Yangon Part 1: Pagodas, Parks and Lots of Food

Myanmar: Yangon

Part 1: Pagodas, Parks and A Lot of Food

Myanmar had been on my list of countries to visit ever since arriving in Asia. Having only recently opened up to tourism in the past decade or so, Myanmar is frequently lauded by guidebooks as a country whose culture can be experienced without the negative influences of mass tourism and commercialisation. However, tourist numbers have been surging in the past years, and this has already started to make its mark on the tourism landscape, making my plan to visit the country feel increasingly urgent. Therefore, when a week's holiday marking the end of the semester started to come closer, I decided to finally put my plan into action and set off to Myanmar. Unfortunately I only had a week (9 days including weekends, but down to about 7 when factoring in the ridiculously long travel times to get there), which meant I had to limit my trip to only a few places, namely Yangon and Began. However although I was only able to scratch the surface of Burmese culture and travel along the relatively well beaten path, my trip ended up an being incredibly unique experience, filled with new sights, sounds and flavours.

My trip started in Yangon, the capital of the country and home to some of the country's most famous architectural sights and a lively, bustling street life. The timings of the overnight flight I booked meant that I arrived in Yangon in the very early morning but due to a late hostel check in time and my limited number of days in the city, I ignored my tiredness from a few hours of pretty uneven sleep and began to immediately explore the city upon arriving.

The majority of hostels and hotels are located between Myanmar's Indian Quarter and Chinatown and this is where I made my base. The area was an amazing melting pot of cultures, with golden pagodas nestled between alleyways filled with Chinese food stalls, Indian teahouses, and weathered colonial buildings.  A large number of locals wore traditional Burmese longyis, long wrap-around skirts and many women and children had thanaka, a pale yellow paste made from ground bark painted on their face in different patterns. 

The most prominent feature of downtown Yangon is the Sule Pagoda, a huge golden building originally constructed around 2,500 years ago and located at a roundabout right in the middle of everything.

Sule Pagoda

Before heading to the Sule Pagoda, I decided to get a feel for things a little by exploring the nearby streets and my first stop ended up being at the Maha Bandula Park. This park is located adjacent to the pagoda and is home a large white obelisk that built to commemorate the independence of Myanmar in 1948. Unfortunately the park didn't mark a great first experience, and shortly after walking in, I started being greeted by people who would strike up friendly conversations, only to then show an ulterior motive, such as selling me drugs (I think? The pronunciation was a little unclear) or trick me into falling for scams. About three different people approached me at different points insisting that if I wanted to see the true Myanmar, I absolutely had to go with them to an island across the river. They insisted that central Yangon was full of rich people and that I could see a more real version of the city on the island, offering to take me to their house while casually dropping references to a typhoon which did a huge amount of damage to the area in recent years. After researching into this a little later that day, I read that there is a common scam where tourists are tricked into buying large bags of rice at hugely inflated prices for some of the poorer locals, and then transporting them on very expensive motorcycle journeys, with people spending, eventually costing tourists upwards of 100 dollars. As this was my first experience of dealing with people in the country, it left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth and made me worried that I might be continually hounded by people looking to take advantage of unsuspecting tourists, which I had not infrequently encountered in my trip to Vietnam.  

Fortunately after leaving the park, I didn't have any more experiences like this, and for the rest of my stay people were typically friendly and honest towards me (admittedly overcharging meals or taxis by a dollar or two from time to time, but I'm not overly bothered by that).

The Independence Monument in the park.

After leaving the park feeling a little overwhelmed, I wandered toward the Sule Pagoda and after paying a small entrance fee and leaving my shoes and socks at the door (something you have to do at all temples and pagodas, so easy to remove shoes are recommended), I headed inside.

The pagoda was very beautiful to look at, decorated all over in ornate golden images and despite having a reasonable number of tourists, was mostly filled with locals praying or just relaxing and taking refuge from the heat. The pagoda felt very much still a part of daily life for the people of Yangon which gave it a pretty authentic feel, but unfortunately this also meant there wasn't much information inside about the history or functions of the pagoda.

There was also a small golden boat which people could pay to send traveling up a pulley and back down again, although I opted out of doing this.

The colour gold pervaded the entire building, and the architecture was really beautiful when you looked closely at the details.

After leaving the pagoda, I continued to explore the area a little more and acclimatize to the city.

