Snakes Alive!

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There are few zoos in Burma – in fact I had only heard of four (Yangon Zoo, Hlawga Park, Yadanabon Zoo and Naypyitaw Zoo). I had been to the first three but Naypyidaw wasn't really on my route and I didn't think I'd be able to fit it in. However I wouldn't be much of wandering zoo-keeper if I missed out what was supposed to be the largest and newest zoo in Burma, so at Lake Inle I came up with a possibly-to-be-regretted plan for my last few days in the country involving a succession of night buses, very little sleep and no showers for the following 60-odd hours. (In case you're wondering, a wandering zoo-keeper is much like a wandering minstrel except with less musical talent). I will cover all of this in separate blogs, but in short I got up at 5.30am on my last day at Nyaungshwe and went out on Lake Inle and generally spent the day birding rather poorly, then took a twelve hour overnight bus to Bago where I arrived at 6am, had some breakfast, left my bags in a nearby hotel for no charge, and took a motorbike out to Lake Moeyunggyi and then to the Snake Monastery to see a big fat python. I managed to catch a few hours sleep at the bus company's flop-house then took a five hour overnight bus to Naypyidaw, arriving at 1.45am. There I discovered that the hotels in Burma's capital are very expensive so I spent part of the night sleeping on the street and part in a tea house. In the morning I went to the Naypyitaw Zoo where I found that it is in fact a very good zoo indeed and nothing at all like the Yangon and Yadanabon Zoos where you feel like you've gone back in time a hundred years. In the afternoon I got a six hour bus to Yangon where I finally got to sleep in an actual bed and have a shower.....



The first part -- Bago:



I arrived in Bago at 6am after very little sleep on the twelve-hour night-bus from Lake Inle. The first thing I had to do was buy a ticket for an evening bus to Naypyidaw. I got sat down in a restaurant – so I got breakfast as well – and a man appeared with a book of tickets.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked.

“Naypyidaw” I said.

“Naypyidaw?!” he repeated incredulously, almost slapping his forehead in surprise.

“Er, yes....is that not possible from here?”

“You have just come from Lake Inle?”

“Yes”

“That bus comes through Naypyidaw on the way here!”

“Ah, I see” I said.

I had actually asked specifically in Nyuangshwe whether it was easier to get to Naypyidaw from there or from Bago, because I knew it was closer to the former than the latter, and I'd been told that because of the roads it took a very long time to get to Naypyidaw and I would be better going to Bago first and then to Naypyidaw from there. But later on this day I checked the map at the bus office and the bus does indeed go straight through Naypyidaw on the way to Bago. The things you don't know when you don't look in a Lonely Planet eh? No matter.

I left my bags at the reception of a hotel next to the bus office (free of charge!) and took a motorbike out of town for about an hour to Lake Moeyunggyi. This is spelled Lake Moyingyi on the signs there but I'll stick with Moeyunggyi because that appears to be more commonly used. The lake is supposed to be crawling with birds of all kinds, but my bad run of luck continued and once again I saw little. To see anything you need to get out on the lake of course, and the only two options on offer were a motorised boat from the HQ for US$15 for one hour – or a pole-propelled boat with one of the local fishermen for half an hour for about 5000 kyat. Half an hour by pole-power isn't going to get you anywhere, so I paid up for the HQ's boat. Huge numbers of purple swamphens were a highlight; they are usually seen in ones and twos but here they were gathered in flocks of fifty or a hundred. There were also big flocks of lesser whistling ducks. A plaintive cuckoo hanging on some reeds was also very nice to see. Otherwise it was mostly just the usual egrets and herons. The lake was quite choppy and I started feeling sick again, I think mostly from not getting much sleep but also because I think I ate some bad chicken in Nyaungshwe which started having effects on my stomach later.

After the short and rather bird-less stay at Lake Moeyunggyi I headed back into town on the motorbike to visit the Snake Monastery. I had only found out about this while in Kalaw (again because I haven't looked in Lonely Planet), when two travellers had told me that there was a huge “boa constrictor” in a temple in Bago which was supposedly 120 years old. Seeing I was going to Bago anyway for Lake Moeyunggyi I added the Snake Monastery straight onto the schedule. The snake was a Burmese python and was indeed very big and fat. Snakes are notoriously hard to estimate the length of because their shape distorts your perception, but fortunately this one was lying on a tiled floor inside the pagoda where it lived. I measured the tiles with my fingers and compared that later with a ruler, so I knew they were 20cm wide. The snake lay along 16 tiles, so was roughly 3.2 metres long (just under eleven feet). It isn't an exact measurement because the end of its tail was curled on a blanket, and also the snake was relaxed – when it started moving it extended out more. I'll just say it was a minimum of 3.2 metres. If the tiles hadn't been there I probably would have guessed it as being at least 50%!l(MISSING)onger than it actually was! As for its age – my motorbike driver told me it had been there for fifty years, and they had just built the pagoda to attract visitors to make money......

After seeing the python I picked up my bags from the hotel where I'd left them, and went to a rest-house owned by the bus company. It wasn't a hotel or anything like that, just a room with a long wooden platform on which you could sleep for 1000 kyat, which is what I did for several hours before the bus was due. On the way to the rest-house I passed through the food market where one stall was selling pacu. I would have been very surprised at this but I had seen pacu for sale at a market in Borneo as well in 2009. I can only assume they are bred for food in ponds in southeast Asia because I have never heard of wild populations here. The bus was at 8pm, but although I had a ticket it didn't seem like there was really a bus to go with the ticket. I sat outside the bus office while the operator stood on the other side of the road and flagged down passing buses to see if they had a spare seat. A very odd way of doing things and I suspect almost a sort of scam. I eventually got on a bus at 9pm, and reached Naypyidaw the next morning at 1.45am.

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