I was happy, more than happy, to leave Mandalay with the 4.30am train to Hsipaw after three days. The train takes much longer and is as expensive as the bus but the experience is worth the effort. I booked a 2nd class ticket but when I arrived the station the whole 2nd class, inclusive my seat, was already packed with families and luggage and I didn’t want to chase them away so I boarded the 1st class, prepared to pay a supplement. Maybe it was because my ticket for foreigners was written in english only and the conductor didn’t understand what it sais or he just didn’t care but I didn’t pay more for my cushioned seat. The eight hours (for 200km) were a little bit rickety but the landscape outside was really nice and I had a good conversation with a monk who sat beside me. The highlight was when the train passed the Gokteik Viaduct, a steel bridge over a gorge out of the colonial era that was the
Hsipaw is a nice small city in the mountains, with a comfortable climate (not soo superhot in the day and pretty cold at night) and great surroundings. It’s only a twenty minutes hike and you’re in the middle of the mountains, just surrounded by rice paddy fields, rural farmers, small water streams and water buffaloes. I did some nice walks out into the countryside in my first two days, before the real adventure started. Ian, a guy from the USA and me rented motorbikes and planned to do the “Namhsam Circle”, a route that is famous for it’s unbelievable bad “road” conditions.
Guidebooks tried to warn us to take this route, for example the Lonely Planet sais about Namhsam: “…a few brave souls come here by motorcycle, but the road is long, the route confusing and you have to break the journey overnight. … There are no permit restrictions for visiting Namhsam town and hiking to nearby villages, but the shocking condition of the road and the unreliable transport links deter all but the most dedicated travellers.” Not us! If the LP sais something like this, you should go and do that all the more.
Equipped with a handdrawn map provided by Mr Bike, the only guy who rents motorbikes in Hsipaw we started in morning. After a few kilometer Ian’s chain jumped off the first time and the 2nd, 3rd and 4th time should follow until we broke down directly in front of a motorbike repair bamboo hut For 0,50US$ the guy fixed the problem in a few minutes and we continued. The road is paved for the first 20kilometer, until you take the leftturn to Namhsam, from there on, for the next 200km, the full Namhsam Circle (this name is an invention by Ian and me – it’s not commonly known like this) it’s just a more or less narrow, bumpy and rough dirt track. And you shouldn’t have any illusions that the road conditions will be better at some point: No, they just become worse! After the intersection to Namhsam it really starts to be frightening and challenging, I can’t really describe how bad the road is, because even if I tell you that it’s the most terrible road you can imagine, you can’t imagine it, you have to see it. Before this road the worst “road” I’ve ever seen (with a four wheeled jeep!) was the way to the Naiman Nuur lakes in Mongolia, but I’m really sorry for this adventurous way, it’s no longer the number one. Congratulations instead to the Namhsam Circle, with flying colours you’re my official number one of the worst roads I’ve ever seen.
In the first hour you only think “Oh my god, I’ll never survive that” before the adrenaline kicks in and it starts to make fun. You have to be fully concentrated and mistakes are punished immediatly. Ian fell 4 times in the 200km, luckily I could avoid that. Beside the road conditions the landscape is beautiful. The area really earns the nickname “Asian Switzerland”. It’s pretty comparable to the Yunnan area around Dali and Lijiang in China, it’s anyway not really far away (to the chinese border it’s maybe 100km) from there. The area is a tea plantation zone what is responsible for the miserable street condition, too. The tea harvest is in the middle of the rainy season when a lot of overloaded trucks queue up this windy road and get stuck what results with ruts that are sometimes 1,5m deep. The sleepy village of Namhsam lies on the halfway in the circle and is a logical stopover point because there’s a very basic guesthouse. The village is pretty nice but pretty boring, too. It completely shuts down by 7pm so better have dinner before that As I said the guesthouse is very basic and ideal if you don’t want to sleep. The walls paper-thin and you can hear every noise from your neighbours room (in my case it felt like a strong snoring chinese man is lying directly beside me), but the thing that was really a pain in the ass for me that night was, that I had some stomach problems and had to use the toilet a few times. Of course there was no electricity and the toilet was one of the squat version toilets, really not convenient when you just have light from your mobile phone. When I ran out of toilet paper after my second visit I had to become inventive… I spare you the details!