There were lots of really pretty and vibrantly colored buildings left over from the colonial period...

including a church built by American missionaries...

and the former government telegraph office built by the British.

In the Indian quarter there were some very striking and colorful images of what I assume are Hindu gods, although I'm not certain.

And at certain times of the day large groups of men in Islamic dress would congregate on the the street side tea houses.

For lunch, I headed to one of the most famous restaurants (for tourists anyway) in the city, the 999 Shan Noodle Shop which served food from the Shan State which borders China, Laos and Thailand. 

The most famous dish here was the sticky shan noodles, a kind of noodles made from glutinous rice flour and which had an really amazing, sticky almost gooey texture, topped with oil, fried onions and chicken and tasted as good as they look.

After lunch, I set off toward the most famous sight in the city, the Shwedagon Pagoda in the north of the city, deciding to eschew taxis and take the journey by foot.

On the way, I passed through the Bogyoke Aung San Market, a huge building where you can buy all kinds of traditional fabrics, local dishes and souvenirs.

The entrance to the market.

The market gives you a good idea of the brightly colored, formal fabrics that a lot of local women wore.

Myanmar also has a famous traditional form of puppetry, with many shopkeepers selling puppets ranging from obvious cheap souvenirs to some pretty ornate looking antiques (not pictured) for sale in a small little wooden shop.

I continued to head north, next passing through Kandawgyi park, a large park surrounding a huge lake.

Finally, I started to approach the streets surrounding the Shwedagon Pagoda, which were increasingly bustling and full of life.

A Buddhist monk doing some repair work on a building near the pagoda.

I also passed this man making the huge life-size statues that are present in all the different temples and pagodas.

I finally reached the main entrance to the Shwedagon Pagoda, a massive building first built over a thousand years ago, covered in gold leaf and filled with thousands of statues and stupas.

The entrance to the pagoda involved a reasonably long walk across a wide set of stairs filled with locals selling flowers and different items for prayer. It took a little bit of time to get form here into the pagoda, but I overheard a young couple of travelers assuring a middle aged women they bumped into that it was NOTHING like the treks they'd done in Sri Lanka, so that's a bonus.

The pagoda complex was huge, and apart from the enormous golden stupa in the centre, there were hundreds of smaller buildings and shrines to explore.

Like the Sule, although there was a reasonable number of tourists, they were massively outnumbered by the groups of locals. Apparently Shwedagon Pagoda is an important site of pilgrimage for the Burmese and it was nice to feel that you were visiting a living, breathing building, instead of just a tourist site, which I've found some famous temples to be in other countries.

Locals lighting candles and praying toward the central stupa.

There were also lots of little buddha statues surrounded by a basin of water, where people could dip their hand in and wash the statue.

As I walked around, I came across some Kayan women wearing the large brass coils that elongate their necks. I'd only ever seen this before in Guinness World Record books, and had no idea that they were native to Myanmar so it was pretty amazing to see them.

Some monks walking along the top of the main stupa to give you an idea of the awesome size of it.

Although the complex was absolutely massive, every little part of the buildings was covered in incredibly detailed patterns and little statues.

There were A LOT of statues, which really varied in appearance and style.

I timed my visit so that I arrived an hour or so before sunset, which gave me the great opportunity of seeing the pagoda in the dark, where the main stupa is showered with light and you can really take in the breathtaking effect of the gold leaf.

The edges of the stupa were also covered in hundreds of burning candles, which gave a beautiful luminescence to all he gold around them.

I ended up spending around three hours at the pagoda, and this was without any guide or information about the building to distract me. There really was so much to take in and see and the pagoda was a definite highlight of the trip.

Before heading to my hostel for the night, I stopped at an Indian restaurant that I'd read about, which apparently offered incredible Indian food at alluringly low prices.

I ended up having probably the best Indian meal of my life. I got an amazing lamb curry, which came accompanied with a bowl of dahl and six different sauces each of which had incredibly distinct flavors, ranging from sour to sweet to spicy. Apparently there's a type of Indian cuisine known as Thali, which incorporates a perfect balance of six flavors, spicy, sour, astringent, sweet, salty and bitter.  I don't think I've ever experienced so many different flavors at once, but none of them clashed with one another. The restaurant also offered free refills of rice and dahl and the whole meal only ended up costing a few US dollars. This was not my only visit here...

