Hpa An to Yangon
Jeffrey and I took off on the same bus heading north only to meet up with a honeymooning couple from England and their father who had joined them for a short spell. The three were heading to Yangon and at this point had plans to go to a few hours out of Yangon and stay a night where a monk is supposed to have reincarnated into a snake. The snake is supposedly 4 or 5 meters and eats 20 pounds of chicken a week. I love snakes but something didn’t feel right I think it was the fact that I’d have to get an accommodation and then get back on a bus the following day. I opted for continuing on to Rangoon. (I use both Yangon and Rangoon and Burma and Myanmar interchangeably. The people may live in Myanmar but if you ask them they are Burmese and they speak Burmese.) Jeffrey wanted to go to the Golden Rock Pagoda and stay in the town below that is considerably cheaper but he would have to climb up and down the thousand plus stairs. I hope he made it. Cheers Alfred.
The three English and myself hoped in a taxi at the bus station and headed into Yangon. Shared taxi, tuk-tuk, tours, etc. is the way to go. It brings the costs down considerably. Once again I didn’t have a reservation for a guesthouse so I just cruised along for the ride into town and low and behold they were a few doors down from the Cherry Guest House where I had stayed on my arrival. It’s a challenge to find cheap accommodations and in Burma you just have to ‘Bite The Bullet’.
Two nights in Yangon would allow me enough time to set up arrangements for Mandalay and get on with it. At this point I had heard mixed reports about Mandalay; ‘dirty’, ‘nothing special’, ‘lots of garbage’, ‘just another jump off point’, that kind of comment. I don’t remember it that way at all so now I had to go see for myself. I had made arrangements to meet up with a Nepali guide that was going to give me the heads up about Nepal and some side treks other than Everest and other popular treks I want something a little more remote and the two men I met in Moulmein from Colorado had spent almost three months in Nepal and had a lot of information for me and said the same thing, ‘Get away from the over-crowded treks. There are plenty more.’ The Nepal guide got held up elsewhere and I missed him.
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