The next day I felt already a little bit better but actually I had no choice rather than to go on the motorbike and ride back to Hsipaw. But it worked. The road was even getting worse than the day before but after an hour the adrenaline kicked in again and we finally made it back to Hsipaw in 7 or 8 hours. Inbetween we stopped in a Palaung village for lunch. The people on the way are really great anyway, everybody shouts “bye bye” to you (strange, everywhere else in Asia they shout “hello” but in Myanmar everybody shouts a friendly bye bye) and waves. Especially the children of course are getting crazy when they see you. When we finally got back on the paved road we both intuitively raised our fists. It was an adventure and it was really great but it’s just recommended for experienced drivers, if you think you are experienced enough to do that, go for it. Namhsam and the whole area is probably one of the most off-the-beaten-track destinations you are allowed to go to Myanmar, really unspoiled and beautiful, so don’t miss it!
When we arrived at our guesthouse, where Mr Bike was already waiting for us, we asked him how many people rented motorbikes and did this trip on their own so far. He answered: “Oh, not a lot, I think maybe 5!” . Somehow that was not really surprising for us. Anyway, we both thought that it is a little bit irresponsible from Mr Bike just to give us the motorbikes and let us go to do the circle. He knew where we wanted to go and he knows about the conditions but didn’t ask any questions if we have a license, how experienced we are etc. If a usual backpacker who rented a motorbike in Ko Phangan where he went around the island for a day without any accidents and now thinks that he’s able to ride a motorbike and he can manage it to go up to Namhsam, than I simply predict his death on this route. For example, Ian, the american guy, lives in Asia since 8 years and drives a motorbike since 8 years without any accidents. In this 200km he fell 4 times, good luck that he always was on a pretty low speed and nothing serious happened to him. And I was just lucky. If the trip would have been longer, let’s say three or four or five days it would have been just a matter of time when I would have to pick up the motorbike from the ground, too.
We were pretty proud that we did and survived the circle and Mr Bike was somehow, too, and invited us for dinner with his family the next evening. I usually planned to lefave already the next day but this dinner invitation was a good reason to stay one more day and to relax (my asscheeks definitely needed a break, too).

The overnight bus ride from Bagan to Mandalay was kind of pleasent, except the usual inconveniences like a much much too cold air-con, just one break in 8 hours and the arrival time at 5 o’clock in the morning. But otherwise the bus was half empty and we had a lot of space. Actually, it was the first time at all that I had an overnight bus ride in Asia where a seat was free at all.
Thanks to Rudyard Kipling and his “The Road To Mandalay” this city has the image to be Asias most traditional, timeless and alluring place. It’s not. It’s just a horrible city, probably the city I liked least in the world so far. It has some attractions but other cities in Myanmar have them too and in general it’s just a booming economical city that provitates from it’s strategical good position. All trade Myanmar does with China is going through the city and it feels just like a huge dirty marketplace. I usually like dirty cities (Yangon is a dirty city, as well) but really not this kind of dirty. The whole city somehow looks the same everywhere, nothing special to see and just a few special things to do. Of course there are big temples to visit but there are big temples to visit everywhere in Myanmar. In my opinion, the only really good thing here are the famous “Moustache Brothers”, a comedy troop that is openly dissident to the government. Two of the three brothers were arrested and sentenced to years of hard labour not just once but they don’t think about to stop their program. They are very popular in Myanmar and the government maybe fears protests if they would stop the show so they let them criticise on a low level. Today the shows are just open to tourists, not to locals and in english, not burmese.
But beside all that, Mandalay functions as a hub to a few other old royal cities like Sagaing, Amarapura, Inwa and Shwebo. In the three days I’ve been in Mandalay I’ve just been to Amarapura, nowadays just a small city at the shores of the Thaungthaman Lake. The biggest attraction here is with no doubt the “U Bein Bridge”, the longest teakwood bridge in the world. It connects the Thaungthaman village with Amarapura and still is very frequent used by locals. BTW: Officially, if you visit the U Bein Bridge you have to buy the 10US$ combo ticket (the money goes directly to the government), but nobody checks. The combo ticket is necessary for a few sights in and around Mandalay but beside the Royal Palace, nobody cares about it. Travellers who try to act a little bit responsible in Myanmar will skip the Mandalay Palace anyway. It’s not the original Mandalay Palace which was destroyed in the World War II. The Palace today was build as a tourist attraction in the late 90s by the government and they used forced labour to build it.
