On the (Dirt) Road Away From Mandalay

As you may recall, we opted to take the "luxury coach" from Mandalay to Bagan and felt fairly pleased at the mere 7 hours it was scheduled to take. Until we found out it was just 90 miles away.

How the feck could it take SEVEN hours to drive there, we pondered? All will be revealed:

Imagine a terrain not too dissimilar to the surface of the moon but with more craters and inclines.

Consider also encountering as many species of slow moving animal stock as you can count on both hands.

Next picture a driver who is more content to expend his entire concentration on the horn to announce his imminent arrival to every oncoming motorist. This naturally leaves no opportunity to operate both the clutch and accelerator and so we crawled along at a pace that would shame a two legged tortoise on a skateboard.

Then try and envisage that despite the bus being completely FULL (every seat was taken) the bus crew insisted on taking on more and more paying punters until we had them squatting in the aisles. Even grannies were hunkering down for their back-handed fee which I suspect will not find its way into the bus company's profit books.

Naturally, they insisted on stopping outside everyone's front door en route and helping them take the shopping into the kitchen at every stop. Talk about a personal cab service.

Taking all these things into consideration, now do you begin to understand how it can take 6-7 hours to reach a destination less than three digits away. It was almost as bad as the train ride up- never again.

Planes, Train and Automobiles

Just to dispel yet another urban myth, contrary to the travel "experts" who claim otherwise, one is at liberty to use the trains, buses and planes in Myanmar. We didn't try hiring a car but suspect that should be possible too- should you wish to take the chance.

The roads here are quite poor and you will dirt tracks and rivers on your travels, but the scenery is quite amazing and you will acquire quite a photo album of natures colourful palette and vistas.

Random Thoughts and Mutterings

We've been off line for a few days but I'll try and recap some of our adventures as they come to me. Clearly there will be no chronological order or sequence, just as and when, and you can expect all sorts of typos and errors as it's a non-standard keyboard and I have no spell checker.

Still, it's the first time I've had any type of access (even if only in basic format) to the Blog and with an hour to kill, I'll make the most of it.

PS: No smilies, special effects or flashy stuff until we land in the Philippines next week- it's basic Blogging an not much else. And as usual, don't expect much inspirational commentary either. ;-)

Test Post "Live"

We're back in Yangon and the kids in the cafe have managed to circumnavigate all kinds of censorship to allow me access to our site. Hopefully. If this goes through, game on- if not it's back to Gmail.

Hhmm, no rich text editor options (as in default) this only has the most basic of functions and the "post" option is also ghosted out. I suspect this won't make it...