Ngapali, another paradise (but not exactly during off season)

Our dream trip came to an end today, as we left Ngapali.

Ngapali Beach was very recently named the best beach in Asia. I would describe it as a jungle at the beach. It includes vast empty beaches, an endless greenish sea, a few good looking waterfront resorts and very dense tropical vegetation occupying all the remaining empty spaces. It’s gorgeous and it’s relaxing. We just did not come in the right time of the year.

Our days in Ngapali were more eventful than expected. To start with, as I mentioned before, we had booked an hotel elsewhere. Thus, we spent a couple of hours looking for our (inexistent) hotel, and then trying to book another one. We ended up staying at Amata Resort & Beach, where two friends of ours from Portugal were staying as well. The hotel could potentially be awesome during season. We truly believe so. However, our experience on the first days was not the best. Half of the hotel was closed and covered in blue and green fabrics to protect it against the rain, making it look quite decadent. The weather was not great either. The wifi barely worked, which killed my plans of reviewing my French skills for my exam this Thursday. On top of it all, we found a bug in our toilet on our second night at the resort…

We ended up leaving the hotel one day in advance, as flights back to Yangon were all busier than expected and we could not book one for the 23rd. Thankfully, our last morning in Ngapali proved us how this place is very close to being paradise. Everything looked much more beautiful in the sun. The sea's temperature was perfect, as well as its  amount of waves. We were served breakfast outside, by the sea. We even worked out with the most amazing views! What a morning and what a way of finishing our vacations in Myanmar!

It’s time to move on to Singapore! Let it all begin!

Btw, this is how I will be looking everyday after working out in this crazy weather...!!!

Sacred Bagan

The third stop of this lifetime trip was the temple town, Bagan, in Central Myanmar. Bagan is a green vast area, framed by the calm Ayeyarwady river, surrounded by distant silver mountains, and interrupted everywhere by two-three thousands Buddhist temples. It’s beautiful, it’s unique and it’s one of the greatest archeological sites in the world, although it still does not have the amount of visitors that equally important historical sites typically have. Yet, it is definitely the most touristy area in Myanmar.

Bagan was good to us. We stayed at a quite good hotel, which, by itself, made every thing better. The hotel had an amazing infinity pool in line with the temples, a 13-storey tower (the only tower in Bagan) with a restaurant and a viewpoint, great margaritas, good food, extremely good service and very decent rooms. It even had a small fitness center, which I visited once. Working out in Asia is much more difficult than at home – the weather is way too hot and humid.

We got ourselves two electrical bikes and freely explored the area. No tour guide, no schedules to follow, no obligation to go to all the big touristy temples. Just us, our e-bikes, and a few good tips from friends and Lonely Planet! We visited dozens of temples, climbed up to the top of a few of them and passed through hundreds of others. We talked to many local ladies and gentlemen, who tried to sell their products to us. We sweated most of the time too, apart from the times we were driving our e-bikes, enjoying a smooth breeze. We ate local food without knowing what we were eating. We were happy in Bagan! It is incredibly beautiful and imponent...

A few years ago, Unesco tried to make Bagan part of the World Heritage, while it was still under a strict dictatorship. Unfortunately, that did not go through and the effects of Bagan not being World Heritage can be noticed already. In fact, Myanmar’s government has been renewing temples and monuments with inadequate materials, allowed for the construction of a golf course in the middle of many temples and of a 13-storey tower in a hotel (actually our hotel), and even built paved roads very close to temples, connecting the four local villages in the region. None of this should be happening within such na important archeological site.

As per usual, this stop had to include an atypical event. During our second day in Bagan, we left the hotel on our e-bikes around noon to explore the area. It was a super duper hot day. The temples' floors would burn our feet and we had to stop for water every once in a while. Before 4 pm, when we were quite far away from the hotel, and about to have visited all the spots on our wish-list, my e-bike decided to die. For about 1h30, Gorda had to pull my e-bike while driving his. He would leave my e-bike go down by itself downhill and pull it uphill and in straight roads. Quite an adventure! And quite a workout for him! As a bonus, he awarded himself with many margueritas and a generous dessert at the hotel’s infinity pool.

What happened next may be related to the amount of margueritas he drank. It was about time for us to leave Bagan and we still had not booked anything. After some research, we decided we wanted to go to Ngapali – the best beaches in the country. I started organizing the flights and asked him to look for a decent-not-to-expensive hotel. I left him at the swimming pool so that I could negotiate and buy our flight tickets (Bagan-Yangon and Yangon-Thandwe). He met me at the reception and presented me a very decent hotel, in front of the beach, which seemed to match what we had in our minds. I decided to book it too.

