Myanmar

Tourists Cutting the Alms Line in Mandalay

Domestic air travel in Myanmar is an interesting experience. Once we were turned loose at the terminal in Yangon, the seemingly chaotic boarding through a single exit and constant indecipherable announcements were a tad confusing. Admittedly, we were at least mildly concerned that we might miss our 0630 flight. Everything went smoothly though. We rode across the tarmac in a repurposed old Japanese city bus and connected through to Mandalay with a comfortable and short flight.

Mandalay has a much more relaxed feel over Yangon. It is the Aguascalientes to Yangon’s Mexico City. Plenty of scooter and motorbike traffic, there is a thrum to the place. In comparison though, it has a slower pace and a less condensed feel. We visited some really beautiful and unspoiled sites around town. There were some quiet little temples and pagodas, and a sprawling Buddhist monastery. Often, it would just be us and some locals… but then, occasionally, jarringly, there would be another western face… maybe calmly snapping some pictures… or maybe they’d be traipsing into a temple with their shoes on arguing with a local guide about the need to take them off…. or maybe they’d be squatting in cutoff shorts and a spaghetti strap blouse taking awkwardly close-up photos of monks in a procession to receive alms… or maybe they’d be belligerently confronting a guard about not having a camera permit, filming them a few inches from their face just to prove they don’t care about paying for a camera permit… or, maybe they’d be just a little too uncomfortably like us, a couple trying to get some nice pictures without foreign photobombers. That’s the thing though; you can travel a really, really long way trying to escape from yourself… trying to find a place without familiar faces. It’s a Sisyphean task. Sooner or later, they appear, almost like you never left home. I guess it makes foreign places familiar in a way. They all tie together in often remarkably similar tourist milieus. For us though, Myanmar uniquely carries with it many other layers of both foreign and familiar. The place is distinct in East Asia, decidedly different and yet fitting in perfectly within the geography that it is situated. How did we miss it? It’s like a missing chapter in a book you already love. It fills in a missing piece with familiar themes and foreign particulars.

Temple hopping around Mandalay was pretty easygoing. We also spent a little time in a local market and shopping mall… far too much counterfeit Chinese junk and far too few local goods. The main attraction on our arrival day was watching the sunset from a pagoda on top of Mandalay Hill. Little islands in the west specked the water reflecting back the sun. It was very pretty and a relaxed close to the day. This was our first chance to kind of sleep in a little and get in a full night’s sleep. Today we saw a few more sites, a little shopping, and a little hiking before a short flight out of Mandalay backtracking to Bagan, where we’ll stay for two days.

2 thoughts on “Tourists Cutting the Alms Line in Mandalay

  1. Tourists tourists in the 70s it was the Japanese they were annoying with their cameras and their expressions and how they took pictures as you describe these westerners. I would see them in Europe or Asia and I just ran as far possible Very nice place there. I want to go there as one of the places before I die

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