Moulmein
I took a morning bus to Moulmein so I could see the countryside. From downtown Yangon the registered bus station I went to for a bus heading south was out of town and I got up at 6 am, packed and left. I arranged a taxi at the travel agent and it turned out to be the owner of the agency because his driver failed to wake up. It was $7,000 kyat, about $7 USD for the :45 minute ride with limited traffic. The bus left at 8:30 am and was to arrive 10 hours later if there were no delays. The bus seats are packed together and designed for smaller people so there is limited room. Stow your bag under the bus and keep all valuables on you because bags do periodically get opened or whatever like in any other country. The bus seat comes equipped with a small bottle of water and a plastic bag. Burmese people don’t seem terribly fond of traveling by bus and a few have a tendency to throw up, maybe more than a few. Beetle nut is another spitting habit that does not go away while on a bus and the habit seems to have caught on more than diminished as I would have expected from my time here in the passed. In Yangon there are many stalls that sell beetl-nut and gutters and streets are red with spit stains. It’s basically a green leaf, beetle nut and a paintbrush swipe of lye. The lye reacts with the Beetle nut for the desired stimulate affect. In the U.S. lye is used in the solidification of concrete for construction purposes. I don’t know how they put the two together. Anybody who has chewed beetle nut for any length of time has red stains around their teeth and mouth and stumped or missing teeth. Needless to say, this is not a desirable habit to pick up not even for a little while. It is similar to chewing tobacco in the States and has a tendency to burn hot on the inside lip and gum.
In Moulmein there are two bus stations, one with buses heading north and another with buses heading south. Be careful when you buy a ticket from one station because the bus still leaves from the direction you are going. The bus stations are not close together. I wanted to get a ticket heading further south and took a motorcycle taxi to the other station so I knew where it was and could find my way if need be. After buying the ticket to Dawei in two days I went to the Breeze Guest house. The price was $7/night and included breakfast, tea/coffee, boiled egg, and sheets of white toast. In Myanmar right now it appears that 50% of the travelers are French. The distances are far and many guesthouses are considerably over priced paying twice as they’re worth. Food and transport are fare value while hotel/guest house prices are extremely over-rated compared to Thailand. Travelers on a budget beware. I won’t be doing this again on my own dime and it will certainly reverberate through travelers. The Burmese government is expecting 4 million travelers next year. I doubt that very much.
The people that run the Breeze Guest house were as accommodating as they could be. I went to a Tiger Beer station to wash down the dust of the day and grab some cart food for dinner on the way. Moulmein is a boardwalk town along the eastern riverbank of the Salween River, one of the bigger rivers in Myanmar. The sunsets matched those over the Mekong with a big red ball sliding over the horizon across the street from the Breeze.
I made arrangements with a driver to take me to the largest reclining Buddha on the planet the following day and offered as a perk to take me to the Sunset Pagoda above the town that evening. In this Pagoda there is a Bamboo Buddha and apparently a tooth from the Buddha himself. This makes sense because Buddhism was introduced through the Mon people and I was clearly in Mon country with subtle changes to the Burmese language and elders speaking Mon. At sunset the Pagoda lite up in gold and sky grew into the dark.
My driver arrived promptly at 9 am and off we went for a half-day journey about 15 miles north to the reclining Buddha. I didn’t know what I was getting into but when I saw it I was impressed. It was a Buddha but it was also a massive building housing the story of the Buddha’s life and events that lead to his enlightenment. Some of the scenes are quite graphic. I think this Buddha is constantly under construction. Meanwhile they are building another one adjacent to it. This is no quick process. After a tour of the inside of the Buddha my driver took me to a Stupa that had been built on the top of a rock intrusion. There were approximately 522 stairs that I climbed in the heat of the day becoming thoroughly drenched in sweat. The view is spectacular. I saw a funny sign on the way up. I later spoke with some English girls one of them had climbed the same stairs and also saw the sign and we laughed briefly. She went on to say that the reason the sign is there is because women menstruate.
I went back to the Breeze and enjoyed the sunset. I also signed up for a boat trip to Ogre Island in the middle of the Salween River. This is primarily a Mon island with staples of rice farming, fishing and a stack of cottage industries varying but almost exclusively using bamboo as their medium. There were a couple others that were wood carvers, furniture makers, and palm sugar treats. The ride was bumpy from the back of a tuk-tuk but I enjoyed it. We had lunch in a monastery and that was close to the end of the ride. We back tracked towards the port town and took off back to the sunset town of Moulmein by 430pm. My ticket south was that evening to Dawei at 730. I also found out that the permit line on many maps doesn’t exist. Tourists are coming up from as far south as entry allows and on buses and boats. I figured I’d go to Dawei and then back to Moulmein for a break from the bus. Dawei is next.
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