Well, we made it back to Yangon in one piece, despite another brutal bus trip. The road from Bagan to Yangon is one of the main thoroughfares in Myanmar, yet it’s barely wide enough for two busses or trucks to pass going in opposite directions (they both have to slow down and at least one vehicle must drive half in the shoulder), at least 3/4 of it is unpaved, and it’s filled with dangerous crater-like holes that the drivers inch must their way around. Best of all, last night’s bus would periodically start making duck-like noises (!) requiring the driver to pull over and allow a cadre of flashlight-weilding men to crawl beneath the engine and shout at each other for a while. Needless to say, the 15-hour bus trip actually took 18 hours. Christ amighty.

As for Yangon itself, if you didn’t know a typhoon had hit the city, you’d have trouble guessing. Sure, there are a fair share of trees knocked down – even some giant 3-meter thick oak-like trees, ripped from the ground by their very roots. And a lot of electricity poles have been bent in half or thrown quite a distance, trailing their wires behind them to be tangled in the branches of the trees along the side of the road. But we’ve seen very little damage to buildings, and life here seems to have gotten back to normal…in full force. There are Myanmar and Indian women cooking street food on every corner. The sidewalks – where they’re fairly even –  are filled with tea shops, fruit stands, parked trucks, the occasional beggar, etc., so we have to walk in the street. The old male money-changers and young ragged postcard-sellers still follow us around and harass us to trade their goods for dollars (in a non-threatening way). It’s pretty much what you’d expect.

One interesting note is that, upon crossing into Yangon county, we had to go through some sort of passport-control-like inspection. Our bus had to pull over and everyone was instructed to get out. A skeletal old man dressed in an MP-like uniform that was 2 sizes too big demanded our IDs/passports, which he examined with an extraodinarily unpracticed eye. He looked at the *Ghana* visa on my passport, the Myanmar visa on Marjan’s, and only at the photo page for the man from Hong Kong (the only other foreigner on our bus). Clearly he had been deputized out of retirement from some other business. Anyway, we had to go through the whole rigamarole: walk about 50 meters down the road while some inspector dude checked out the bus and its luggage, and then wait for the driver to pull the bus up to us so we could get back on. It would have been amusing, if I hadn’t just suffered through (at the time) 16 hours on the bus with no end in sight.

To be quite honest, I’ll be relieved to get out of here. As I mentioned before, the people are *lovely*. But it’s extremely hard to travel here, and other than interacting with the Burmans themselves there’s very little payoff for all the work: the food pretty much sucks, there are only so many pagodas you can stomach, and…how shall I put this: Nothing’s beautiful about the country (again, excluding the people). The grey weather isn’t helping matters, nor did all the excitement and distraction with the typhoon. The trip has devolved into “how to get out.” Anyway, I had been expecting to love it here, but I can say that I’m leaving with mixed feelings.

All that said, I feel like I’ve posted practically nothing about my time here. So (having found a decent internet cafe, and since it’s raining outside, and since I’ve got a long wait at Bangkok airport tomorrow) I’m going to write a series of posts entitled: What the hell have you been doing?