Yangon... Rangoon... Yangoon?

My friend Dharini is working in Yangon so I handily had a place to stay. And some place it was after 8 months of backpacking: a luxurious serviced apartment in Golden Hill Tower in Northern Yangon.

I stayed a few days in Yangon, with a bit of sight seeing and a lot of eating and drinking in the more upmarket (for Myanmar) establishments in town. Nothing too wild though as a recently imposed curfew was forcing bars to close even earlier than usual - the city was empty by 11.

Downtown

There aren't a huge number of tourist attractions as such but downtown is a beautiful grid of old monsoon weathered colonial buildings and apartment blocks. Myanmar is changing fast (every travel guide you read about a place seems to say "get there now before its too late") and Yangon, the de-facto capital is obviously at the forefront of that. A sign of the times is the amount of traffic in Yangon. The place is gridlocked for the morning, lunch and evening rush hour. Expected for a big city perhaps? Sure, but it was only 5 years ago that there was barely a car here and cycle rickshaws were king. Now there is something ridiculous like 40,000 cars been imported daily.

The first KFC opened a few months ago and the oversized looming face of Colonel Sanders makes an interesting contrast against the old Hindu temple next door.

Most people here appear indifferent to foreigners (decades of not being allowed to talk to foreigners probably has quite a lot to do with that) but every now and then someone will strike up a friendly conversation purely out of curiosity. English is not widely spoken.

I had a wander around Shule Pagoda in the centre of the main city roundabout; my first taste of the many, many pagodas to come. My most memorable sight from there was a monk sat down on the step smoking a massive cherootee. Monks form a large proportion of the population in Myanmar and you see them about everywhere. Seeing a robed monk doing an everyday thing like smoking a cigarette sparks a special kind of fascination.

The biggest and most important Pagoda in Myanmar is Shwedagon and I walked down there one sunny morning from the apartment. The mighty gold Pagoda is an impressive sight but it's the collective array of side temples and prayer rooms that make it such a relaxed and calming place. I love the way in which the temples are used: the expected prayer and meditation but mixed in with the chatting of friends, family outings, people playing games on their phones and even the odd card game.

walking up to Shwedagon

Shwedagon

  

It's the tail-end of the monsoon season (although they've had a relatively mild monsoon this year) and other than a few showers the weather was generally all right. On Friday we got some proper monsoon rain however and it teemed down for most of the day. A nice excuse to relax in the flat though and do a bit of planning and life admin.

Monsoon rains

On Saturday morning myself and Dhe flew up to Heho, in the centre east of Myanmar, for a weekend at Lake Inle.