Ballooning in Bagan

We arrived in Thilawa, Myanmar on November 4th. Our ship was parked on the Irawaddy River approximately 1.5 hours south of the city of Yangon. We arrived mid-afternoon on the first day and by the time we all got our passports to get off of the ship, it was about 6:00 pm. I had a field program that was to leave at 3:30 am the next morning. It was a tough decision to make,

but I decided just to stay on the ship that first night rather than going out to the Yangon city center to see some pagodas and get a few drinks. I knew that I wanted to be rested so I could fully enjoy the next couple of days that I had ahead of me.

In a way, it was weird booking this overnight trip through SAS. I knew we were going to take a flight to our destination but I had no idea when the flight was, where we were even going, or even how to get to the first airport. All I knew was that if I got on this bus at this time, I would make it to Bagan someway or another. I was a bit surprised at how developed the city looked compared to that of even India. Myanmar was the first place I’ve seen stoplights since South Africa! The airport was as nice if not nicer and more well maintained than those that I have seen in the States. When we landed in Bagan however, this was all very different. The airport in Bagan was a giant temple beautifully colored in gold as many of the temples/statues are in Burma.

We started off by visiting a few temples and pagodas as soon as we left the airport. The Bagan area is supposedly home to over 40,000 pagodas and temples. From what I gathered, the main difference between a pagoda and a temple is that temples are made to go inside and pagodas are to be viewed only from the outside. It is customary to take off your shoes and socks when visiting both. We stayed at the Bagan Treasure Resort both nights which was phenomenal! The first night we went to a fancy dinner where they had a puppet show prepared for us throughout the night.

Before we left for dinner, we hopped on a rickety wooden fairy to cross the Irawaddy River which also ran through Bagan. It was a 20 minute ride to the other side of the river. From there, they said we would use public transportation to go see a small village. This ‘public transportation' consisted of 7 vans that we all piled into to drive us around. We did go to the village where we spent an hour or so playing soccer with local kids and a wicker soccer ball. Up to this point, this has been the biggest language barrier that I have seen. We weren’t able to speak at all to the village people, many not even the slightest ‘hello.’ Even so, we had a great time interacting with them and sharing gifts that we brought.

I tried to go to bed early the first night but there was just so much to do! Dinner and the puppet show ran til about 9:00 pm and then on top of that, there was free wi-fi back at the hotel. I hadn’t seen wi-fi in a couple of weeks and hadn’t seen good wi-fi since South Africa so it was nice to finally have this luxury. The next morning, we were up early once again. We set our alarms for 4:45 am to wake up and go hot air ballooning at sunrise. When we arrived at the location, they welcomed us with coffee/tea and a croissant. Soon after, we arrived at each hot air balloon which would hold 12 passengers plus the pilot. 

It was incredible. I don’t necessarily have words to describe how this experience made me feel. Seeing 20+ hot air balloons all take off at sunrise and soar through the red/orange painted sky was surreal. All of the pilots were from England and since it is offseason there, they come to Myanmar. Our pilot actually needed his annual flight inspection done so we had one other instructor come up with us. The guy who checked out our pilot happened to be the world record holder for the ballooning in the most countries at 113! He now owns his own hot air balloon and airplane and flies himself all around the world to keep improving on this number.

After ballooning, we went back to the hotel to eat breakfast and prepare for the long day ahead of us. Our tour guide, Wah Wah, was the best. Her English wasn’t perfect and there were definitely a few times when there were miscommunications. One of those times was how she kept saying ‘later, we will go to the market and do the shopping game.’ We knew she probably just meant that we will go to the market and have time to shop.

Nope! She actually meant shopping game! She gave us all 3,000 Burmese Kyat ($2.19) to buy three things in the market. Burmese is written without any English letters like we may be used to seeing in other languages. However, Wah Wah wrote out the pronunciation in English words for us on three different slips of paper each on saying something like; Can I please have a lemon fruit for 1,000 Kyat. We were to take these pieces of paper and try to read them aloud to the locals in hopes that they could give us what we needed. What a perfect game! We can’t cheat because this writing Wah Wah created is literally just gibberish and it’s tough because we don’t know how to pronounce it correctly!

