the picture.

There are a lot of things we would change if we were doing this trip over again (going to Myanmar?  we have lots of suggestions!) and staying longer an Yangon is high on that list. Yangon seemed like a fascinating city, one we could have easily spent a week in.  The colonial architecture is crumbling, but provided endless entertainment as we strolled down random streets.

While the streets were our favorite part, we also stopped by the Shwedagon Pagoda, an incredible gold-plated reliquary containing goodies from the four Buddhas that have attained enlightenment:  4 hairs of the OB (original Buddha), a staff, a water filter, and piece(s) of robe.  We're still a bit confused on the particulars.  It's a pretty insane place -  huge, shimmering, and crawling with people who wanted to take our picture.

 

We hired a guide in an effort to get even a little background information on what we were seeing, and we realized two things very quickly - one, we were not going to be able to understand a word he said, and two we were very, very hungry.  We made it 15 minutes into our hour tour before we told him - thinking this would effectively end the tour - that we hadn't eaten.  He, with kindness that still blows my mind, immediately declared that we needed food and offered to take us to a nearby lunch place, saying we could resume the tour after.

It should be noted at this point that you can not wear shoes or socks in temples or pagodas.  We spent most of our time barefoot, which lead to some relatively sketchy situations like barefoot cave explorations, and, less exciting, barefoot bathroom explorations. Obviously we didn't think this would pose a problem when we agreed to lunch.  It did.  He led us out the back of the temple - original shoe lockers nowhere in sight - and into the busy(ish) streets of Yangon - our bare feet burning on the asphalt.  We dodged glass and other debris all the way to his favorite spot, only to realize upon getting there that there was no way we could eat this food.  It was a buffet dishing up meat and fish that had clearly been sitting out for a while.  Ordinarily, this would have been our jam, but we had been warned about how easy it was to get sick in Myanmar, and we didn't want to take our chances.  We tried to explain as nicely as possible that we were afraid his lunch spot would likely poison us, so maybe there was some other place?  Luckily he didn't take offense and he led us back through the temple to collect our shoes, so that he could take us to another lunch spot that offered soups.  By the time we sat down for lunch (which he had already eaten!) we had been with him for well over an hour, but he happily chatted with us we stuffed our faces.  We never did finish our tour. By the time we finished lunch, we needed to head back to our hotel to make our way to our next destination. But our time with him was definitely time well spent.  His over the top kindness and willingness to help was emblematic of almost all the people we encountered in Yangon.

 

From Yangon we took a surprisingly easy overnight bus to Bagan, home to over 2000 temples, pagodas, and stupas (though for simplicity's sake - and because who needs cultural sensitivity/accuracy? - we'll just call them all temples).

Bagan is a former capita which was at it's height between the 9th and 13th century, when most of the temples were built.  Kings, or other people of means, constructed them as a way of ensuring good karma and a better reincarnation in their next life.  As a result  (so we heard) temples often represented hopes and desires for their future selves - e.g. gold for a life full of riches - and more recently, white plaster for a life as part of a more privileged race.  In addition to reflecting future hopes, the temples have also enshrined the mixing of cultures that could be found in Myanmar at the time. There are strong Indian, Chinese and even Egyptian elements of architecture, art and design.  The style of the Buddhas themselves change depending on the temple.

We tooled around the temples in a combo of electric bikes, normal bikes, and feet.

Many of the temples were destroyed in a major Earthquake in the 1975 (we were told 2500 were destroyed).  They've been rebuilt without much attention paid to historical methods or preservation.  As a result it's not currently a UNESCO World Heritage site.  As Myanmar gets more accustomed to tourism and once it gets the world heritage designation, I imagine restrictions will become more and more....well, restrictive.  But right now, there's not an opening or closing time to most temples, and you can climb on plenty of them.  As a result, our favorite parts of the day were sunrise and sunset, which was spent on top of temples and away from (most of) the crowds - though crowds were never were that bad.

 

In Bagan we did one of the more indulgent things of our lives- dropped a stupid amount of money for a hot air balloon ride over the temples at dawn!

For a while we were not sure if it was going to happen.  Work (and our inability to do anything with forethought) kept us from making reservations until the night before our trip.  We didn't want to book through the balloon company as their tickets generally added about 80 bucks per person.  So Friday found us frantically and indiscriminately e-mailing travel agencies.  

One e-mailed us back - Young Tycoons Tourism - offering a great deal on tickets...and telling us that they would meet us at the airport to pay in cash so they could go buy them.  (Actually this is what was said: "Thank you indeed for your kind cooperstion.  And how tall you are! and you seem look like someone i hav seen. And that's great and we try to negotiate with the Oriental and we do hope that they are flexible and let us have a chance. One of our colleague will be welcoming you at airport with a banner in your name but if the Oriental give a favor. Let's try to think of positively and we do believe that we willwin this situation." We considered paraphrasing this e-mail but just can't figure out how to cut it down.  It's too good.)

Sure enough, when we arrived at Yangon, someone was waiting, and in broken English demanded our $900 in cash so that they could make the reservations.  He was not able to communicate when we would get the tickets, who would bring the tickets to us, or why we had to give all the money right then.  But we really wanted to go on the hot air balloon, and competitive to a fault, we really really did want to win the situation.  

So we trusted him, forked over almost a grand to a stranger (we did get a receipt) and then refused to acknowledge that we might have just made a huge mistake.

Thankfully, we did not.  We were greeted at our hotel by the manager of the tour company - who didn't have tickets yet - he had just dropped by "to release our worry" and explain why they needed the cash.  Turns out because our flight was delayed, they had to put their own money down on the tickets (yep... they put down 900 bucks to save us spots on the off chance we would show up at the airport, still need tickets for the balloon, and would agree to give them our money) and they were racing to put down the rest before the agency closed for the day.  Later that night, we had tickets delivered to our room, and three days later, we were in the basket of a balloon getting ready to launch.

The ride was too quick and too difficult to fully describe.  So we'll just say this: hot air balloons are awesome.  The views were wonderful, it was incredibly smooth and peaceful and they give you champagne afterwards (and orange juice  - which I'm 100% positive was  just tang with pulp put in it.).   While I'm not sure we would do it again, mostly because we'd be broke, the whole experience - from the e-mails to the final toast - were absolutely worth it.

Our time in Bagan, like the balloon ride itself was over way too fast and before we knew it, we were once again on a bus to Kalaw for some trekking.