Our travels commenced at the less than popular time of 01:05 with our Singapore Airlines Boeing 777-300 flight leaving Melbourne on time and arriving at Singapore’s Changi Airport some eight and a half hours later at around dawn. This middle of the night flying resulted in us having a five hour wait before we joined our connecting flight through to Mandalay in Myanmar. In the meantime our group of ten travellers had made contact and assembled with everyone keen to get the final leg of a long day’s travel out of the way.
The flight to Mandalay from Singapore took just under four hours and involved travel up and along the eastern side of the Malaysian peninsula before crossing over Thailand heading north westwards towards Myanmar, formerly the country called Burma. On arrival at Mandalay we were able to pass through customs and general security checking with ease and were delighted to find our luggage had arrived safely. It was pleasing for us as our bags had been checked in at Hobart and we’d been assured that they’d get to Mandalay despite the double transfers in Melbourne and Singapore.
Our group was greeted by the tour manager, William and his female assistant Momo both of whom seemed very friendly and well organised. We plus bags were loaded into a mini-bus and we then commenced a one hour journey from the airport into Mandalay city central.
The road was an uneven concrete surface and in order to travel comfortably we had to drive quite slowly. The scene along the way was one typical of south-east Asia with dense population along roadsides living in shanty type accommodation with frequent signs of day to day commerce such as markets, car and motor bike repair shops, mobile phone sales and of course numerous eating areas under trees and canvas awnings with rough tables complemented by the ubiquitous plastic chairs.
In 1970 the Burmese Government decided to introduce driving on the right-hand side of the road but even today, the majority of car are right-hand drive which provides a hazardous situation for overtaking. The problem for our bus driver was partly solved by having an assistant on the front left side monitoring for on-coming cars that might present danger if overtaking.
To add to the potential confusion the road signs showing distances from Yangon are in miles (subdivided in to furlongs) as well as in kilometres. We were informed that depending where you buy fuel, petrol is sold in both gallons and litre volumes. There seems to be a very slow progression from the old imperial units of British times to the more modern metric standards.
The Myanmar unit of currency (the kyat) is in paper note form only with the largest denomination being 10,000 kyat which conveniently corresponds to about AUD$10. We used ATMs to obtain the currency and then ventured into a supermarket to buy some nuts, cheese, nibbles and mixers for our duty-free spirits acquired in Singapore. A quick perusal of the supermarket’s alcohol prices revealed that they were considerable cheaper than even Singapore’s duty-free.
The streets of Mandalay are a rat-race of motor bikes and scooters, older cars, trucks and carts competing for space with the pedestrians. This is a dangerous situation as we found when crossing a main street as the cars don’t always come from the direction you might expect as some weave down the road on the inside of the wrong lane, adding to the uncertainty of safe passage in Mandalay’s bustling city centre.
The roads although appearing very dusty and are in many places bordered by water filled drains and swamp areas where the usual litter of plastics, glass and discarded possessions have been abandoned.
The pool at our hotel
After settling into our very nice Rupar Mandalar Hotel we showered and took a bus trip to the 230m elevated Mandalay Hill site to see the famous Buddhist shrines and to observe the sunset from the spectacular Kuthodaw Pagoda. The scene from the top was expansive with this sprawling city of over a million people surrounding our hill top spreading in all directions. The trip up and down the hill had to be in the back of a very old and dilapidated truck as our bus was not permitted to enter the sacred precinct. The truck driver we had drove at break-neck speed and weaved in amongst motorbikes and pedestrians as if he had priority and for him it was general routine.
On returning to our hotel we had a pleasant meal with a local musician and a puppet show for entertainment. We headed for bed early having had little sleep in the past 36 hours.
Tomorrow we start our Myanmar adventure in proper fashion with an early start and a day’s site seeing in and around Mandalay.