A Blast to the Past in Myanmar

I'm not gonna lie, I knew little to nothing about Myanmar (formerly known as Burma) before heading there last month. I was interested in the place because it came so highly recommended by many of my friends who have traveled there, but everyone seems to put this ticking time clock on it. They say things like, "You gotta get there soon, or else it's going to be hit by tourism."

"Right now, it's amazing; off the beaten path and untouched by Western tourists," she said.

"I don't know how much longer it will be like that," they warned. This made me grow more and more anxious about not visiting with each month that flew by.

However, by the time we got there, it was not too late. We seemed to have transported a bit into the past as well as into a culture very foreign to my own and what I have experienced so far in my travels. Myanmar is a place where I don't fit in. Everything about the way I look/dress/live is foreign to them if not flat out backwards.

Western style and popular fashion trends have not yet reached this country. Women walk around wearing a combination of colors and patterns that most likely clash or are overly loud with design both on their shirts and long conservative skirts. Think red checkered on top and teal floral on bottom just to give you an idea. The men also don't seem to mind any sort of mis-match either. They also walk around with long floor length skirts and, I'm assuming, whatever shirt they grabbed first out of their closet. They wear these "skirts" wrapped around either shorts or pants like a towel after a shower; most of them are some form of plaid.

I at first thought they wore them for comfort and breath-ability, but Lee noticed one guy who undid the "knot" on his skirt and opened it wide to re-adjust it. Once opened, Lee saw that the man had normal pants on underneath. What is the point of that? We are unsure because layering up is akin to torture in this hot and humid country. We debated all week the purpose and then chalked it up to religion.

On top of the unique fashion trends, most people walk around with what looks like dried mud on their faces. Painting circles on their cheeks is most common, but some choose to color in the "T" zone and others cover the face entirely. This was also something we couldn't quite get a straight answer for as to why, and our tour guide said many different reasons, but mainly for beauty. He also informed us that it is actually wood, which was pretty much the last resource on Earth that I would have guessed it to be besides metal or magma. Evidently they ground the bark up from a certain tree and it gets turned into a paste, and then they sell it as a beauty product. I believe it also protects your from the sun, never-minding the tan lines. You see this most commonly on women and children, but men also don the paint as well. And, it is not just a countryside thing. Everyone is doing it, even in the capital.

Finally, my least favorite feature of the 'Burmese look' is that most of the men are constantly chewing and spitting a dark red tobacco. I would say mostly the middle to lower class men do this. Our taxi drivers would always open the door and spit every time the car was stopped. Places like bus stops, train stations and just streets in general have splatters of red spit all over the ground and the teeth of these men are dark reddish black all day long. I am unsure if that is the actual tobacco or if they are permanently stained that way. All of the men who worked in our hotels, servers at restaurants or tour guides were not seen chewing the stuff, so I must assume it is a trait of the lower class. I'll take the skirts and face paint all day long. I like it because it reminds me that I am in a different place, but the spitting was horrid.

All of these things which are totally unique to Myanmar only are what makes this place so interesting. They do not listen to Western music or even popular Asian music trends like K-Pop (Korean pop bands, usually an all girl or all guy group). Or at least I didn't notice it at any of the bars and the 6 hour bus ride that left at 7:00 am immediately blasted local love ballads all the way down to the beach at levels that rendered my own music and earbuds useless. The droning of the singer still permeated my headphones leaving me with the option to damage my ear drums and listen to two songs simultaneously or just watch the same sad love story play over and over again to the background of slightly different melodies. Each time the guy fell in love with the girl, and they had a great time together, and he played guitar for her, and then she left him for another man. Oh, the heartbreak.

It's just a country uninfluenced by the West. I cannot say that for other countries I have visited in Asia. They are just doing their own thing and that in itself makes Myanmar a place to visit, but I will tell you more about what I saw there and the hidden gems that are hidden in this country.

