Upon arriving to Mae Sot after a bumpy and exciting 6 hour bus ride through Thailand's beautiful mountain ranges, we are spontaneously greeted at the station by another traveler, Matt, who teams up with us to cross into Burma. We quickly learn that the border crossing has closed up a few hours before arrival, so we head to town to find a guesthouse for the night. It is May 10th and our Thai visas expire at midnight. Oops.
Initial impressions of Myanmar are rattling around in my head. It's too soon to make sense of it all (and I never will), but the small border town of Myawaddy is oddly reminiscent of India. Upon crossing the bridge over the river border we see naked children bathing in the water below. There is a stark contrast in waste management between Thailand's side of the river and Burma's. The trash levels are alarming, and that's after seeing India. The streets are fuming with odors of human and animal waste and it's pretty incredible to behold. Maybe India was similar and Thailand pressed my reset button for standard of living.
We picked an inopportune day to travel, or rather we were offset by one day as the opportune buses leaving Thailand were sold out, (the reasons now clinking together in my head), meaning traffic between Myawaddy and Yangon only goes one direction before alternating on the next day. This is just one of the things you get used to when traveling. Schedules are not always tight and mechanical, so you're left with what seems like downtime which can often feel like useless waiting time. It can be difficult to override the feeling of anticipation when you have one destination in mind, but acknowledging it sort of frees you (if only partially). So being "stuck" in a rather small town with nothing ostensibly attractive about it, you're forced to delve into a different mode of thinking. It's all in how you frame it.
Now fully informed at the border w/r/t the travel situation, we require a hotel for the evening until our a.m. departure. We walk down the main drag, occasionally spotting dingy and overpriced hotels. The language barrier is expectedly wider here, chasm-spanning even. We meet a few eager locals ecstatic to practice their English with us, but cheap guesthouse seems to defer to expensive hotel each time. We luckily happen upon a rather well-kept hotel, after walking the width of the town, with a surprisingly reasonable rate for how posh it was. With the sun's dial set to 'oppressive' we would've paid twice as much (though Nicole would likely disagree with this hyperbole).
Our hotel staff was beyond nice, bringing us cold water upon arrival and seemingly ecstatic when we gulped it down. The rooms were modest and comfortable. The adjoined restaurant served reasonably priced food. So far, Myanmar is feeling pretty cushy. Perhaps with the recent influx of tourists they are able to sustain a higher standard of service. With little to do outside, we got the most out of our 25 dollar accommodations with a bit of R&R (reading and writing).
We begin our journey to Yangon in the early morning, first hiring a private car to Hpa-an where we will catch a bus the rest of the way. We find a driver pretty easily and set off, treated to a mix of Burmese power metal and pop music. I rock out for a bit as we cruise up into the mountains in tow with all of the other one-way traffic. It quickly becomes apparent that the narrow, winding mountain roads would hardly sustain two-way traffic without serious delays, so we're not bothered one bit as we cruise through mountains, treated to even more vast expanses. There are no cities within view for miles, just shiny temples which glint silver-gold in the sunlight.
The drive is hot but not too long. We stop at a few villages along the way which have what you might call convenience stores and rest stops. Water flows freely from hoses to clean the the wheels for several minutes, also perhaps to cool the brakes after all of the life-saving friction they offered coming down the mountain. The ground is saturated and muddy as they don't seem to have an off switch.
We see a little monkey in front of a shop harnessed to a rather short leash. Its feet can't reach the ground so it resorts to perching on a small plastic chair or hanging from the adjacent fencing. It seems far too active to be limited to a two-or-three foot radius. We watch for a while with our respective inner conflicts. Add another item to the hard-to-swallow list. We're compelled to simply observe as guests to the culture. But seeing a creature so visibly discontent and deprived of the simple freedom of movement triggers a sort of quiet, helpless, frustration-paralysis. Unable to act or communicate, but unable to stop thinking about it.
We arrive to Hpa-an to be treated to a 3 or 4 hour layover in the heat of the day, once again feeling a tinge of stuckness as we try to figure out how to get out earlier. We end up on moto-taxis to the town center where we wait in the shade in limbo. I play the mandolin and read while Nicole goes out and finds a western toilet. She also happens to meet an incredibly friendly hotel owner who is more than happy to let her use the facilities and teach us useful Burmese phrases ('vegetarian' and 'cheap guesthouse' among them).