Just skip this city, or stay there only for a day to see how terrible it is or use it as an accomodation point for the cities around. Leave early in the morning and come back in the evening. I know that I was not in the best mood in the days when I visited Mandalay and maybe reached my first real “down point” on my travels but I didn’t meet one single fellow traveller who liked Mandalay, either.

I don’t know what came into my mind when I agreed to take a chair in the middle row in the bus from Yangon to Bagan because all other seats were already booked. The journey should take 16 hours and I knew that a chair in the middle row usually means a small plastic chair with the height of 30cm. Prepared for the worst overnight bus ride in my life I started together with a few other people from my guesthouse in a shared taxi to the long distance bus station, which is located 45 minutes north of the city center. Then, when I got my ticket and my seat number I was really happy because the middle row seat was just the middle seat in the last row of the bus, good luck. But it could have been a plastic chair seat in the middle row, too, as they filled up the real middle row with this. Business as usual in Asia. The trip was surprisingly pleasent and it took just 11 hours instead of 18 (maybe they tell you 18 because that’s the usual time the bus needs inclusive calculated breakdowns etc.) and we passed through the new build capital of Myanmar, Nay Pyi Taw. It’s unbelievable to see what’s happening there. The whole country is in a miserable condition and the capital is so hyper-modern, super-resource wasting and out of all limitis. 25000 people live there at the moment, mostly army generals and their families. Of course they need 3 lane wide (in both directions!) streets that lead through the city and of course the lanes must be separated by fancy neon green lights instead of simple road marks painted on the streets, of course the whole city must be as bright in the night as it is in daytime and of course every single house you see must look like a palace. It’s insane and when I passed through and started to think about the people in Yangon who are suffering for these corrupt electricity policies, I immediatly got angry and started to think about a guerilla war to stop this horror junta. Beside that and the two police stops, where we had to get out of the bus to let them control and copy our passports, the way was very convenient.
Anyway, we arrived pretty early in Bagan (as every night bus in Myanmar does) and let a bunch of trishaw drivers bring us to the “Winner Guesthouse”, that I highly recommend to fellow travellers. It’s maybe not the cleanest (but still clean enough) and not the most comfortable one in Bagan, but it’s the cheapest and for sure the one with the friendliest and most helpful owners. For example, usually you have to pay a 10US$ entrance fee for the “Bagan Archeological Zone” at your guesthouse but when we ask them how they handle it, they just ask if we already paid the fee somewhere and then made us understand that we should be quiet and maybe no one will notice. Very nice, really no one noticed. We also checked in at 4am, got our rooms and didn’t get charged for this night or half the night as most of the other guesthouses in Myanmar would do. The rest of the day I spent with sleeping, eating and writing blog articles, so I didn’t went into the fields that day. Another interesting thing happened when we (that were actually Cyril from France, Johannes from Germany, Alon from Israel and me – we shared two twin rooms in the guesthouse) had some food in a restaurant and a man somehow got involved into our conversation. Pretty fast he changed the topics, lowered his voice and started to tell us about the situation in his country and about politics. Stuff like that is really dangerous for locals, the stuff he told us would mean a few years prison or hard labour for him. It was obvious that he wanted to talk but felt uncomfortable in this restaurant, so he invited us for tea and fruits to his home the next day. Of course we were more than happy to accept his offer.
