Yangon

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On arrival back in Yangon, we grabbed a taxi back to Motherland Inn. Allegedly, the price of a taxi ride had doubled from 5000K in only one and a half weeks...but amazingly dropped back down in the time it took us to walk the 10 meters from inside the airport car park to the street.
Scott jokingly suggested we go to Tokyo Fried Chicken for lunch - the Burmese equivalent of KFC - so we did. It made KFC look quite gourmet. At least their burger patties are the colour of chicken and their coleslaw doesn't look like vanilla ice cream...hmm.

After lunch we headed to Scott (Bogyoke Aung San) Market which is a massive indoor market mainly targeted to locals, but with the obligatory souvenirs and tourists t-shirts. There is also quite a large jewellery section, with heaps of gold silver and gems. We both got 2 clean t-shirts - what a novelty! Bianca also picked up a beautiful red and black parasol. That night on our way out to dinner, we ran into an Aussie couple Hannah and Steve, and ended up having a delicious Thai dinner with them.

The following morning at breakfast we ended up chatting to the Hannah and Steve again as well as another 'tourist' that smelt a lot like a journalist - he carried a laptop, a big camera and a notebook around and spent every day out for the whole day by himself. After a while of chatting he let it be known that he was there working for a guide book company. We ended up heading out with the Hannah and Steve to central lake so they could see the royal barge that we had had dinner on almost two weeks earlier. We then attempted to find the Bogyoke Aung San museum, but after a lot of walking we found that it was closed indefinitely for renovation. We continued our rather clueless walking around in the general direction of a massive reclining Buddha. Finally after trying to ask random locals for directions (none of us even came close to pronouncing the name) we made it to the Buddha and he was MASSIVE - similar to the reclining Buddha in Bangkok, but about 15-20 metres longer.

That afternoon we went back to Shewedagon to watch the sunset and to see it in the dark with all the lights. This time we were lucky enough to catch the sun setting behind the diamond and depending on where you stood (they had marked points on the ground) you could see different colours through it like red, green, blue etc - Bianca was again drooling and in love. The pagoda is probably more impressive at night than it is during the day because of the lighting, especially during sunset. Dinner following was at a local restaurant where we had venison curry - a little strange but quite nice.

The next day was our final one for Myanmar, so with plans of greatness we did....not a whole lot. We made our way back to the Scott market to try and burn some of our leftover currency because it has no value anywhere outside of the country. We weren't really that successful - the market doesn't really have a lot to offer if you’re not searching for cloth and jewellery, but Bianca managed to get another Longyi and a wooden elephant puppet.

Given our failure to waste money that afternoon we set our aims at having an expensive dinner - which means (like home) Japanese. We were about to go that night and were in our lobby when we ran into the journalist and a random American, who said they were going out for Japanese and asked if we would like to join them.

The dinner conversation was interesting with as the American and the journalist were pretty opinionated and we found out by the end of the night that the journalist was on assignment for Lonely Planet writing the next Myanmar edition which we thought was pretty cool. We also completed our mission of spending our cash as the Japanese was by far the most expensive meal we'd had the whole time, luckily it came with complimentary food poisoning for Bianca starting 8 hours later in the Yangon airport about to board TWO flights - let’s just say that it was a long trip up to Chiang Mai and that Bianca arrived several litres less than she left and an expert at finding a gutter to spew in!

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Photos

Tshirt shopping
This tshirt seller was so bored she was singing everything she was saying

Reclining Buddha
Look at the size of the people down the bottom