After finally leaving sleazy/touristy Phuket we got the bus north to Ranong. It felt weird not to be cycling. Our next stop was the lovely quiet and un-touristy Prachuap Khiri Khan, where we hung out with the locals for a few days and enjoyed sampling the food at the night market.
We then made our way to soggy Bangkok to get our Myanmar visas. Thailand has suffered the worst flooding for 50 years but luckily we managed to get around OK and on 20th October we boarded our plane to Yangon, Myanmar.
We arrived in the evening and immediately loved Yangon. Myanmar has a very strong culture and is the least westernised of the SE Asian countries. There are no McDonalds or Starbucks or people with mobile phones. Bliss! The people we met were extremely friendly and all wanted to know where we were from.
On our first day we went to visit the wonderful Shwedagon Pagoda, which is 2500 years old and has 82 buildings to explore. The original pagoda was built to house 8 hairs from Buddha and was 66 feet high; now it's 326 feet high and is decorated with 3,154 gold bells and 79,569 diamonds and other precious stones. We employed Liddy as our guide and we spent hours wandering about. It's impossible for me to describe the scale and beauty of this special place. It's also a very peaceful place to visit.
Below is the the enormous bell that the English tried to steal when they got kicked out. It ended up in the river and was damaged. The English tried to steal and did steal quite a few things from Myanmar.
Here's Nic getting some good luck by pouring water on a Buddha image and a guinea pig image. The day of the week that you were born on is very important in Buddhist Myanmar and a different animal represents each day (two for Wednesday). P.s. We have since found I was born on a Wednesday so am actually an Elephant (without tusks)!!
We loved Shwedagon so much that we went back after dark to see it all lit up. It's dazzling at night and we couldn't take our eyes off it. It's also a great place to hang out with the locals who arrive in the cool of the evening to pray, eat and enjoy time with their family and friends.
Here are some very bright and beautiful university students that we met. They wanted to practice their English and chat to us about England and our travels. We really enjoyed chatting with them and we swapped email addresses. Myanmar has only had gmail for about 1 year. They now also get world news. Things are very slowly changing in this extraordinary country. After 2 hours of chatting with these wonderful young people the fact that I'd broken my elbow and couldn't cycle for a while really didn't matter any more.
We did some more sight seeing and made use of the numerous Beer Stations, where you can meet some really great people. This is Ben and he's a real inspiration. A few years ago he suffered a massive stroke and it took him over a year to learn to talk and walk again. He is a very successful business man that lives in Jakarta but after his stroke he completely changed his life. He's been battling with the authorities in Indonesia for 20 years about building a temple for the Sikhs in his area and after his stroke he went in this wheel chair to see the officials and finally got the permission he needed. Since then he's also decided to build an international school. He's been travelling around SE Asia for over a year raising money and awareness about his project. We spent a few hours with Ben and found him to be wonderful company and very funny.
We also met this Indian man at the same Beer Station who entertained us with some Bhangra. He did some great moves with his specs! Life is lived on the streets here and it's never dull!
One of the things that we noticed when we were wandering about was people paying for typing. They also have telephones on a table in street that you can pay to use. The majority of people also use Thanaka, a yellow make-up that is made from the ground up bark of a tree and protects the skin from the sun. Many men (and some women) chew Betel nut, which is mixed with tobacco for about 30 minutes and then spat out. The juice they spit out (often whilst riding their motorbikes) is bright red, which is pretty disgusting. It also rots your teeth.
We loved our time in Yangon and then we set off on our first Burmese bus journey to get to Pyay.
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