We hop on our bus just before dark. The roads make for a fun ride or nightmarish roller coaster depending on your taste. The woman sitting behind us (next to Matt) heaves the contents of her stomach into a plastic bag periodically and hearing her wretch induces simultaenous empathy and wanting to be elsewhere.
A young girl is seated next to me on a small plastic stool in the aisle. A woman talking to her (who stands for most of the journey) makes encouraging gestures toward us and we see that she wants to communicate but is so adorably afflicted by shyness that we then decide to playfully encourage her as well. We start asking basic questions and exchange names and ages and hometowns and eventually she is lighting up and we all feel pretty happy to be around each other. E E looks through photographs on our phones, identifying animals in English and adding how beautiful the sunsets and tigers and other things are. This sixteen year old girl is nodding off in the aisle so I offer her my seat. She immediately snuggles up with Nicole and falls asleep. Seeing Nicole assume a maternal role is a rare and endearing sight and the unlikely pair sleep for the rest of the ride.
Arrive Yangon at crap o clock. We'll quickly learn that each overnight bus tends to arrive somewhere between 3 and 5 in the morning. Having no guesthouse booked, our driver helps us find a place at the wee hours and we eventually settle into sharing a double at Mother Land Inn for the remainder of the night.
This city is bustling and dirty and raw and beautiful in strange ways. People are typically stoked to see foreigners and we are often greeted with wide smiles and Hello's and Where From?'s and so on. It feels really good but we also wonder how the influx of tourism might diminish the novelty. At any rate, we answer their often red-toothed smiles in kind (Chewing tobacco wrapped in betel leaf is a custom amongst men here so most of these smiles are plastered with red/brown tar).
The street merchants and shops offer a nice spread: fresh fruit including bananas mangoes watermelon up the wazoo, fried bread, fried noodles, whole fish and chickens, headless fish and chickens, various nondescript meats formed into little shapes (flies sold separately), fried crickets, and other less edible items including pirated movies, knock-off everything, stores lined with electronics stores, pharmacies, and, less commonly, little wiry snakes in mason jars (which supposedly live off of ground coffee).
Sanitation is a concern again, especially after naively eating some questionable street noodles. The noodles are mixed with sauce and tofu by the same hand that takes our money. The concept of filthiness doesn't exist in Yangon. This is soon followed by a bilious churning in my stomach that has me down for the evening, paranoid that whatever chaos in my tummy might work its way down and twist my intestines into a sort of mobius shape.
Yangon days aren't much different from the rest of Thailand, and we are treated to some excellent thunderstorms in the late afternoons. In between downpours we explore the city. The People's Park features hordes of people and gardens and treeforts. A young man approaches us and bequeaths me a small, ornate flower bracelet which smells like honey. He takes my hand and kisses it with a sincere expression, then turns and sits back with his friends. We settle under a large tree, whose vibrant red flowers match the nearby monks' robes, and watch the people and dragonflies go by.
We spend an evening at Shwedagon Paya, an enormous Buddhist temple. We are treated to sights of all shapes and sizes of Buddha statues, each one situated in their own smaller satellite temples, often backlit by an LED display of rainbow colors for a disco-ish effect. People revolve around the pagoda and we get swept into the slowly moving stream, pausing to watch people pray or auspiciously wash their Buddhas and dragons.
Our guesthouse is excellent and we meet many interesting travelers. The dormitory resembles a sort of sleeper train; each bunk has a curtain and light and fan and it allows you to have privacy while being in the midst of others. We meet a fellow Californian who has lots of trip ideas for us, and additionally offers some much needed info for our Vietnam plans (to be revealed at a later date). Nov from Israel has been stuck in Yangon with a nasty case of food poisoning so we all want to mother him back to health quickly. He catches on with our sense of humor and we invite him to travel with us, but alas his stomach will permit no such thing.
After Yangon we make our way to Kalaw where we will hike east to Inle Lake.
