Flying Foxes into the sunset - Pathein, Myanmar
Pathein, Myanmar
After around a 4 hour drive, we reached Patein. It welcomed us in heavy rain and was very muddy. We chucked our ponchos on and after chatting to a few people at the local shop, we went in search of a hotel. We read in the" Lonely Planet” that the place called "Taan Taan Ta Guest House” was the best in town and worth checking. So we headed in that general direction, tramping through the wet rainy streets with our back packs on, checking hotels along the way. There were some hotels with pretty filthy conditions and as everywhere in Myanmar, still wanting top dollar for it.
We eventually got to the “Taan Taan Ta” and wished we hadn't bothered. Colourful spotless rooms turned out to be peeling paint and dirty sheets, and manky bathrooms. All for only $15 a night!! (with an additional service charge on top). No discount allowed.
We were determined not to stay there despite the fact that we just wanted to put our gear down out of the rain. Ania decided to stay with the luggage in the hotel foyer while Peter went to check a place called “”The Paradise Hotel” that we passed on the way. It turned out to be much better, for $13 we had a double room with bathroom and hot shower, Wi-Fi and TV. It was not “European clean” but more like “Asian clean”,however it was much better than half of the rooms we had seen and much cheaper as well. It was getting late and we needed to figure out how to get north from Patein. We started asking the hotel people about how to get to Pyay. They didn’t speak any English but called a guy whose business card they had at the reception. It said “free tourist information”. We only wanted to ask a question but he wasn’t interested in answering over the phone, he insisted we wait until he comes to us. Our first alarm bells started ringing but we thought “let’s see what happens”. He came over with his mate and introduced himself as an English teacher with tourist services on the side. He was quite young and very friendly with good English and offered us help etc. He said there was a bus going to Pyay at 5am the next morning and he would go and book the tickets for us. He said we could go with him or stay. So we gave him money and left for a dinner establishing that he would drop our tickets off at the reception. We went to the place he recommended to us. It was a small street kitchen where an old lady was serving all sorts of traditional Burmese curries. We ordered chicken and lamb curries with rice and complimentary soup and vegetable plate.
It was quite delicious and all for a very reasonable total of 1800 kyat. Although it was nice, we haven’t fallen in love with Burmese curry as it is extremely oily. It is usually served in small bowls with meat and some sauce in the bottom topped up with around 30 mm of pure oil on the surface. We found ourselves always scooping the oil out in order to get to the original sauce and meat.
It is something we have not seen in any other country. After the meal we wandered around the streets for a while. Patein is a small quiet riverside town. The centre has a massive Buddhist temple with a stunning giant golden stupa in the middle. Peter took some great photos of it. Ania bought some fresh peanuts and her favourite guavas from the street sellers and we both went back to the Hotel. When we reached it there was a message waiting for us at the reception. It was a letter from “our tourist guide” saying that there was no seats available for the bus and so he didn’t manage to buy the tickets so he attached our money to it. We gave him a call to find out what are our other options. He said there is no other option but to stay in Patein one more night and get a bus to Pyay the morning after. We were not particularly happy with this as we didn’t plan to stay in this place for two nights, we planned to have only a short break on our way to Pyay. However it was late and we were very tired from travelling all day so we went to sleep somehow a bit relieved that we didn’t have to get up at 4am. Next morning we met our guide and his mate at the breakfast place at 8am. He was sitting there with other travellers - a polish couple from Warsaw. Pretty cool people, that had been travelling around the world for … 5 years! It had pretty much become their way of life.
They had been using yachts to cross continents so we were quite interested in how they went about it (crewseeker.com).
The “café” we were sat in was a small street hut with plastic chairs serving coffee and Burmese breakfast meals. We had a very nice pancake like bread with chickpea and onion chutney. It was really delicious but as everything there – very oily. We chatted a bit with the polish couple and they had to leave to catch their bus. Then we started talking with the guide of our options of getting to Pyay. And this is when we realised that we had quite possibly been tricked into staying another day. He had let slip out that there was also a train going to Pyay. We asked him why he didn’t say anything to us last night about the train when we had been asking him about any alternatives, as we could be sitting on it at that moment heading north. He started mumbling something and said he didn’t think we would like to go by train. Then he said that since we are now here for the day, he can take us for a motorbike tour around Patein for 8000 kyat each. We were foolish that we didn’t even double check if there were really no seats available on that bus last night. (not that we knew how to) He really looked like he had tricked us to stay in Patein for a day to make money on us!
