Our AIA local guide took us to the airport in the morning to head to Yangon, Myanmar (formally known as Rangoon, Burma).  We said goodbye to some of our travel partners from the tour group.  It was a great trip, as all AIA trips go (this was our third one).  We have two more AIA small ship cruises planned in Japan in May and in Alaska in June.  They’re our favorite group tour company, and we can highly recommend them.

Our travel in Myanmar will be a little different.  Tom and I will be by ourselves, but all of our travel arrangements, flights, drivers, and day guides have been arranged by a tour company called Journeys Within.  We’re writing this post at the end of the trip, and I can’t rave enough about how wonderful this company is.  The hotels, the guides, the itineraries, the support, and the care are absolutely amazing!  If you’re going to Asia, do yourself a favor and check them out.  They’ve won several awards and deserve all of them and more.

We stayed in Yangon at the Sule Shangri-La, an excellent hotel next to the Sule Pagoda, a beautiful golden stupa within walking distance.  The first photo below is from our hotel, but our view isn’t of the Sule Pagoda, it’s the Shwedagon Pagoda, the most famous in Yangon.  It’s on a hill, and no other building is supposed to be taller than the Shwedagon.  The term “pagoda” was defined a few times by our guides (each time differently), but can mean stupa (solid structure, usually for burial or remains) or temple/shrine (open structure).  We added the wedding photo because of two things.  Most of the weddings look very Western, and wedding photos are often staged in different hotels or venues before the actual wedding.  We saw this throughout Asia.  Our Cambodia guide showed us 5 or 6 different outfits for his wedding.

We didn’t do anything the first day, since Tom was recovering from a cough and I was recovering from the heat, but we met our guide, Tin, in the morning to walk through a local market and a Chinese temple  The picture of the chicken parts was interesting – there was no part of the chicken that was missing (head, feat, heart, etc.).  There were three things immediately different about Yangon from other cities we’ve visited.  We saw almost no bikes or motorcycles, but saw thousands of (mainly) white cars (they don’t get dirty as easily).  Almost every woman had a very noticeably light pancake makeup in patches on her cheeks and forehead to keep her skin light.  Some men did too.  Many men, including our guide, wore longhi skirts.  Most women wear them too.  He says they’re much cooler in the hot weather.  Sometimes men wear something under them; sometimes not.

After the market, we walked to the Sule Pagoda, which was quite beautiful with the shiny gold covering, and Tom rang the bell to summon the spirits.  I think he summoned the wrong spirits because it went downhill for the rest of the day.  The two main sites of Yangon turned out to be under construction.  First, we went to the giant reclining Buddha, only to find it being re-gilded, with the first step being painted in black and covered in bamboo scaffolding.  You can see they completed the bottom of the feet.  That’s me at the end of the feet.  Our last stop was Shwedagon Pagoda, the pride of Yangon, but the main spire was under construction and covered with bamboo, so we couldn’t see the gold leaf (or gold tiles) that would be covering it.  Did our luck wear out?

Cheryl

The rest of the photos are all from the Shwedagon Pagoda complex.  Notice the bamboo construction covering the center stupa.