When we arrived in Thandwe the following day, we got a taxi and asked the driver to take us to Emerald Sea Resort. The guy started driving us through an awful road. After over 20 minutes, we arrived at a closed hotel whose name didn’t even match Emerald Sea. We told the taxi driver that was not our hotel and he took us to another hotel so that someone there could tell us where our hotel actually was. In such hotel, we were told to go in the exact opposite direction. There we were, in the taxi, on an awful road, again. We passed through the airport, drove for quite a long time, and the taxi driver stopped again in another hotel, whose name still did not match Emerald Sea. We were starting to get a bit annoyed with all that…

We asked the reception where our hotel was and understood that Gorda had booked a hotel room in the wrong place, in another district, not reachable from Thandwe!!! Gorda, Ngwe Saung Beach and Ngapali Beach are not the same…! Also, our booking was non-refundable so we ended up paying 2 different hotel rooms for 4 nights in a row, in two different locations, and just enjoyed one of them… I guess we will look back at this in a couple of weeks and laugh about it. When it happened, it was not that funny at all.

Love from Ngapali Beach,

Marta

Lovely Inle Lake

The second stop of our trip around Myanmar was Inle Lake, and its primitive beauty.

Inle Lake is a large lake somewhere close to the center of the country. The lake is quite vast, and has no exact border to the land. It includes stilt-house villages, quite a few islands, countless temples and monasteries, floating gardens, and is surrounded by a set of mountains, very dense in vegetation. The scenery could not be more beautiful.

To explore the region, Gorda and I took a one-day boat trip, just the two of us and the boat captain. Captain is certainly not the right word to characterize the person who drove our boat today - a young local man (boy?), dressed in sportswear, with a few tattoos on his arms and a earring in his right ear, who barely spoke English or actually did not speak English at all. The truth is that he knew where to stop and we were able to figure out what each stop was ourselves. The trip was amazing!

The first part of the boat trip allowed us to see fishermen and their unique technique of leg-rowing - which consists of balancing themselves in just one leg and wrapping the other leg around the blade, driving it through the water more effectively, while using their hands to fish. It also led us through small water channels, were locals would bath themselves and their animals (we saw, for instance, a man brushing his cow), wash their clothes, sell products in flat bottom boats, or simply commute between regions.

The second part of the boat trip allowed us to hop at different locations to:
   - visit a lovely local market, where we could hardly identify many of the goods being sold and only saw two tourists besides ourselves;
   - contemplate more temples (most of them golden);
   - visit a lovely peaceful monastery, with the most amazing views;
   - have a cheap local lunch in a stilt-house restaurant;
   - get to understand what these people live from (textile, tabaco, jewelry, iron, and a few other industries, agriculture, fishing, and tourism, still in na initial stage of progress) and learn a bit about their (quite primitive) techniques;
   - date a lot, think a lot, laugh a lot.

The hops included Phaung Daw Oo (a bit of a disappointment), Nga Hpe Kyaung (beautiful!), In-phaw kon village, Naung-taw village, Nam-pan village, and Ywa-ma, among others.

Last but not least, I need to tell you about our priceless experiences at Heho airport. We first fell in love with Heho airport when we arrived on Monday. We left our turbo-helice airplane on foot and were given umbrellas to protect ourselves from the light rain. The terminal was a small box, with an immigration control desk (one person), one information desk (with one person, but only right after each flight arrives), a toilet (with a lady that kindly gives us toilet paper, and opens and closes the water tab for us), and one or two airline counters (not all of them opened). We found it remarkable, however, that such terminal had free wifi!

Our best experience at the airport only happened today, the day of the departure. We had asked our hotel concierge to pre-book us two flights for Bagan. As we arrived to the airport, we went straight to the airline counter but were told we should buy the tickets at the check-in desk instead. At the check-in desk, we tried to pay with credit card and were first told that would not be possible. After a few phone calls, one of the three ladies helping us concluded we would be able to pay with credit card, if we waited a couple of minutes. A fourth lady then arrived with the credit card machine, turned off. The four of them tried to turn in on, as they spoke on the phone with someone that I believe that should be their “IT support”. The credit card machine showed a few technical messages, which ne of the four ladies would read to the IT support. As it stopped showing messages, ready to receive my payment, they tried to insert my credit card in a few artistic ways, listening carefully to instructions via cell phone. After a few interesting minutes, I asked if I could help. I inserted my credit card correctly, introduced the correct amount, inserted my pin (with eight eyes seeing my pin as well), pressed the green button and it all worked. They were all very pleased and impressed. Gorda and I had a blast. Finally, we got our boarding passes and our sticky on the chest to prove that we had done the check-in. However, could not leave the check-in desk without being asked for my credit card number again. They thought they had to introduce my credit card number on the computer, instead of our booking reference. I said I should not have share my credit card number with them. Another phone call to the IT service, lots of vows, and we were free to go!