There was also something that the Polish Girl had said to Ania in Polish while we were sitting there, that looked like they may have had a similar sequence of events done to them, they however went on the “tour”.
We didn’t really want to have much more to do with him so we explained that we didn’t want to go on a tour and left them to it.
We went back to the Hotel and Peter enquired to reception why we didn’t have any hot water in the bathroom. It turned out we were supposed to, so he got his little Volt tester screwdriver (that he couldn’t bear to leave in the micra) and started checking the supply. The hotel guy was watching and he removed the cover. After pulling it apart and putting the thermostat into some hot water downstairs, it turned out it was a stuck pressure switch on the thermostat unit. After freeing it up again, They reassembled it and it worked, the Hotel guy was pretty happy that he had just had his shower fixed for free.
We were just happy that we had hot water.
We wandered around Patein and sat down for a while by one building site watching the workers. They were building a new shopping centre there and the way it was all happening was really interesting. There were men, women and kids (we saw a few but were not sure because of the distance) carrying buckets with cement on their heads. There was no truck pouring ready cement onto the site. Instead there was one wheel and guys mixing it manually and people carrying it up the stairs onto the second floor. There must have been over 50 of them all working like ants. There was a big sign at the front of the site saying “Safety First” and it put a bit of a smile on our faces as none of the workers had gloves or helmets or any safety gear. The only person with a new white helmet was a guy in shirt and suit pants sitting on the bench in front of the site observing and instructing some people. We sat in the bar across the street overlooking the river.
Some Burmese girls wanted to take a picture of Ania on their phones. We got chatting to a German couple, a guy who was an Orthopaedic surgeon and his girlfriend that was a secretary at the same hospital.
They were travelling through Burma and had been many times before; they gave us a lot of good recommendations for guesthouses at places that we were going to. We were watching a beautiful sunset when the sky filled with birds crossing over the river. They looked a bit big initially and then we realised that they were not birds but big “flying fox” bats! It was quite a sight. We had a couple more beers and left for the same street Burmese curry we had the night before. The lady cooking it was really happy to see us again. We left around 10pm and went back to the hotel. The TV in our room had only 1 English Channel and luckily it was one with the movies so we fell asleep watching “Hitch” with pixilated censorship applied to every moment that there was a cigarette shown or parts cut out when there were kissing scenes.
The next day we woke up and eventually decided to hitchhike north. We walked out onto the street and tried to catch something going north. It seemed that only taxis were stopping offering a ride to the bus station. We stopped a bus thinking we can get somewhere out of town a bit but all it did was take us back to the bus station in town. Nobody understood what we meant by saying that we want to go north by any means of transport for free. It turned out that there is no word for “hitchhiking” in Burmese.
That was really surprising but we read that people have done it so we were determined to try. After getting out of the bus station and also a bit out of town by a motorbike rickshaw we found ourselves on the main road going north. The first transport we caught was a guy who owned a textile factory and his driver was driving him to work, he offered to drop us off a bit north. We were soon dropped off at the junction outside Patein. There we stood for a while not knowing what to do as the only people that would stop were motorcycle taxis and a lot people were just offering to take us to the bus station. Nobody seemed to understand us. However all people around were curious to find out where we wanted to go so were gathering around us. There was no way we could catch a ride like that. Peter went to a nearby restaurant and asked for help to make us a sign in Burmese saying “we want to go to Ngatanchao”. While Pete was busy explaining to all the locals what we were doing Ania stopped a big and nice looking car where a guy looking like some government official offered to take us north. He got out of the car to help us chuck the luggage into the boot. We then noticed that he had one plastic leg. He was wearing elegant clothes and was on his way to Yangoon with his wife and their small furry dog. The car was lovely air-conditioned and had Burmese flags at the front windscreen. We had a small and polite chat but the couple couldn’t really speak a lot of English so we sat in silence most of the way. It was so comfortable and cool that Ania fell asleep. They dropped us off at the main junction where the roads to Yangoon and Pyay cross. They were very polite; we thanked them profusely and gave them one of our bags of banana crisps.