Night Bus to Bagan

I woke up the next day feeling refreshed; breakfast was served by the hotel in the common dining room where I met a few other backpackers and we had a short chit-chat on our experience in Myanmar. Since we would not be going anywhere else today but to stay in the hotel till 4pm when we had to check in at the bus station (I figured we probably had seen most of the must-sees in Yangon), we went out for a short stroll and did a little routine grocery at a local shopping mart, before having lunch at another teahouse by the streets.

Back in the hotel, we bumped into Mary, one of the most hilarious fellow backpacker I came across in this trip. Mary was fun and garrulous, and she is 75 years old; she was planning to stay in Myanmar for 4 weeks after a fortnight in Laos and a week in Cambodia, before heading to Thailand later. Well, I wonder if I were aldy bedridden or wheel-chair bound at that age. Or probably I would have been demented enough. 

Anyway, since she was heading towards Inle Lake with a bus 30 minutes ahead of us, we agreed to share the taxi. And Mary kept on entertaining us with her savoury backpacking stories when she first did her backpacking trip 50 years ago! I was just simply amazed by her courage and perseverance.

As I was toying with my iPhone while killing time, Mary almost killed me.

"What's that toy you're playing with?" She asked.

"It's a iPhone." I answered.

"What's an iPhone?" She asked again. "What does it do? Is it some sort of a telephone?"

Astonished I was.

"It's a smart phone where you could perform other functions like logging onto the internet and etc." I explained.

"Does it have a camera?" She politely added.

""Of course it does." I chuckled.

"Oh my! I didn't know such gadgets existed!" She exclaimed. "I don't know how to use a cellphone to be honest."

I almost fell off my chair. Mary must have been a living antique. Probably she was from the Jurassic Age too.

"Anyway, I do most of my stuffs via the internet using emails on the computer. More reliable." She persisted. "I find normal phones more trustworthy than these handheld ones."

Gosh. She survived 75 years without a handphone, and I could barely live for a day without my iPhone!

Our pick-up taxi arrived at around 3.30pm to pick us up to the bus station, 26km away from city centre, for 8000MMK. The journey to Au Mingalar Bus Station was an eventful one, with Mary teasing the driver and entertaining us with lots of jokes. And like usual, the roads of Yangon was packed with traffic, with swirls of dust hovering the air like a sandstorm, and we were baked in the taxi for almost an hour!

Au Mingalar Bus Station is an eye opening; it somehow is a city in a bus station, and a bus station in a city. A labyrinth packed with buses leaving to every single destination in the country almost every single hour, it is like a city that never sleeps. I swear we could even get lost in it. We had Chinese food in a nearby restaurant, as I was worried we would get disorientated if we had wandered too far from our bus depot.

By 5.30 pm the our bus, somehow old but seemed reliable, departed the bus station as we headed north towards Bagan. They gave us a complimentary bottle of drinking water, as well as a facial tissue and a toothbrush with toothpaste, which made me somehow impressed. The ride was rather smooth, and I managed to catch some sleep despite the  loud Burmese pop songs and soap opera on the telly throughout the journey.

Around 9.30 pm we stopped at a rest stop which looked like a theme park! It was so bright and colourful and busy, and they have got their own wifi! Impressive! We got ourselves some midnight snack and lingered around the stalls for 30 minutes before the bus continued its ride. Eventually I doze off after adjusting myself on the small reclining seat, and when I woke up hours later, we were already in Bagan.