This post could not finish without mentioning another remarkable part of this trip to Inle Lake: the most incredible sunset ever. 

And now it's time for Bagan!

   

Our one-day experience in Yangon

We just had an unforgettable/ unbelievable experience in Yangon. We knew Yangon was not exactly a touristic destination. Still, we decided to give it a try. One day could never be too much… But it kind of was. The only reason why it was not too much time was because it taught us quite a lot about Myanmar people and history.

We arrived around 11 am on Sunday, August 14th. Our hotel was close to the only real worth-visiting spot in Yangon, which we were advised to preferably visit during sunrise or sunset – Shwedagon Pagoda. As so, we decided to get a feeling of the city during the day, go to bed early and visit Shwedagon for sunrise the following morning.

What did we see? We saw taxis without taximeters, bikes with bike-sides, people with painted faces and friendly smiles, and many street markets where merchants would sell from flowers to vegetables, from fresh fish and meet to a variety of cooked dishes, from gifts to religious decorative items. We also saw both men and women in long skirts, plenty of monks, quite a few temples, chaotic traffic, cars having clear priority over people, very dirty streets, generators in front of most buildings and not-so-stable electrical cables. We listened to an endless number of car beeps and a few religious songs. We smelled the typical smell of poor and polluted cities. Yangon’s smell made me think about Luanda more than once…

We walked quite a lot, visited Park Kandawgyi, saw a few sites and took the Circle Train that passed through most neighborhoods around Yangon. The Circle Train is a 3-hour train mainly used by low income people, as it costs $0,2 per trip. People would look at us as if we were ET. They would smile every time our eyes crossed and the few 2 or 3 that spoke English asked us where we were from. No one knew where Portugal was, but one knew Cristiano Ronaldo. It was quite a humbling trip – we saw tons of really poor yet happy people, and very bad living conditions. As a funny fact, let me tell you that one of the train stops was at a golf course – there are two in Yangon! And we saw a Tailormade store too.

We failed at going to a nice hotel by the river which usually has interesting expositions about Myanmar as it was under renovation. To finish the day right, we had lunch/ dinner at a cool laid-back restaurant, definitely made for expats and tourists (the few ones that exist).

This morning, the alarm clock rang at 5:30 so that we could visit the Shwedagon Pagoda. We failed the sunrise, but it was still a worth-visiting trip, as you can check in the golden pictures below. After that, we had breakfast at the hotel, I worked-out while Gorda slept again and we came to the airport quite some time ahead of our domestic flight. The experience at the airport was surreal – no one at the check-in at first, manual scales to weight the luggage, some stickies on our chest to ensure we had already done the check-in, liquids allowed in security gates, nothing but chairs waiting for us after the security gates.

Time to move to Inle Lake!

Mixed feelings

Who has ever wanted something really bad but, when it becomes real, felt butterflies in the stomach? That's kind of how I have been feeling in the past few days about leaving home. Again.

I am 25 years old and life could not go smoother. I have a great year ahead. Truly. Still, it was not easy to leave home today.

So what's happening this year?

• An MBA at INSEAD - #1 MBA in the world according to FT
• Getting to live in two different places - Singapore until the end of February and Fontainebleau until late June
• Loooooots of traveling, as I am planning to visit Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines and Indonesia until late February
• Plenty of networking
• New friends
• Lots of learning
• The opportunity to think about my professional future and what I imagine myself doing in the long term
• Getting married to my dear Gorda Velha (which means Old Fat Lady and is my boyfriend's nickname) - and all the necessary wedding preparation
• A bachelorette party
• A honeymoon
• Some super efficient studying to allow all the above

Isn't it a great year ahead? It is. Did I not feel butterflies in my stomach? I did. Actually, I felt butterflies in the stomach, tears in my eyes and one or two restless nights.

Why's that? Is it because life's so good at home? Is it because Portugal is a special place? Is it because my family rocks (and that includes my own family and my future family too)? Is it because we have a new house to prepare? Is it because Gorda won't stay long in Singapore with me? Is it because I don't want to leave my friends behind or become behind myself? Is it just inertia?

It's probably a bit of it all. What I have to think today - the first day of this great year ahead - is that all this will be waiting for me at home and welcome me in less than 11 months, when I will be a MBA graduate, more open-minded, more cultured, more knowledgeable, even more of a grown-up, with even more unforgettable friends.

It feels good to be writing again...!

Will keep you posted,

Marta