It’s hard to know where to start, because Myanmar is a country that both Mod and I have wanted to visit for a long time, individually before we met. We had very few concrete expectations, but a lot of unspoken hope that this would be something amazing, even if we weren’t sure what the amazing things would be. What would the people be like? What about the food? And what does the countryside itself look like?
The answer to all of these the same: Amazing.
Walking down the street, people grin and shout hello, or “Mingalaba!” They are so helpful to the point where it’s almost awkward. Once, we arrived in a city too late to eat dinner anywhere and the receptionist just gave us some of her own bread that she had in a bag. Waiters laughed and showed me how to properly mix in the pickled vegetables and chili sauce that come with Shan Noodle Soup, a delicious concoction of sticky noodles, some minced fried meat, and some delicious broth.
Everyone is always smiling. It makes the people beautiful in our eyes, especially when they have Tanaka (a sandalwood paste used as a sunblock) painted on their cheeks and noses. It’s like magical face paint, turning gold on your skin.
The people are beautiful, except when they are chewing a Betel Leaf with fermented tobacco. It stains their teeth and saliva red, so that they look like they have a bloody mouth, which is more spooky than anything else.
At least once a day, we stop to take a milk tea. It’s hot, sweet, and delicious. Every one we had was a bit different, but our favorite was one that tasted almost chocolatey in Yangon. We have some communication issues in this country, as people just say, “Yes,” to all our questions at the local restaurants, but in the end we are always happy with what we get.
There are so many temples, pagodas, and stupas to see in Myanmar. Shwedagon Golden Temple is one of the most sacred sites for practicing Buddhists in this country, crowned with a giant golden stupa in the middle of many smaller (but no less ornate) temples. Buddhas statues smile, recline, and mediate, as do his followers. Even small children sit quietly on their knees and bow their heads to show respect.
Yangon has a Chinatown, and if you wander over to 19th street, you’re met with a strip of restaurants that look more like a night market than anything else. Each one packed and the smoky smell of barbecued meats fills the air. Anthony Bourdain came here with CNN and raved. Did I mention there’s also a place on this street with mojitos for under a buck? We are so in.
The problem is that we want to eat everything. Do we want the pork or the marinated chicken and what about a plate of dumplings? There are some skewers of mystery meat that are really popular and surely we should eat a vegetable of some sort, for our health? We load up a plastic basket with too much food so the restaurant can grill it off, while we do the hard work of drinking beer and waiting.
Verdict: Worth the wait.
It’s 5am, I’m leaving alone for Kyaiktiyo where Golden Rock stands. Bo needs some rest from the buses, so she’ll take more time exploring Yangon’s markets.
I’m the only foreigner on the bus, and a monk invites me for a tea at one of the many bus stops. His English is limited, but he says he’s going to the same place as pelirinage. He offers me a Betel leaf package, which is what everybody is chewing, spitting red. I arrive in the small village at the bottom of the Golden Rock mountain at 11am, climb it, and wander for the afternoon around the summit, waiting for the sunset.
I come back hoping Bo is well-rested, because she’s decided to come with me on her first multiple-day trek. We take a night bus to Kalaw, a village in the mountainous area where we are going to start a two-day tour to Inle Lake. On the way, we have a dinner of Shan noodles, which Bo tried without me in Yangon. It comes with pickled vegetables and chilis, and it’s delicious.
Let me tell you, I am not a trekker. I do not trek. I don’t think I can emphasize that enough. So, marching through the countryside between Kalaw and Inle Lake sounds like a disaster. Mod has been training me, guilting me into going to the gym to be “in shape for traveling,” which was code for “decreasing the odds that Bo will make that face and be grumpy.”
I don’t like trekking, but I love the things we are seeing on this trip. The fields are colorful with pink, red, and yellow, ripe for harvesting. The earth is reddish brown, making the greens seem greener. The people are smiling as they lay their peppers out to dry. Lee and Matt, a couple we were trekking with, keep trying to taste everything. “Can you eat that?” Lee asks our guide for the third time. “No, we do not eat that,” he replies, amused. Mod talks about wanting to eat potatoes, I mention I miss guacamole and before you know it, we’re hungry and hightailing it through the last three kilometers of our 18-kilometer day.