On day two we borrowed bicycles and biked to New Bagan, the village that was forced by the government to move from Old Bagan to it’s new location a few kilometers out of the Archaeological Zone around ten years ago, to make space for tourists. The old man who invited us the day before, lived there with his family. He already expected us together and after we introduced ourselves to all his relatives we were asked to sit down in a very basic bamboo hut. They served us tea and fresh fruits and the man began to tell. He told us a lot and without a lot of interruption from our side he talked for maybe two hours. He started with the long history of Myanmar and all the different tribes that are at home there and continued with the recent history, which was the the biggest part of his story. He actually didn’t tell something that was really new for me but it was still great to hear all that from a local. The most interesting things he told us were about the situation in the villages, especially in the villages where tourists are not allowed to go to. Later in this blog more about that. The rest of this day we spent cycling around the temples, what I didn’t really like. I mean, I loved the temples but to go with a bike was just not the right form of transportation for me. It somehow felt to fast, you pass by so many temples and don’t really get the feeling for this place so I decided not to rent a bicycle anymore and to walk around Bagan in the next three days.
What is Bagan about? It’s a unique place on planet earth and it’s one of the most important religious sites in the world, as well. It’s the most important national heritage of Myanmar, it’s amazing, stunning, mystical. In numbers, the first temple in this old royal city was built in 1057 AD and around 4400 temples followed in the next 230 years before a few thousand mongolian warriors, sent by Kublai Khan, swept through the city and ended Bagans glory days. At the end of the 13th century Bagan counted 4446 temples, nowadays something like 2300 remain, especially the 1975 powerful earthquake damaged and destroyed a lot of the temples. The area is not too small and not too big either, maybe measuring 10×10km, just big enough to find solitude and to explore the area just without any other soul around you and just small enough to do that on your own feet. To stroll around the fields, to climb various temples and to enjoy the view over the plain, maybe to stop at a temple for several hours, just you, a book and the impressing scenery around you, was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever done in my life. Additionally to this already impressing site, there was another big thing happening in this days. The longest lasting sun eclipse in history crossed Bagan on the 17th of january. Already in the days before Bagan began to become “crowded”, maybe more crowded than ever before. But we’re still talking in Myanmar numbers, a country that hardly sees 300000 tourists a year. Compared to Thailand (or Angkor Wat in Cambodia), it was still empty here. The afternoon of the 17th of January than finally offered perfect conditions for this natural highlight. There was no cloud in the blue sky, the obversation conditions couldn’t have been better. I was just about to enter the “Bad Luck Temple” when a very excited french man came up to me with his special sun eclipse glasses and told me that the sun eclipse just started. I didn’t believe him because there were usually more than three hours left until the moon would cover the sun but a view through his glasses convinced me . I hurried up to the temple that should be the meeting point with the other people from the guesthouse. It was still a few kilometers away, but at least when I arrived there I recognised that I was much to early. Even after the “first contact” it takes a few hours until the moon is in the middle of the sun. Myanmar was, as expected not really prepared for this sun eclipse, so it wasn’t possible to get these special glasses anywhere in the city except in the 5* hotels and they kept the glasses for their guests. Instead of glasses people used old x-rays, floppy discs or black and white photo film, what worked good, too. Tour groups that flew in for this event from Germany, France or the USA had their own special glasses, too, and were happy to give them away for some time. We actually used x-rays, what was practical for the cameras to take pictures, too. The moon should be in the middle of the sun for more than 8 minutes, that means that this eclipse was the longest in this planets history but I have to say it was not that spectacular as I hoped. It’s definitely great to witness such a rare phenomenom at a place like Bagan but I expected a little bit more. It was an annacular and not total sun eclipse, so the moon didn’t cover the whole sun and left a ring around. The advantage of this was, that it was possible to see the sun corona, the disadvantage was that it didn’t really get dark. Anyway, it was nice, but nothing I would travel thousands of kilometers for.
The day after the eclipse was the perfect day to eplore the really big temples. It seemed that all tourists, except me (and Johannes from Freiburg in Germany), left Bagan directly after the eclipse and I had even famous huge temples like the “Pyathada Paya” just for me for several hours (when the first other tourists arrived to watch the sunset from there, I left). It really was amazing. In the evening I left together with Johannes on the night bus to Mandalay… a not so nice city as you imagine when you hear the name.

