What we've seen of
the traffic in Bangkok had made us a bit nervous about getting to the
airport on time for our flight to Burma, so we set the alarm nice and
early this morning - we were awakened at 3.45am - and not long after
we were downstairs and on our way. We were also a bit nervous about
how long it would take us to get a taxi, but even before we made it
the main road we saw several pass by, and one stopped for us as soon
as we got to the kerb. The driver was an older, very chatty guy,
despite his limited English – a phys ed teacher who had spent time
living in Italy - and rather erratic behind the wheel.
The good news was
that the roads were virtually empty and we were at the airport before
4.30am. Which was extra good news because when we got inside we had
to join a long queue to check in. We were flying with Asia's popular
new budget airline, AirAsia, and like budget airlines everywhere they
hadn't put enough staff on. Also in common with other budget
airlines, they charged extra for all of those things that you used to
take for granted on a flight – checked luggage, food, allocated
seats and so on. We'd paid for as few of these as possible, which
meant that they had seated Sarah, Kate and I together and Zoe at the
other end of the plane, but thankfully, the woman who checked us in
kindly moved Zoe next to us. After making our way through security
and passport control, we got some breakfast at a McDonald's outlet
and then went to the gate for the short wait until the plane started
to board.
The flight was short
– not quite an hour and half – and uneventful, and when we got
inside the terminal building, we sailed through border control,
picked up our bags, grabbed some cash from an ATM and then went to
the taxi desk to arrange a cab to our hotel. We were led outside to a
car and a young driver and off we went. We hadn't gone very far,
however, before we got stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and so
began our slow crawl into central Yangon. At one point we heard a
siren behind us and the driver pulled over to let an ambulance past.
He then cheekily pulled out behind it and for the first time in a
while we got out of first gear as we sailed along past all the other
cars that had pulled over to let the ambulance past.
After something
close to an hour, we got close to the hotel, but had to go down a
narrow one-way street so we could loop back around into the narrow
one-way street that our hotel is on. Easier said than done, thanks to
all of the vans unloading merchandise and the double-parked cars, but
eventually we made it. After checking in and dumping our bags, we
went back outside, walked up our street, threaded through the
stationary traffic on the main road and started looking for the
entrance to the train station. I saw on old, moss-and-mildew-covered
sign on the wall that said something about the railways, but it was
only when I looked a second time that I realised that it also said
'Booking Office'. We walked in to find something very different to the
ticket office we visited in Bangkok only yesterday. It looked
derelict, as if it had gone out of use decades ago, but there were
lights on and a few of the ticket windows were open, so we went to
one and enquired about getting tickets for the sleeper train to
Bagan. I had read that it was usually possible to just walk up and
buy a sleeper ticket for the next day without any difficulty, and we
had a day up our sleeve, but we were still nervous. The person behind
the counter directed us to another, equally dilapidated set of ticket
counters, where we bought our tickets with a minimum of fuss and
bother (and cash – the tickets were the equivalent of about US$13
each).
Back out on the
street, we tried our first Burmese street food - a little round, oily
bread-like thing with small pieces of chilli, fresh coriander and
fresh tomato, cooked in a little metal skillet – I think if
anything it most reminded me of focaccia. It's cut up with a pair of
scissors, placed in a small plastic bag and sprinkled with a mixture
of sesame seeds, salt and some unidentified brown spices. And it's
absolutely delicious, although the chillies were a bit too potent for
me and I mostly tried to pick them out (on a later occasion, Kate
picked up a bag I had set aside and proceeded to put all of the
little bits of chilli I had removed into her mouth at once – not a
mistake she's likely to make twice).
We then walked to a
little restaurant for some noodles for lunch. The staff were
incredibly attentive, picking the bones out of pork at the table,
removing the plastic from our chopsticks and constantly refilling my
mug of tea the second that I drained it. After lunch, we just walked
aimlessly for a while through the busy streets. The part of Yangon
we're staying in is set up as a grid, with wide two-way streets
running in one direction and narrow, one-way streets running
perpendicular. As is often the case in less developed countries, the
streets are 'commercially themed', so you walk up one street and it's
filled with little shops selling stationery, and then down the
adjacent street, which has nothing but sign-makers.
We eventually
stumbled across a large park, that was seemingly surrounded by
barbed-wide barricades. However, we could see people in it, so we
walked around looking for an entrance. Ahead we saw a grand old
building very much in the British colonial style, with a magnificent
tall clock tower. On closer inspection, we could see that, like many
buildings in Yangon, it was festooned with weeds. We later learnt
that it was the high court building.
The girls spent some
time in the kids' playground and then ran over to the collection of
exercise apparatus that is so much a part of the Asian park. Not long
after, the dark clouds that had been gathering let loose and we ran
to join a collection of locals under a rare bit of cover at the
entrance to the park. When the rain began to slacken off, we
continued out exploration, stopping to buy some corn on the cob for a
hungry Zoe. By now it was approaching beer o'clock, but try as we
might, we couldn't find a bar – or indeed anywhere that served
alcohol. We walked and walked and eventually, as we approached the
area around the hotel, we found a Western-style chicken and burger
restaurant, where we managed to get a couple of bottles of the local
lager (and some chips and a burger for the girls).
The streets of
Yangon are full of vendors of varying types – selling everything
from mobile phones to antique nick nacks, clothing to lottery
tickets, and on the way back to the hotel, we came across a book
binder sitting on a stool and binding together some A4 pages. Beside
him, on his little table, was a very contented sleeping cat.
When we
got to the hotel we went up to our room and waited out another heavy
downpour, before setting out for so-called 'Barbecue Street', a well
known thoroughfare in the Chinatown area, where there are numerous
street vendors and restaurants specialising in, you guessed it,
barbecues. First up, we went to
a bar – quite a trendy bar, with some pretty relaxed jungle on the
stereo and a young staff sitting about waiting for customers –
where we ordered some beers and fries and played some cards. We then
walked down to the business end of the street – where all the
restaurants, and barbecues, were located. We took a long time to
choose a restaurant. Many had big display cabinets out the front with
an array of kebabs set out in them, but we couldn't find one that had
everything we wanted – a charcoal grill that we could see, an
appetising selection of skewers featuring the edible parts of the
animals we known and love, and a free table. In the end, we chose one
with the first and last of these as a stopgap and ordered a big fish
and some skewers with what looked like some reasonably 'normal' bits
of chicken on them. The fish was delicious, moist and tasty and just
a little bit spicy; the chicken bits, we discovered, were actually
parson's noses, which were also very nice.
It didn't take us
long to fall in love with Burma. There's a real vibrancy to Yangon
but also a real sense of otherness. It's certainly significantly
different to everywhere else we've been in Southeast Asia. It's clear
that we're in a transition zone between there and South Asia, with a
lot more ethnically 'Indian' people around. The British influence is
sporadically evident in the architecture, the fact that English is
quite widely spoken and, I would argue, in the relative tidiness –
litter is much less common here than we've seen it elsewhere. But
it's also clear that no-one's spending a lot of money on making it
look nice. It has that quality that I love – what I call elegant
decay. As I mentioned with regard to the High Court building, there
are weeds growing from every available crack in the buildings (and
there are many), and most are being slowly overtaken by a creeping
wave of black mildew. And finally, with the country having been
isolated for so long, it seems largely unsullied by the corrosive
effects of tourism (and, yes, I'm well aware of the contradictions
and hypocrisy lurking in that comment). The people seem both
surprised and pleased to see white faces among them, and are quick to
break into a lovely warm smile when they make eye contact.
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