Landed in Yangon in a A320, but we touched down in what appeared to be a cow paddock. The smell of people wafts over me as i approach passport control. For a moment it is like papaya and oil in my nostrils.
Saturday, 24 December. Sunny.
Beyond customs is a small gathering of taxi drivers with red stained smiles, that same woody fruity breath. I don’t wait to settle on their high price but I know it is now a race between me and the fellow travellers on the plane. I give into the badgering of John, a short but well fed fellow with a red stained smile and laughing buddha eyes. He has his own driver and a rusted out van of which I am the sole passenger. There seems to be only cars, bicycles with sidecars and no motorbikes in Yangon. This is the town where Corollas and Sunnies come to die, their rusted out, held together with electrical tape, suspension coils with no memory of the youthful spring. Used by date already 20 years past.
I meet a girl, Yvette, at the Okinawa Guest House, a single serving friend. We walked around to a tea house where the food is laid out before you and take what you like — different from the Yum Cha in HK where you chase the lady with the cake cart. Cigarettes are bought by the piece, laid out in a holder , like the cake. Price for 2 ppl – 2700 Khat.
The food looks and tastes like Cantonese cake but there are also friend vegetable samosa. Yvette is a hotel consultant on vacation, American-born, chatty and energetic – it’s easy to follow her around for the day, a camera always appearing every few minutes to snap a few pics.
The Shwe Dagon Pagoda campus is huge, towering above the rest of the city. The guide, Win, is chatty but boring, the Pagoda is magnificent but gaudy – gold leafed and shimmery. A thousand images of buddha sit or lie in shrines around the base of the pagoda. LED lights flashing and swirling like so many street food carts.
Amazing pagodas of old, tea carving that are startling in their complexity, and new pagodas, shiny mirrors adorned, or tin sheds that betray an austerity and an absence of craftsmanship but built none the less because a rich man sponsored(willed?) it into existence.
The taxi drivers are so reluctant to bargain to local rates, adding 50-100% to the fare. But we go to Feel Restaurant for some buffet Myanmar food. The sweets are chinese (mooncakes) and indian (gulag jamon). The curries spicy and oily.
The beggars, though young and desperate are disposed to converse after a failed sale with talk of the their city and lives, most come from over the river to hunt for tourists – all of them sell postcards and can’t go to school, which apparently costs 3 dollars per semester. The old buildings surviving from the British are stately high ceilinged palaces, falling apart, rotting away.
The Strand is Beautiful. (no pictures, sorry.)