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Published: June 28th 2015
From Koh Samui, we had a couple of flights to get us to Yangon and all of us were a little nervous about our Visas to get into the country but they turned out to be fine. We caught a taxi through the peak hour traffic and found our accommodation and headed out for dinner. We wandered the streets first and I loved the place. It was dirt streets, no tourists and it looked like things hadn’t changed in years. We went into a local place for dinner and I had my best meal of the trip – a stirfry pork dish with garlic which is making my mouth water even now. Unfortunately midway during the meal, Clay came down with traveller’s belly which would haunt him for the rest of the trip. It would hit Meg the following day. We weren’t sure where it came from as it was too soon to be the food and we had all eaten basically the same stuff in the last day or so. James’ iron stomach wins again!
With my comrades down for the count, I went off exploring by myself the following day and gravitated towards Shwedagon Paya which
as you can see from the photos is a truly phenomenal piece of architecture. I didn’t go inside as I decided to wait and see if the others were feeling better. I returned back to the hotel and managed to drag them up to see it. It was amazing – so much gold! Unfortunately Clay and Megs were still feeling pretty poorly so we didn’t stay as long as we could have but I still managed to get far too many photos.
This was the definite highlight of Yangon and the next day we flew off to Bagan which is fairly famous for the photos even if people do not recognise the name. Our first day we hired bikes and explored some of the close temples, and due to there being literally thousands of them and hardly any tourists, Megs was right when she said it was like being Indiana Jones. Our second day was fairly similar though this time we hired electric scooters which were great fun and we managed to cover a lot more distance. Some of the temples were incredible and from the bigger ones you had incredible 360 degree views around the region.
It was very flat and for miles and miles you could see hundreds of these temples dotting the landscape.
From here it was another flight (to avoid the hours and hours on buses or trains) to Mandalay where the main attraction was a palace surrounded by a moat. We thought it wouldn’t take us long to walk around to the tourist entrance – the opposite side to our accommodation. Again, how wrong we were! It took us hours and the scorching heat and even at the end, it was not that impressive. It may not be Mandalay’s fault as Bagan was simply one of the most amazing places I have ever seen. The following day was off out exploring again and again we were a little underwhelmed.
From here we flew back to meet up with Kim and Marc for One Night in Bangkok. We had booked into 5 star accommodation which was very fancy and we ended up being upgraded as well. The view over the river and Bangkok were pretty amazing. For the evening we had booked a tuk tuk tour which took us around some of the local hotspots and included
dinner at a world famous Pad Thai place which had a queue of close to 50 people over the whole time we were there.
But sadly all good things must end and the next morning Clay, Marc, Kim and Megs were off early to the airport back to London while I relaxed by the pool for the day before my evening flight back to Auckland and reality. Oh well, only a little over 6 weeks until my next adventure!
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