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!