Myanmar
A town where we wished we were more local
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Johan Kruseman
Updated on 27 August 2024
Updated on 27 August 2024
Monywa is a town not very familiar with visitors yet. We arrived late (in Myanmar perspective at least, still before 21.00) with the very very last seats of the actually sold out bus (it took us more than half an hour in Mandalay bus station to convince them that we foreigners are able to sit on a small plastic chair in the bus’ corridor as well) but couldn’t find any place able to serve us some food (all were closed) except one upper class hotel which still had a last dish to share. With a full stomach the next challenge started: finding a place to sleep. The upper class hotel, not our first choice, appeared to be full anyway (or not expecting dirty looking backpackers to be able to pay ;)). We then found one hostel which seemed to have lost all its glory with very smelly rooms. We said we would like to check some other hotels first but we only found great hostels which however weren’t allowed to take in foreigners. Trying to convince them we were local didn’t really work even though we had entered with an accentless “minglaba!”. So we were forced to go back to our smelly rooms hostel and accept it with a smile.
We hope the hotels in downtown become more accessible soon since the surroundings were worth all the effort to get here and even compensated for the smelly room. Seeing a standing lying and sitting Buddha of a size beyond comprehension we took our rented motor bikes to A Myinth, a small little river village with really nothing to see or do. The people in this little village clearly not being exposed to any form of tourism were a delight in this little d-tour. We were even taken to a local football match where the visitors for sure must have thought we were from the BBC with our compact camera able to shoot video while zoomed in 10x. Since the 100’s of spectators now seemed more interested in us (or rather our little camera) than in the football match we decided to continue trying to make it back before dark in wich we failed misserably due to a little crash (my travel companion) to avoid colliding with an undecisively crossing dog and getting out of petrol (me). All together one of our best days in Myanmar but for sure its a place where you have to accept and enjoy the unexpected.
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Traveled route: Yangon, Inle Lake, Lashio, Mandalay, Monywa, Bagan
× A town where we wished we were more local
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A bridge almost ruined our planned boat trip to Bagan
Continuing our road from Monywa to Bagan we were aiming to catch the local ferry from Pakkokku. When we asked for departure time and where to buy tickets we received a “no time, no tickets, only one boat”. At the ferry place we found the river (s
Myanmar
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