I’m sorry to have you all worried. The internet was spotty anyway, and with the typhoon everything got knocked out. I was trekking in the hills at the time. Now we’re in Inle Lake, heading to Mandalay this evening. Up north here there was only rain. So we’re safe and completely fine. We didn’t even hear about the full extent of things until just this morning. We heard 100K dead? We have no idea.
I’m on borrowed generator time right now, so I’m gunna run. I’ll try to send more later.
Well! Thanks for 3proxy.com, greetings from Yangon, where it has been raining for 3 days, and rain is forecast for the next 3 months or so. It’s a shame, because the giant puddles and general nasty conditions are stopping me from seeing what I can tell is a city I would love.
We arrived this morning at 8:30 am local time (we’re 11 1/2 hours ahead of NYC). The Yangon International Airport was as big as you’d expect….but ours was one of only two planes on the tarmac. The other was an Air Bagan plane – for domestic flights. But the wide empty tarmac was just the beginning of the rather spooky airport. I entered the arrivals hall expecting grit grime and dilapidation. Instead, I was greeted with sleek, modern steel and glass. And completely silence. No announcements. No bustle. No other passengers competing for a place in the immigration queue. Just a giant, Logan-worthy arrivals hall with a few sleepy foreigners and many sleepy Burmese. (As we were leaving the airport I checked the arrivals screen – the only flights I could see arriving today were from a few from Bangkok, one from Taipei and one from Singapore. )
I had been planning to stay at a “mid-range” hotel here, but at the luggage carousel we were greeted by Zin Minn from Motherland 2 guest house (a great cheapie option, according to Lonely Planet). He offered us free transport to the city, so we decided eff it – we’ll go with him. I’m glad we did. Zin (who’s sitting right next to me right now printing out welcome notes for tomorrow’s arriving guests) and the rest of the staff here are extremely friendly and helpful. They just helped us book a bus ticket to Kalaw for tomorrow. We had been planning to spend another day here, but the rain is awful and Marjan is not happy. (I’m starting to worry that she’s very negative and suspicious, which will make traveling with her – especially in this nutty place – quite difficult. I hope I’m wrong!) So anyway, we’re heading north to the cooler and hopefully drier hills.
I wish I had the time and capacity to write about my first impressions of Myanmar and Yangon, but I’m exhausted from the long day and I have to get up early tomorrow. I have a 18-hour bus ride to look forward to. My poor ass.
Hope all’s well with everyone out there. I’ll log on again when I can.
I arrived at the Suk 11 (heh heh) hostel in Bangkok at 2:30 am…early Thursday, I guess it was. It’s a quiet, teak, traditional-looking place tucked away down an alley next to a 7-11. The sleepy security guard had me register, wordlessly handed me a bottle of water, and pointed up a steep staircase. In the delirious state I was in after 24 hours of nonstop travel, I’m shocked I managed to find my room.
Sleeping in a real bed was pure luxury, but I had to get up fairly early to go get my visa to Myanmar. Despite what I thought were careful preparations, the process of applying took a lot longer than I thought – evidently the forms had changed somewhat, so I had to fill them all out again. Interestingly, the new forms required far less than the old ones – the old forms included a CV-like work history (to weed out the journalists, I suppose) and full travel details. I was extremely surprised at how polite, friendly, and helpful the officials were. They happily photocopied my passport for free (I was supposed to have brought a copy) and even provided paste to glue my passport photos onto the new forms. The whole experience, which took place in the usual bland, dreary bureaucratic setting, was a great contrast to my experiences in, say, Eastern Europe, where officials seemed to take malicious glee in torturing the form-filling challenged. But I’ll hold off on final impressions until I actually have my passport back with a visa attached. 3 pm today.
After applying for my visa, I went to the Hua Lamphong train station to buy a ticket on an overnight sleeper to Chiang Mai for tonight (Friday). Mid-April in Chiang Mai is a “dangerous” time – not only does the forecast say 105 degrees, but April 12 is the beginning of Songkran (Thai new year) festival, celebrated most vigorously in Chiang Mai and the highlight of which is The Pouring of Water Festival. Evidently, for the four days of Songkran youths patrol the streets with water guns (or just big vats of water) and soak anyone in their path. I guess if I go out I’ll have to leave my camera behind, or at least store everything in plastic bags.
After getting my train ticket I decided to wander around in nearby Chinatown, which is much like Chinatowns anyplace else: businesses selling cheap knock-offs and strange dried and fresh food spilling out onto narrow streets, forcing pedestrians off the sidewalks to dodge motorbikes, etc.
I normally have a great sense of direction, but it simply is out of order here in Bangkok. I can’t tell you how many times I had to stop, whip out a map or my guidebook, squint at the road signs, and try to figure out where I was and which direction I was going in. And every time I stopped, a tuk-tuk driver would come up to me to offer his services….usually leading to a conversation about wherever he could get a commission. One guy even tried to tell me that Chinatown was “all closed because holiday” so that he could take me to a shopping strip he knew.
After wandering about in Chinatown for a few hours I was very overheated – I’ve never needed a/c so bad. So I found my way back to the train station and hopped on the fairly new metro, which links to the awesome Skytrain – all with a/c, and all of which avoid the nightmare of Bangkok traffic – back to the Suk 11 for a cool shower and a nap. (I’m not quite over the jet lag.)
All told, I’m excited to get the hell out of Bangkok. Maybe under different circumstances I’d enjoy it more, but right now I want some peace!
Taking The Fork 