This is a country where religion is very, very prominent and every attraction listed is some sort of temple or pagoda. I probably saw 500 pagodas when I was there and this is not an exaggeration. Most of them were seen in Bagan, the religious capital of Myanmar, where it is said that even a widow can build a temple (i.e. she is very poor because she is a widow, but it is affordable enough to build a very tiny, tiny temple; many of which I have seen). And of course many wealthy families have built bigger temples there and then each former king has contributed his mark on Bagan by building one of the more elaborate and enormous temples with some of the biggest Buddhas I have ever seen inside all on account of his name and reign. Everyone wants their temple to be here on this holy land.

Here, Lee and I rented an electric bike because foreigners are not allowed to rent motorbikes and we drove around Old Bagan and New Bagan and went off-road to create our own tour through the holy grounds. The next day we got a tour guide who was a 20-year-old college student majoring in English. I must be getting older because when I first saw him, I thought he was about 14.

This is also a place very famous for its sunrises and sunsets over the vast landscape dotted with temples as far as the eye can see. At sunrise, maybe 30 hot air balloons go up with the sun which of course would be amazing to be a part of, but also makes for great pictures for us on the ground. Lee and I recently did a hot air balloon ride in Cappadocia, Turkey and didn't need to splurge again for another. It was actually more expensive in Myanmar than in Turkey. But anyways, this place is stunning. The sheer number of temples really creates an atmosphere that is a bit magical and you feel as if you have stumbled onto some secret that you're not supposed to know about. You can drive around silently on your e-bike without seeing people if you take the backroads and avoid the very famous temples. Not many tourist attractions can boast this feature. Most famous attractions that look beautiful in traveling magazines are most always overrun with tourists and vendors and so many things that remind you of the modern world instead of the ancient wonder it is, which makes it impossible to get the photo you want and the experience you thought you would have. But here, in Bagan, you still can until, of course, you go back into town.

The town of Bagan was probably the place which has been influenced the most by tourism in Myanmar and is the big hot spot for sightseeing. However, a place that usually is not visited by tourists is the beach. Even though Myanmar has a huge coastline that stretches all the way down its west coast and then turns into a peninsula at the bottom, most who visit do not make it to any beaches. This is mainly because they are so hard to access. As much as I found the blast to the past quite charming in many ways, the one way I found it inconvenient is getting around the country.

They have planes which are overly expensive or very, very long bus trips (not an official lie down sleeper by the way) that only leave from the two major cities: Yangon and Mandalay. All roads lead there so going form Bagan to the beach is unheard of, downright impossible, so we had to fly up to Bagan to save time, then take an overnight bus back only to get on another bus out to the beach and then take this bus back to the capital. This was the bus that was blasting the loud music. However, that was not the worst part about this bus; the worst part was the departure times. We had a choice of 6 in the morning or 7 in the morning. What the absolute shit is going on here? Who is benefitting from this schedule? I can't even get my free complimentary hotel breakfast. That is not even an option really - they should just have one bus that leaves everyday early in the morning. If they are going to have two, make the times different so people have options. My experience traveling around Myanmar was having zero options all the time.

So, we luckily got on the "later" one and had to wake up at 5 in the morning in order to get to the bus station on time which happens to be an hour and a half outside the city. This is also what they said for the airport and a different bus station in another part of the city. Yangon - hour and half from everywhere, it's a 'geographical oddity'. Not surprisingly it did not take that much time, but I think the hotels just tell everyone an hour and a half because traffic can fluctuate so much in a city that has banned motorbikes. Cars = congestion. Hanoi is suffering from this same epidemic in the recent years.

So far, this holiday has been very early flights that get in at 7 am, overnight busses, early morning alarm clocks for another stupidly early departure time and despite the fact that I am on vacation, it is not a relaxing holiday. I hadn't slept in once yet and spent two evenings not in bed at all (one in an airport/one on a bus). I am not usually one to be so bothered by this, but we were tight on time so it was one bad nights sleep after another back to back. All these traveling times wouldn't be a problem if we had a couple of weeks here. We could spend more time in each place and leave when we felt like it, but, we were trying to do Bagan and the beach in one week. It didn't seem like much when planning, but ended up being more difficult than we thought due to the lack of transportation options. So, I was ecstatic to finally get to the beach and just chill out. No sightseeing, just beach/pool and more amazing curry.