My three items I needed to pick up were an orange, chick peas, and lemon fruit. The sellers in the markets saw me trying to read off of this piece of paper and quickly snatched it from my hand and tried to read it themselves. Apparently, some of them knew enough english to pronounce the words enough to understand what I meant. It wasn’t easy though. I ended up getting exactly what I needed which I felt to be a big accomplishment even though I did cheat just a bit. One girl came back with Papaya and Wah Wah said ‘what is this?’ It wasn’t one of the three items on her grocery list but it just goes to show what a great game it was and how it really was tough to get our point across to them in order to buy the right stuff.

The neatest thing about this game is that after we spent all that money and bought all of the food that we did, we took it right down the road to a school for kids living in extreme poverty. We stayed there for a bit and actually served them food as well as interacting and playing some games with them. A few SASers bought some wicker soccer balls which always came in handy when there were young kids around.

After the school we went and visited some more temples before going to lunch. At lunch, I sat with the deans as well as a few professors and other staff from the ship. This is one of the biggest and most influential thing that I can think of that SAS provides. I love the fact that I can sit down with anyone and have a nice discussion without having to force anything especially within a school setting. Many faculty have become very close friends and even my extended-ship family.

We went to a lacquer ware shop following our lunch at the Italian restaurant. Burma is known for their lacquer ware and the shop we went to was one of the most famous in all of Bagan. We were able to sit down and draw small pictures and stencils on pieces of lacquer ware that we then took home. The lacquer shop was filled with gorgeous work pieces that were all far out of my price range. Lacquer ware can take up to 6 months to create a solid piece after the 12-16 coats of paint/stain that it usually receives. 

We were leaving the next morning on an 8:20 flight and we did everything we could to get the bus driver to take us to a pagoda to watch the sunrise and other SASers balloon on a different field program, but unfortunately we couldn’t talk them into it. We were able to book three vans though to take us independently to a pagoda to watch the sunrise before we needed to be back to the hotel to leave for the airport. I’m so very glad that we did this. This was just as memorable as the ballooning itself in a different perspective. Watching sunrise sitting on a pagoda and then to see 20+ more balloons flying over all of the temples was unreal. 

When we landed back in Yangon, our field program took us to one final meal for lunch before we headed back to the ship. I decided to sign out of the field program after lunch as did many others and travel independently within Yangon. I spent the rest of the day with a girl named Victoria as we went to the Shwedagon Pagoda which towers almost 350ft over Yangon. Afterwards we went to a hotel to get a few drinks and some wi-fi.

A friend of mine went to Naypyidaw, the capital of Myanmar. This place is known for being a ‘ghost city.’ Not a ghost town, but actually a city. There are 20 lane highways with nobody on them and often nobody even in sight. The only people that live in this city are the government workers. Oh, and this city is approximately six times the size of New York City. And nobody even lives there! I need to do more research on this phenomenon to try to understand it but from what I’ve heard, it’s symbolic of the Burmese corruption in a nutshell.

The last day in Myanmar, I had a field class for my Financial Markets and Institutions course. We went to three banks throughout the day to get a better feel on how each one operated. The first was located 15 miles north of our ship, but it took us 2 hours 15 minutes to get there due to traffic. This was about 9:00 am on a Wednesday! It’s just the normal traffic though in Myanmar and with a bus, it is that much tougher.

For the most part, I found the banks to be fairly interesting. Some of the coolest facts I learned were that; the 10,000 ($7.30) Kyat note is the largest and it is actually quite hard to come by in the cash based society of Myanmar. Even when buying a house, people have to pay in cash. These banks that we visited have had people come up to them and buy a $500,000 house by paying all in $3.65 notes! Money was flying everywhere behind the counters of the banks! Literally we saw bags of money that looked like bales of hay full of cash.

Another thing I learned at the banks were about the SIM cards that you have in your phone. Phones are a relatively new thing in Myanmar and 5 years ago, you could buy a SIM card for $5,000. Two years ago they cost $1,500. Today: $1.5 or less. They are becoming much more accessible which has been the cause of the drastic decrease. Overall, Myanmar was a country that I would absolutely love to come back to someday. Here are some fotos from Myanmar/Burma.

Shwedagon Pagoda