The end of the first day brings us to a guest house where we drink rum, play a card game called “Shithead,” and get to know each other. Another trekking group arrives as well. We have dinner, which consists of some typical dishes, including an amazing eggplant curry. Then, the fries appear. Fries! We joke that Mod must have prayed to the potato god before we eat everything.
It gets cold in the hills at night, so our guide Melvin and the others start a bonfire. We drink and sing songs while trying to avoid the sparks. Herds of buffalo walk by with their owners at night; they are headed to Thailand illegally, where they will fetch a better price. The rum is gone and it’s a struggle not to buy another bottle. We know that tomorrow is another day of trekking so we decide to be good and go to sleep early.
For breakfast, we eat toast and guacamole. GUACAMOLE? It turns out that Melvin is the potato god and the guacamole god. Just when I’m starting to warm up to this day, it starts raining. Mud is slippery and it’s everywhere, especially anytime we have to go downhill. We are drenched and painted brown when we arrive at the end of our destination. Did I mention we’re cold? We have a simple lunch of noodles, down some beer and then hop on a boat across Inle Lake to get to our hotel.
Our hotel is not happy to see us but they try not to show it. You can’t even see the color of our shoes because they are so slicked down with mud. We are leaving small piles of brown everywhere we walk. We ask the hotel to do some laundry for us, but everywhere in Myanmar they do it by hand, so it comes back all orange. Mod’s white shirt is beige now, which makes him sad. We resolve to do laundry as soon as we leave the country, cost be damned.
We are staying in a city called Nyaungshwe, from where we can take a boat tour of the other small villages on the lake. Lee and Matt join us and we visit some temples and stupas, a silver workshop, a local market and the floating gardens, which are fields of tomatoes and other vegetables floating above the lake itself.
All over the lake, there are fisherman at work. They drop their net or basket into the water, then smash their paddles on the surface of the water to scare the fish into their trap. Most boats have motors now, but some fisherman go old school, using their foot and a paddle to navigate their boat. It’s especially magical to see them on the lake during the sunset.
We have a few drinks, some dinner and then it’s time to say goodbye for now. Matt and Lee are off to other adventures, and so are we.
Dhammayangyi, the biggest pagoda in Bagan smells musty. It’s floor is sharp with pebbles, and we can feel each one, as shoes are not allowed inside holy sites. Bats and pigeons fly over our heads as we strain to see the carvings and artwork on the walls through the darkness. A bit of light filters in, allowing us to see slivers of what we’re walking through.
“This is poo,” I say.
Mod is, to say the least, confused. I clarify.
“These aren’t pebbles. We’re walking on dried poo,” I say clearly. And then I start laughing, because what else can you do?
We walk on, taking things in stride. We’re going to be walking through as many of these payas and pagodas as we can. We zip around on our electric scooter, wearing cotton masks on our face, stopping whenever we find something new we want to see, a place we want to explore, or a pagoda to climb to watch the sun set.
Bagan is a place you must go if you travel to Myanmar.
Mod and I are not morning people. But to catch the magic of the sunrise from one of the highest pagodas, you’ve got to wake up at 5 a.m. and leave as soon as you can. We wait in the cold for the light to slowly creep up the horizon and when it does, the hot air balloons are released for the tourists to whom cost and vertigo are no challenge. The light smolders over thousands of temples, which we set off to explore after the sunrise.
Around 8 a.m., we go back to the hotel for breakfast and set off again. When the sun gets too hot, we rest and recharge our e-bike, hopping back on it to catch the sunset.
Matt and Lee, our friends from the Kalaw/Inle Lake trek, warned us about “temple overdose.” Every site was different and beautiful in its own way, but after three days we have to admit that we were not too sad to jump on a bus for Mandalay.
It’s hard to love a big city in the beginning, Mod and I always say. And so it is with Mandalay, a gritty city with delicious food, hustling locals and the stench of every day life (and sewage) depending on where you go. We visit the Royal Palace, which is huge in theory, but most of it is off limits. We can see that families live within the old walls in the restricted sections, but who they are and why they are there remains a mystery to us.
We watch the sunset on Mandalay Hill, which is a place young monks come to practice their English with foreigners. There are small mirrors tiled in the walls, so the light catches beautifully.