However, once Lee and I got off the bus, a slew of motorbike taxis were there to take us to our hotel. They asked us which hotel and we told them we hadn't booked one yet. (This is not uncommon for us to do - we prefer to scope the area out a bit and see where we want to stay. Plus, finding a room has not been a problem in the past.)

But today, "All full," they said.

"Sorry?" was my response.

"No hotel, all booked up," they kept insisting on telling me this.

I was instantly skeptical because I knew this beach was not meant to be crowded. Its reputation was that you would have the beach to yourself, so how were all the hotels full? As I was debating this in my head, I couldn't help thinking about the one-time-departure bus that had already left for the day. If we truly can not find a hotel, that means we are sleeping on the beach tonight.

We hopped on the two bikes and they agreed to take us around to many hotels to check. The first five we checked were all full. Finally, the 6th one said they had one room available for $30. This was a pretty high price for the Myanmar countryside and an especially high price for the room we were given. The hotel was still under construction and I do not think our room was officially ready for guests. On top of the hotel pool being built, our room also had no furniture besides a bed and one Little Tyke plastic table, no mirror in the bathroom or anywhere (I had to hold a phone up so Lee could put his contacts in), no wifi and the toilet didn't flush. This meant only number ones were allowed in this room and no way were either of us going to try a number two. I mindlessly flushed after peeing out of habit and it miraculously worked this one time and never again. Once the sound of the flush rang out, Lee shouted, "You wasted the flush on a pee!" I think the hotel charged us the rate of what the place will be like in the future when it is all ready and done, but not what it is now.

That day, we decided that we would go down to the beach and find wifi and look up hotel options on booking.com or agoda. Ours was okay for one night, but we had two more nights to figure out after that.

To our surprise, wifi was nearly impossible to find. We stopped in loads of restaurants and none of them had it. Finally, we started trying nice hotels and not even all of them had it. We finally found one that did an hour and a half later and once looking online we quickly realized that we would have to stay at a really bad place or a really nice place. All of the middle of the line places, which we would usually select, were all full. Since we had been so exhausted all week, we just wanted to relax, so we splurged on a $100 per night, very fancy hotel. It was amazing and further confirming my acceptance that I am getting old.

Ngwe Saung Beach was exactly what we thought. It is the longest beach in SE Asia at 15 kilometers. It is also super wide and has perfect white, sand-box sand. All day long, when the sun was out, the beach was empty. We had so much space. Then, when the sun would start to go down, all of the Asian tourists and local tourists would come out and swim. This was perfect for us because it was happy hour and we would usually meander back to the hotel bar at this time to watch the sunset and all the people on horseback travel down the extensive beach.

The rest of our trip was perfect. I was truly very sad to leave. One of my friends who lives in Shanghai also happened to be at Ngwe Saung beach at the same time as us, so we got to meet up with him each day. Also, the beach was not very crowded, but there are just not that many hotels/bungalows there yet, so the rooms fill up quite quickly. We were lucky to get a place and ended up taking the last room even in the nice hotel, however, nothing ever felt crowded. The one bar we went to every night was called Umi. It was never actually busy, but they had a fire spinner each night including myself for a few minutes. (No, I do not know how to spin fire and no the bar did not necessarily allow me to do it, but I did for a brief moment after Lee had burnt his hand and passed it to Jon, who then burnt his hand as well and dropped it on the sand and then I picked it up and had the most success before it went out and the bar staff instantly put all of the fire spinning paraphernalia away.)

The Burmese people were very friendly and helpful and I can't be positively sure, but I did not feel that I was ever getting scammed or ripped off there, which is really nice coming from a region where that is the norm, save Laos.

Therefore, my final verdict is that I would also highly recommend visiting Myanmar as it was quite the experience and there is so much to see there especially outside of the cities. However, when I go back, I will make sure I have more than one week so that I can eliminate some of the stress and frustration I experienced getting around the country. There are still many things I want to see there and I knew I wouldn't be doing it all in this one trip, so I will return to see Mandalay, Inle Lake, any other beach and maybe go up north trekking into the jungle close to the border. Or maybe, I'll just go back to the Ngwe Saung beach.