Myanmar !

Myanmar is one of the big countries in South East Asia with 676 000 Km2 (sorry not sure what it is in miles…), so a bit bigger than France. Most of the interesting parts to see were quite a way from one another. SO we did a lot of transports and mainly a lot of night buses. We spent (far too) many hours  travelling. Night buses are more comfortable in general, the only problem was quite often the timings ; we would arrive at 3.30 am in a new town, and waiting at this time for hours after a ten hours bus Journey was not the easiest. But fortunately, most of the time, we met quite a few people who found room for us , even if ours was not ready. This was still better than the bus journeys during the day, when they had sold too many tickets ( god knows how many times I have complained of the English train system, where you end up standing up for your Journey at the end of a full days work. I take it all back.) and you end up sitting in the corridor of the bus, on some kids plastic chair, with screaming Burmese movie, and this for hours.

 It was the dry season when we arrived in Burma. The population was waiting for the monsoon. It was very late to come, and finally it is there, and I just checked. It ihas since been flooding everywhere. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/burmamyanmar/11780411/Burma-floods-Heavy-monsoon-rain-causes-widespread-flooding-in-pictures.html

It was about 40 degrees. Once again, I am going to mention the climate, but I cannot help being quite worried when I experience country after country the same kind of problems. Too much sun, draught, fires, floods , shortage of water etc… I was already sensitive to the environment problems and global warming, but travelling in Asia just reinforces that feeling that our planet is not going towards better days.

We started our trip in Yangon, which is the old capital, replaced nowadays by Naypyidaw. We found a lot of colonial buildings and the city is much nicer than we were expecting, there is lots to see. The second day we lunch at Shwe Sa Bwe, a restaurant owned by a couple of French people who emigrated a few years ago and decided to open a restaurant and train Young Burmese for free so that they could found a job more easily. I loved the initiative, the restaurant seems to be mainly visited by tourists and people who can afford it , but I thought it was a great way to help locals to have access not only to a job ,but also a better paid one and generally a better life. Tips are given to them, so I do hope that the wealthy people who visit this restaurant leave them something. I really would like to be able to do something similar one day.

From Yangon, we went to Mandalay, which did not impress us to say the least. The name evokes something a bit dreamy, maybe because of colonialism, maybe because of the lovely sound . But it is for us a « miss ». The city looks like  a place that has developped too quickly without any thoughts on how this should happen. Then Bagan, the temple region with more than a 1000 of them, nobody seems to now exactly their number. The landscape is stunning, we did a sunrise and Sunset sitting on the top of one of them, it was incredible. Our main second stop was Inle lake, which might have been my favorite for many reasons. We did a wine tasting there. Myanmar has, to this day, a couple of vineyards, so we effectively tried 50% of the production of the country, not very often can you claim something like this, and it was filth. Still quite a lot of work to do there…

Inle  Lake is a fishermen area, where most of the houses are bamboo made and on stilts. Again this is a stunning place, people are extremely friendly and despite their very approximate English, and the fact they , for some reason, think we are Americans, we had a great time with them. Alex tried in our last stop to get some mayonnaise in a restaurant, we got the salt (« salt » vs « sauce »), the ketchup pretty much every condiment you can think about, but the mayonnaise. They all looked  lost, but always with a smile. The funny thing is we are currently in Vietnam where salt is not on the table and we had the opposite problem of wanting salt and being delivered various sauces.

Tourism is still very new and it gives us the impression to be lost in the middle of nowhere. In the south of the country where we went after, there was even less tourists, so much so that we nearly stayed stuck in Kiyatko at the golden rock. We go to this famous rock at the end the day. Around 6.10 pm, whereas the place is still heaving with people, I go to buy our tickets back to the city, but I am being told that there are no more buses, and that the next one is at… 6 am the next day. errrrr Knowing that we are 6 km from the centre on a very steep and hazardous road, and that in 15 mins the sun will be down, and we have about one pound with us. Double errrrrr . Light disagreement  « I told you it was before 6 pm » , « but no, the hotel said that… » Fortunately, a group of Tibetan monks turned up and needed to go back too. None of them speak English of course , but with extremely astute sign language, we manage to get on a truck with them all.

We decided to cut our trip short at the end because we were getting close to New Year’s eve there, and all transports and shops stopped working. You can continue to travel but for three times the price. Their new years eve, (and in Thailand as we went to Bangkok just after) is very different from what we get in France and England. They celebrate the start of monsoon with a water festival. Everyone uses water pistols, buckets, hose and throw cold water on everybody else. This is a huge mess that can last up to 5 days. Foreigners are a great target obviously, the atmosphere is really good and festive, we liked it a lot. During the day particularly, when it is 38 degrees and your clothes dry ; in the evening ; it is definitely a bit more challenging when the sun has goes down and it is the 50th bucket of cold water you get in your face…

Lastly, from a culinary perspective, there is not much to say except that … it is not very good. Once again the hygiene is not great, and they don’t have any remarkable dishes, no spices, everything is buried under litres of oil in order to be kept as long as possible. Food is the fuel they survive on mainly. I wondered if the habit they have to chewing betel had an impact on their taste, just like Tobacco (when I wrote this, I hadn’t tried it, it is now done and it is awful and I would say it definitely has an impact on their taste.) This is a disgusting thing in the country, you can find their red spit everywhere on the roads and sometimes in bags on your bus seat. Their lips, teeth and tongues are all red and black, but they think it is good for them. It is Something we will find in many countries in South East Asia.

Those two weeks then led us to Bangkok for a couple of days and the Philippines for a month !