The next morning, I got up nice and early to continue to take in the amazing flavors of Yangon cuisine.  From the early hours of about six to nine, hundreds of breakfast shops open through the city and sell a fish soup known as Mohinga. Mohinga is made from rice noodles and a fish broth and a wealth of other flavors including lemongrass and ginger.

I went to a shop which supposedly has some of the best in the city, called Myaung Mya Daw Cho, where I was deserved a delicious warming bowl of the noodle soup, complete with egg and fried dough sticks, as well as some unidentifiable crispy orange colored chips on the side.

My bowl of awesome noodles.

Yangon definitely felt like a city which is best explored early and the streets were full of people, with hundreds of little breakfast stalls set up on the street as well as temporary newspaper stands.

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Despite having had a pretty substantial breakfast, I was still determined to try as much local cuisine as I could in my limited time. So I head directly from the breakfast shop to the Golden Tea teahouse. Yangon.

Myanmar is full of tea houses (similar to how Vietnam is with coffee) and there are people sitting inside and outside them through all hours of the day. The golden tea house had tables covered in different plates of snacks which customers could choose to eat or not and I decided to try the semolina cakes pictured below which were delicious and had a really nice simultaneously smooth and grainy texture. I coupled this with a bowl of tea sweetened with condensed milk. As I was drinking, a local guy with pretty good English came and sat next to me to tell me about his life and his thoughts on Myanmar. He seemed to have had a pretty interesting life, having lived for a while in Jamaica, and had a lot of critical things to say about the Burmese government and it's treatment of its people, something which surprised me as I'd read that people were generally reluctant to talk about politics with tourists for fear of getting in trouble.

The semolina cakes (right corner). Unfortunately, having just eaten breakfast, I couldn't justify trying the other foods, but they all looked equally dishes, as did some samosas that the guy at my table ordered.

I had a bus scheduled out of the city at nine o clock that evening, so I then concocted a plan to slowly again avoid getting a taxi and instead slowly walk to the bus station, stopping along different interesting points along the way. This plan, unsurprisingly, did not quite work out as well as I'd hoped. I'd completely underestimated just how much walking I would have to do and also was unable to find a few historical buildings that I'd planned to stop at on the way. What's more, my reason for walking was so that I could see more of the street life in Yangon, but after leaving the downtown area, there were very few things to see, and I ended up spending about an hour walking through streets covered in embassies and completely devoid of any people.

Eventually I did find one of my destinations, People's Park. People's park is referred to as a park, but in actuality it's much more than that. As well as the expected grass and trees, it also is home to an out of use Myanmar Airways airplane, roller coasters, bumper cars, karaoke buildings, a swimming pool, a bunch of little restaurants and a strange section covered in giant statues of movie characters and comic book heroes.

Even though it was a weekday, the park was full of people and had a really cheerful atmosphere.

One of the signposts showing the huge array of activities visitors can take part in at the park.

The Myanmar Airways airplane.

One of the restaurants I went to had a sleeping cat on pretty much every chair that didn't already have a person on it.

No matter where you go in Asia, there's always a place to take part in some Karaoke!

A drink I bought which I think encapsulates the joyful vibe of the park, consisting of tapioca balls, red jelly, coconut milk and strawberry ice cream.

As I was leaving I stumbled upon this unexplained collection of tons of giant action figures randomly placed together.

After walking through the park, my legs were beginning to feel exhausted and I finally succumbed to getting a taxi to my last destination before the bus stop.

The Sweepstakes's Taw Myat pagoda is a relatively new pagoda in comparison to others in the city, but has very striking architecture. It is also notable for having what is allegedly the tooth of the Gautama Buddha, who died 2,500 years ago.

The outside of the building is a beautiful mixture of white and gold, and had really beautiful architecture.

There were also some pretty fun creatures guarding the doors.

There seemed to be some TV event happening outside as there were a bunch of people and film crew gathered outside.

The inside of the building was centered around this beautiful structure which contains the tooth relic.

I couldn't actually see the tooth itself, but I was very impressed with the elaborate storage device it had been placed in. 

The Tooth Relic Pagoda was my last stop in Yangon for this part of the trip and from there I headed to the bus station where I was booked to get an overnight bus journey to the ancient city of Bagan.

Stay tuned...