Our dilemma was how we should leave Nay Pyi Taw. There was one train each day on to Bagan, our next stop, or we could take a local overnight bus, arriving at Bagan in the dead of night. Both these options appealed given our increasingly straitened finances (more later) but another day long, bone shaking ride by train or an overnighter in a chicken bus were not exciting prospects. Of course there is always another option: take a private car to Bagan for an eye-watering 200,000 kyats (£170)
Hmmm. What to do? Our deliberations went something like this:
Ant: Sod it, let's go for the car option
Gill: Yeah
David: Go on, then
Our "private car" turned out to be an elderly VW Nay Pyi Taw city taxi, but at least it had seatbelts in the front. We were sorry to leave the Tungapuri Hotel. It had been short, but very sweet. The staff couldn't do enough for us and they seemed rather bemused at having Western tourists as guests in their hotel. They lined up to see us off and presented us with hotel goodie bags.
We left the manicured lawns, golf clubs and empty pavements of Nay Pyi Taw behind and headed north on the Yangon-Mandalay expressway. We had not quite left the surreal atmosphere of Nay Pyi Taw yet. The expressway is a spine of concrete that runs north to south from Yangon and eventually on to Mandalay and is almost entirely devoid of traffic due to high tolls and few stopping places or exits.
We saw only a handful of cars on the road which is ironic given the many millions and decades that it took to build it. It was only when we turned off the road towards Bagan two hours later that we felt we had abruptly re-entered Myanmar, with potholed roads, carts and dust. We thought we had escaped the Generals by leaving Nay Pyi Taw, but a quick check of Wiki reveals that the only taxi company in the city is owned by the military, so actually we escaped courtesy of them..... our paranoia now making us wonder if our totally non English speaking driver was really one of them. We so wouldn't make good spies!
We were still fretting about over-spending as we arrived in Bagan, and we decided at all costs to find a hotel that would accept credit cards. No mean feat in a country isolated by sanctions, and we stopped at several hotels, none of which would take cards. All had said online or in travel books that they did, but apparently, no longer... We grew increasingly desperate as night fell, and our driver was thoroughly lost. Finally we caved in and went to the cash only hotel that we had planned to stay in, the Kumudura. Miraculously they had received our online reservation that we had made earlier that day and we were taken aback to be welcomed by name. And pleased to see a nice bar and restaurant....gin slings, here we come!
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