Yangon

Where do I start? Perhaps with the ride into Yangon from the airport, one address in hand, but no reservation. We had no idea we were entering a wild west town, a boom town where every room was twice a much as it was in the guidebook, and not a whit better than they were when we were here 7 years ago. It was broiling hot, the traffic unbelievable and in the midst of the crumbling infrastructure of a fading colonial empire, new building was going on, rapidly, on the bones of the old. Our one hope of a guesthouse was a blowout and after 4 phone calls by the rather bored young woman at the desk, we secured a night at the Garden House. Even when I showed her photos of the Chan Myae we took in 2006 she was unmoved! So off we went with the patient taxi driver. I nearly passed out climbing the stairs of the Garden House, but what could we do...we needed a place to stay and to let the poor cabbie go, so we took it. The same price as the New Siam in Bangkok, but nothing like it, believe me. It was wretched in a way only Burma can be...it all came back in nightmarish flash. The one good thing was that from the 3rd floor window in the common room, the view of the Sule Paya, the 2000 year old temple in the heart of Yangon, was stunning. You could almost reach out and touch it, magnificent! I collapsed in the room sending Muzzy out for water and to change some money. After an hour passed, I was convinced I was a widow, alone in a country where the most I could say was hello (mingalaba) and thank you,if I could remember it. I saw him dead from heat exhaustion, lying in traffic, no one knowing who he was or where he belonged. I started to panic, went down the stairs and looked around the front of the hotel (change money, madam? taxi, madam?) and climbed back up, nearly passing out on the second floor. But he showed up, with two icy cold bottles of water, a wad of kyat, and tales of a wonderful guesthouse just a block away that might have a room for us the next day. Indeed, we rested, got up and went over to the Shan May, and they miraculously found us a room. We moved in today and will stay two nights, hoping to take a flight to Inle Lake for a long 4 or 5 day stay.
It's crazy here...hard to describe. Muzzy says it reminds him of India, and indeed, it is very crowded, dirty, full of Muslims...the mosque is just a few doors down and across the traffic circle from the Sule Paya where all day long a woman sits under a banyan tree with nat houses nailed to its trunk, selling dried corn for the pigeons and another woman sells tiny baskets of birds you can release to make merit. The men, young and old, walk around in longyi, a long sarong type skirt they are constantly adjusting. They look rather jaunty with their crisp short sleeved dress shirts on top. There are Muslim men with beards and skull caps and long knee length shirts over the longyi and Muslim women in full hijab and overdress. It is so hot I don't know how they stand it. And the traffic is crazy crazy crowded, the sidewalks are never smooth and even and things jut up out of the walks and the road at every turn. The busses look like they've been in a destruction derby and the bus boys hop off at every stop yelling and harranging the prospective passengers. It is chaotic, confusing and a little intimidating. And we haven't even left Yangon yet!