Yangon: Tuesday 26th February 2008
No touring today. After our 5:30 breakfast we met up with Phyo for the boat trip back to Nwang Shye, watching the sunrise along the way; a beautiful sight passing the many fishermen up early working hard to catch their fish.
Back in town we loaded up the car as the monks on their morning collection walked past.
The flight to Yangon took 45 minutes, passing over many mountain ranges and huge dams.
On arrival we were saved from losing our baggage by a kindly airport staffer as we assumed baggage collection was inside the terminal. Instead we had to go through a door onto the tarmac to collect our bags.
Our transfer to the Savoy was filled with much interesting chat from our pickup; including news of a large fire in Mandalay as well as a fire destroying 100 houses in Yangon at the same time. It seemed a strange coincidence.
The Savoy is beautiful with our room facing onto the courtyard with swimming pool. We relaxed for a while in our room before venturing out to find a nice restaurant for lunch. The internet was working, but it was slower than usual (which means slower than 14.4K dialup) and there was no chance of finding a working g-mail proxy.
The first two choices from the Lonely Planet Guide book no longer seemed to exist; looked like some renovations were going on, else they had changed names. We wondered around the block and came to Aung Thukha, which I recognised from the book. We went inside and were given a table and I was pointed towards rows of pots with differing dishes which I had no idea of what was what, except for the pigs trotters which I didn’t feel like today.
I pointed to a couple of pots and was told prawn, and fish. So I nodded and returned to my table to find rice, a very nice clear soup with acacia leaves and a clover-like leaf. The soup was really nice. There was also a plate of vegetables, beans, cucumber, lettuce, etc which we were not really sure what to do with. Nobody else in the restaurant seemed to be doing anything with them either so we left them untouched.
The prawn curry was delicious; creamy and not at all spicy. Likewise the fish also was beautiful; lots of garlic and oil and with very big bones. This was the best meal I had had in all of Myanmar! Lunch cost the princely sum of 5500K, including 1500K for a can of coke. On our departure we were given a calendar featuring pictures of many different Buddha statues throughout Myanmar.
We returned to our hotel, and then we walked up to Shwe Dagon Pagoda to watch the sunset. The temple again was magnificent, and there were possibly more people visiting today then the first time we came here.
There were a group of people chanting the scriptures of Buddha as we watched the golden pagoda in the pink glow of the setting sun.
We walked back to our hotel; had dinner in the restaurant. Pene prawns for Michelle and Pesce Lasagne for me. Mmmmmm. Finished off with Chocolate Lasagne: Chocolate mouse layered between sheets of dark chocolate.