The ground crew of AirAsia and the customs weren’t really bothered about my condition but of course I tried not to show off that I’m totally drunk what maybe didn’t work so well. Max had this great idea to buy some yellow plastic glasses with palms on the top in Bangkok and put these glasses on everybodys nose who crossed his way. Now that he flew home he gave me this glasses to continue with the fun and I started in the Airport already. Unfortunately the most people weren’t as ethusiastic about the glasses as I was but maybe it was just too early in the morning. Anyway, I got a few pictures and usually wanted pictures of the stewards and stewardesses, too, but I slept in in the same second as I took my seat. My direct neighbour woke me up when the airplane was back on the ground and almost empty already, I was the last person who left it. So I was the last person from this flight that got it’s luggage, too and I was the last person that left the airport building as well, at a time when the free shuttle offered from my guesthouse already left without me, thinking that there’s nobody more to come out. It was not a big deal, I now shared a regular taxi with three other Germans and one Israeli what was good fun, too. Our taxi ” driver was funny and free to talk about the situation and the government in his country and I got some “yellow glasses” pictures as well. Really a great thing, this yellow glasses and a great pity that I lost them already after two days… When we finally arrived at the guesthouse I just had the desire to sleep, what I did, for almost the whole day.
The next day I was fit again and it was time to get some first impressions in this country. Yangon has nearly 5 million inhabitants and is the biggest city in the country but not the capital anymore. The military generals, who are the men with the power there, decided in 2005 to switch the capital to Nay Pyi Taw (means “Royal Capital”), a city that didn’t exist before this decision and is in construction now. That’s where all the money goes to… but more about that later. I really liked Yangon from the first minutes I arrived there. It’s definitely something else here compared to the other big cities in South-East Asia. It feels a little bit as if you were thrown back into the eightis. The majority of the people still wears their traditional clothing (that is a skirt for men and woman, called “longyi” for men and “ingyi” for woman), you don’t see a lot of people with mobile phones, the streets aren’t very crowded (in asian dimensions) and the most people seem to live a pretty simple life. Of course, Yangon is the biggest city and the cultural and economical capital of the country and can find almost everything here that you can find in Germany or Thailand, too, but you have to look out for these things, you don’t face them everywhere like in the rest of this globalised, standardised world. And one thing that I recognised very fast was, that the people in Yangon are very humourous and good for a laugh. When you see the condition their country is in you maybe have to be.
As a city itself, Yangon is a big mixture of missionary or colonial (that means christian), indian, bamar, muslim and modern western influences, that makes it to a big melting pot of cultures. You see people of all world religions on the street and some quarters have a destinctive flavour of India or others of China. Otherwise the city is definitely not a beauty and poverty, social mismanagement, a lack of infrastructure etc. is visible everywhere. Everything is said wenn I tell you that the government can’t manage it to provide enough electricity for their biggest and most developed city. Power cuts are very frequent, like 5-6 times a day, everytime for hours.
But for sure Yangon has the great sights that ” /> are a must see for every visitor in Myanmar, too. At first to mention is definitely the famous Shwedagon Paya, the most important buddhist pagoda in Myanmar. I visited the pagoda twice in one day, one time during the day and one time in the evening and for me it’s just a magical place. A place where you start to dream and where suddenly all questions if this kind of a travel lifestyle is worth all the inconveniences that come with it, are answered: Yes, it is! The Shwedagon Paya is not just one huge gold-glowing stupa (but it is, as well), around the main stupa there’s a big assortment of smaller stupas, statues, temples, shrines, images and pavillons and everything is coloured in this glowing orange gold – people say that the Shwedagon Paya holds more gold reserves than the whole Bank Of England. It’s one of these places where you have to remind yourself how privileged you are and thankfully you should be to see this because there are a lot of people who’s biggest dream it is to go to this place and for them it will just remain a dream. The Shwedagon Paya is maybe the most impressive, but by far not the only tourist attraction in the city, another example of a golden pagoda is the Sule Paya, it has it’s place in the middle of the biggest street roundabout in the city, very strange.
At all I spent three nights and four days in Yangon, mostly strolling around the city and occasionally visiting a temple or another tourist site and it was really a good time. The people here are really openminded and I somehow liked the athmosphere that flows through the, very often, dirty and smelly streets.