The coronavirus situation has continued to escalate as we’ve travelled across Asia. It hasn’t caused us any real concern so far with no impacts to our plans until the start of march when it all rapidly began to change on a global scale. India and Sri Lanka have closed their borders which puts a halt on progressing there after Myanmar and many other countries worldwide have already done the same. Still we didn’t let it put us out too much and had a backup plan to head back to Vietnam and stay there if things got even worse. Then, after a week in Myanmar, travellers were fleeing back to their home countries and some were even getting official emails from their governments advising them to return. We were getting anecdotal information about Vietnam turning away people arriving at their borders and any tourists who were already in the country being confined to their hostels and hotels and not allowed out to do anything. With this all beginning to seriously impact our plans, Jay and I had an impromptu meeting and by that evening, after a week in Myanmar, we had decided to cut our time short and head to Thailand where we felt the medical facilities were better in a worst case scenario and would also be easier to get to Bangkok to fly back home if needed (and more importantly the food is better). So that evening we were on a sleeper train back to Mandalay and a flight through Bangkok to Krabi. Sadly, the one week in Myanmar was not enough and we will both have to make plans to come back and finish this amazing country.
Mandalay
We flew from luand prubang, Laos, to Bangkok and then onto Mandalay, Myanmar. We got into the hostel late that evening and went straight out to have some street side Indian food served from steel trays. The roti’s were amazing as was everything else we ate, even though we were somewhat hesitant eating from the street. The next day we hired a scooter and took off to buy ourselves a longyi each and then explore some pagodas, temples and stupas. A longyi is a long piece of cloth sewn into a cylindrical shape and worn around the waist to the feet which covers the knees and legs when visiting holy places. We soon got into the habit of wearing them everywhere as all the men throughout Myanmar wore them all the time. We got lots of attention, smiles and sometimes laughter form this simple act of two westerners adopting their traditional clothing but it also made us smile and chat to the locals so we werent discouraged.
The next day we got up early to ride out and see the sunrise over U-bein bridge which is the longest teak bridge in the world at 1.2km and then took a slow boat up the river to see mingun pagoda which was built in the 1790 and severely damaged by an earthquake in 1839. It is the largest pile of bricks in the world.
Bagan
From Mandalay we made our way down to Bagan where we continued to explore more temples and hunt for amazing sunrises and sunsets. We also took a day to go out to Mt Popa and hike up to the temple at the top. It was only 15km return and a bit over 600m elevation change, so we were done in under three hours. Unfortunately, rather than being able to continue onto Inle Lake and Yangon and then possibly some beach time further south, we made the decision to get the night train back to Mandalay and fly to Thailand.
