When people ask me what my favourite country is, of course I say well, it's difficult, they're all so different! But really, I have kind a favourite for certain things like food, scenery etc. As an overall country to visit, Myanmar is most definitely my favourite. Gorgeous countryside, beautiful ancient sites and genuine, lovely people. I recommend it to anyone, and actually want to go back myself since my experience was a bit...unique.
Basically, I picked the worst/best time to go, depending on who you ask. Burmese new year, known as Thingyan, was April 13-16th this year. I was in Myanmar April 8th to 18th. This means I had four, fun-filled days of crazy water "fighting", kind of. In the big cities they set up stages with live music and giant power hoses, ready to soak the (usually drunken) people riding around in the back of pick-up truck-type things. In the smaller towns, people (mostly kids and young adults or adults with them) grab buckets, water guns, garden hoses or whatever they can find, set up camp on the side of the road and wait for cars, buses. motorbikes, bikes and even pedestrians to go by so that they can douse them as throughly as possible. I got to be the douser and dousee many, many times and while it's amazing fun and everyone is in such good spirits, you really have to be a good sport about it, even if you have your camera on you, your giant backpack with everything you own etc. I had no problems, really, but it was a sliight relief when I could safely open my window on the train again.
The celebrations also made getting around a bit more difficult, since everyone was flooding by bus, train and car out of the cities beforehand, and back in afterward. Bus service also halted completely during the festival. For me, this meant changing my schedule quite a lot and basically a mad scramble to get where I wanted, since I was also short on time.
Since I'm a bit behind in blogging, I'll sum up the places I visited.
I flew in to Yangon, stayed at the most expensive hostel I've ever been to because I hadn't fgured out the cheap ones aren't bookable online, saw the famous giant pagoda (like a city!), freaked out because getting anywhere seemed impossible, made a friend with an extra bus ticket and left for Kalaw.
Kalaw is an adorable little town, famous for trekking to/from Inle Lake, which I had no time for. Instead, I explored the hillside villages.
Took the local bus to Mandalay, sat next to a lovely university student who was very eager to practice English and show me around Mandalay. Sadly, I couldn't find him on Facebook to keep in touch.
Found an affordable hotel in Mandalay, rushed off to catch sunset at U Bein Bridge, chatted with some cool tourists then joined them for dinner. Next day, Mandalay Hill. Thought I made it about 4 or 5 times before reaching the real summit, then rushed down to go catch my bus to Bagan.
Bagan is beautiful!! If I'd had more time, would've stayed to catch sunset every day at the field of pagodas. Over 3000 of them!
Back to Mandalay, failed daytrip to Pyin Oo Lwin, night train to Yangon where I hung out and caught a plane back to bangkok.
Phew! That was Myanmar in a very small nutshell. A crazy wet whirlwind of an adventure, to be continued another day!