We take a day trip around the neighboring villages, which is lovely. We start the day by visiting a giant monastery in Amarapura in time to see the monks line up to eat their lunch. They eat around 10:30/11 a.m. and it’s their last meal of the day. They’ll eat again around sunrise the next morning. There are little boys and old men with their bowls, and religious visitors place small cash into the monk’s begging bowls for good luck.
Next, we head to Inwa, a small village that has a couple of interesting sites. We first visit a teak monastery with beautiful carvings. The smell of the old wood inside reminds Mod of his father’s watermill back in Belgium. Next, we see another monastery that is made of bricks. There are young couples making out everywhere. Mod is surprised, but I don’t think that there are a lot of places for young couples to go on a “date,” so this makes sense to me. I think in my parents’ generation in Korea, people went up to the mountains on a trek. Youth always finds a way.
We end our day watching the sun set on U Bein’s bridge. The silhouette of the wooden bridge is impressive, and only accentuated by an ice cold beer.
I’m not sure why, but I’ve agreed to another trek. “Oh, my trekker,” says Mod excitedly as he reads about Hsipaw, our next destination. This small town is situated in the Shan region, which is currently a tumultuous area. But the hill tribes are supposed to be beautiful, and we’re supposed to see more culture on this trek than the last, so we sign up.
We rest up for a day in the town, waking up at 3 a.m. to see the night market, which is lit by candle light (and a few small lamps). This is the local market that people shop at before they have to go to work, and so it opens from 2:30-6 a.m. The magic of it is the flickering candlelight, which catches on the sleepy eyes of the sellers. This market smells fresh and clean, most likely because it’s so cold. We sleep a few more hours then meet up with our friends Lee and Matt, who have trekked in a similar area and are down to eat and explore the village.
We spend much effort trying to locate the noodle factory to no avail, so we head over to the Shan Palace and hear about the sad story of the Sao Kya Hseng, the Hsipaw Prince. Mrs. Fem, the wife of Mr. Donald (who was not at the residence at the time we were there), gives us the history of the family and tells us how she came to live in this colonial-style mansion that was the home Hseng before he was “disappeared” sometime after 1962. There is a book “Twilight Over Burma,” written by the wife of Hseng if you want to learn more. Hearing this story from a living relative was truly magical. We were quickly brought back down to earth though after a man was bitten by one of the guard dogs, so we headed back into town for some sticky Shan Noodles (Mod was on a mission), many beers, a football game playing on the television at the local neighborhood joint, and of course, Shithead.
The Hsipaw trek is more challenging in that it’s more of an uphill battle. Our guide is a 20-year-old local whose charmingly funny. He keeps us going at a good pace and explains the local life to us. The first thing we must know, is that his people are Palaung, an ethnic minority and hill tribe in Myanmar. The language is different and the people are friendly. The second thing we learn is that every Palaung person grows and processes tea to sell in the market. People work all day in the fields to gather the tea leaves, dry and steam them, then separate out the good quality black team from the lower quality green tea. A day’s work earns you about $2-3, explains Nipo, who says he picks tea when he’s not a guide, though he much prefers his guide work.
We are sleeping at Nipo‘s cousin’s sister’s house tonight. The family is sorting the tea leaves while the children swarm around us to look at our cameras. Some mustier tea leaves are getting ready to start the fermentation process for tea leaf salad. We drink beer and eat dinner, struggling not to fall asleep before 8 p.m.
Day two of the trek is harder, as our legs are sore. The reward for the end of the trek is … SHAN NOODLE SOUP! Mod is so happy, I think he would do the trek again just for that. The fresh noodles are very sticky and pleasant, and we eat two bowls each.
We take the train from Hsipaw to Mandalay, which is famous because of the old wooden bridge which is very high up on the mountains. It’ll be worth it, Mod assures me as we start our 11 hour train ride. At most points, it’s like a roller coaster; the cars bounce around and rock a lot. We pass beautiful fields and stop often. I am thirsty, so at a small station I walk out of the train to buy a milk tea. As I turn back, I see the train has started and I have to run then jump onto the stairs to catch it. Mod nearly has a heart attack until he sees me walk through the aisle, safely on board.
14 hours into our 11 hour train ride and we arrive back in Mandalay. We are only here to rest for a bit as our plane is the next morning. As we head to the airport we agree that this is the most beautiful country we’ve seen so far. Definitely our favorite.
All pictures: https://goo.gl/photos/jxrxgDfVwirkkpYLA