The Flight to Mandalay

We didn’t take the Road to Mandalay. We flew there.

Firstly we spent two nights in Yangon. The first day we wandered around town, starting in the market. I find the local markets fascinating for the range of strange foods that we don’t get back home.

Yangon has a number of old colonial buildings.

Sule pagoda

Scooters are banned in Yangon to reduce pollution. So they have lots and lots of cars and traffic jams instead. The last dictator decided to rebel against the British colonial legacy of driving on the left and so changed it all to driving on the right in the 70’s. They import used cars from Japan. Unfortunately the cars are all right-hand-drive (like the UK), so it just makes driving even more dangerous as they can’t see past the vehicle in front when they pull out to overtake.

The Myanmar people make what they can’t buy. In this case a home-made e-Bike.

It was Michelle’s birthday just after we arrived in Yangon. The hotel kindly decorated the bed.

We met the G-Adventures CEO (Chief Experience Officer) and our group of 7 people from New Zealand and USA – and Scotland (Wales) of course. The restaurant made a cake for Michelle at our first group dinner.

The Shwedagon Pagoda is the most important in Myanmar.

Everywhere we travel in the developing world, we see generic brown dogs (GBD). After a long period of uncontrolled breeding, they all become a common brown animal.

We took a crazy truck journey up the mountain to Golden Rock. The road was very steep with lots of hairpin bends and vertical drops. The driver was mental and drove really fast. It was wilder than any rollercoaster we’ve been on. We hung on for dear life.

Schoolgirls hanging on back of truck. The local kids get the trucks to and from school. The girls were fascinated by Michelle’s hair and were playing with it.

There aren’t make foreign tourists in Myanmar yet, so the locals find westerners fascinating and want their photo taken with us. At one point Michelle spotted a local taking a picture of me taking a picture of monks.

My monk mates

We took a boat to Mingun.

There is a massive brick Stupa which is solid brick all the way through. It’s made of millions of bricks. It is possibly the most bricks in a single building in the world. It was never finished and is gradually being destroyed by earthquakes. An expensive folly for the king.

They have the largest everything here. The world’s largest book, biggest working bell,

Biggest book in the world at the Kuthodaw pagoda. The entire Buddhist Canon (“Bible”) is carved onto 729 marble slabs, each in their own little building.

Here is the biggest working bell in the world. After an earthquake, they got a Scottish engineer to raise the bell again. It wasn’t Alexander Graham Bell though, he was busy inventing the telephone.

You ring a bell at the pagoda when you’ve done a good deed. The idea is that it then encourages other people.

After Mingun, the next visit was to the Shwenandaw Golden Monastery.

Myanmar has lots of gold mines and there seems to be no shortage of gold to decorate the pagodas with. The locals are generally poor but buy gold leaf and stick it on to the Buddha statue. There are now already 5 tonnes of gold leaf on the Buddha here. That is already worth $200 million!

We went to the factory to see how the gold leaf is made.

Next was the rubber plantation.

At night we went to the restaurant in town on the back of a Karaoke truck.

From Mandalay, we then took a full day’s boat ride on the Ayeyarwady river to Bagan.