Her yesterday is still going on today

Days 1-3: NY/DC to Bangkok to Yangon, Myanmar



I picture the start of out trip like a graphic on The Amazing Race. There are four dots on a world map. Two dots (Moira and me) are shown at Newark Airport departing on a United flight for Tokyo, leaving at 11:15, headed over the Arctic Circle and Russia. These two dots leave on time. The third dot is in Washington, DC (Stephanie) on a United flight leaving at 12:20 and also headed to Tokyo. This dot also leaves on time. These three dots meet up in Tokyo after 12-14 hours of flight time and chill in the United lounge, with some wine (hey, it's 5 PM somewhere) and snacks. The next line on the map shows these 3 headed out at around 630 PM to Bangkok, Thailand.

It is the 4th dot though (Lallande of course) at JFK, that instantly gets thrown to the back of the Amazing Race pack. She is scheduled to fly out at 11:20 on Emirates Air to Dubai where she will catch a flight to Bangkok and beat the rest of us there by about 3-4 hours. Not so fast. The travel gods (is there a travel Buddha? If so, we will start worshipping him) had other plans.

Lallande's plane was delayed 3+ hours in NYC which meant that she would miss her connecting flight to Bangkok. She was told that they would try to hold the flight as a lot of people were connecting, but upon arrival, she found out that wasn't the case. She had been rebooked on a midnight flight to Bangkok which would arrive at 10 AM...or an hour after our flight to Yangon, Burma left. Not good. Sensing that this could be the beginning of a travelanche - our term for when one travel problem snowballs into bigger ones, with the potential to throw off an entire trip (trademarked during our Peru trip in 2004) - Lallande used her travel wits and kindness to get booked on a Thai Air flight that left at 10 and got in at 640 AM. Good karma.  She even charmed them into a day room where she was able to take a shower and grab a quick nap. The obnoxious, ugly American man who we heard speaking rudely and condescendingly to the customer service agent in Tokyo could have learned a lesson for her.

Meanwhile, back in Bangkok, all we saw was the underground passage way which led from the airport to the Novotel airport hotel. Remember that Tom Hanks movie where he is stuck in no man's land in the airport? What is the name of that? Oh, the Terminal!  It is kind of what we felt like in Bangkok. Oh we did learn it was hot. Even landing after 11, it was 90 degrees. We had about 6 whole hours in the hotel. But we will be back two more times to enjoy it, before we had to Bhutan and our last night of the trip. Then, Moira and I will know how to turn off the lights in the room. For the life of us, we couldn't figure it out last night. We tried every wall switch. We tried removing the key card from the entry, which turned off everything. We almost went to bed with the lights on, but finally figured out that there was a control board between the beds. Sometimes when we have things like this happen, I am amazed that ESPN actually lets us run teams of people.

Our flight to Yangon, Burma was a semi-early one (850). The Bellagio Belles were all reunited when we met Lallande at the gate. She looked pretty good for someone who was traveling for almost two days straight. Or as Steph said, "her yesterday is still going on." They served us breakfast on the plane. We had actually has a good one already at the hotel but ate some more, because as Steph said, "We don't want to insult anyone."  I may just quote Steph throughout this whole blog as she has the best sayings.

Editor's note: I am going to refer to Myanmar as Burma at times as it is easier to type. But Myanmar is preferred here.

Yangon is 10 and a half hours ahead of New York. Yes, there are places in the world where there are half hour differences although this is the first time we visited one as a group. You need a visa to visit Myanmar and did something called Visa on Arrival where we paid to have it waiting for us and for someone to meet us post-visa acquisition at customs (recommended by Kensington). The process worked something like this. - we stood in a long line with our paperwork which wasn't needed to hand over our passport which they matched up with our application which had copies of our passports. They had some problems with us for some reason so Moira was helpful in pointing out who was who. From there, we had to wait in a clump of people for the three people behind the glass to hold up our passport which now contained a visa. As Lallande said, it was another mystical entry process. Of course, we were the last to get ours. At one point, they held up a picture of an Asian man and Moira thought it was Lallande which sent us all into hysterics. The whole process took about 45 minutes (my guess). It should be called something more like visa on arrival an hour later. There was a woman who met us right after we went through customs. We thought she was our guide but it turns out she was the visa on arrival person. I am not sure what her purpose was other than to hand our arrival cards over to the customs people.

Right outside, we spotted the Cynthia Freed and guests placard. Our guide, whose name I will spell phonetically, is Chatu. He is very nice and very friendly. Like most men here, he wears what is sort of a cross between a skirt and a sarong. He took us to our van and introduced us to out driver, whose name none of us know. We will call him Joe for the purposes of this story. They drove us to our hotel, The Strand, which took about 45 minutes. It turns out that there is a lot of traffic in Yangon (formerly Rangoon) as people only recently started buying cars. From out hotel, we had a great lunch and then explored the city. We took in the largest reclining Buddha in the world (see picture that I can hopefully include), walked around the streets of the city, taking in the outdoor food stands and other vendors, and went to the Shwe Dagon pagoda which is really amazing.

I am not doing today justice but I am tired, don't have a guidebook to double check facts, and our 8:00 AM flight tomorrow got moved up to 6:30 AM which I guess can happen here (ya gotta roll with the punches when you travel). I will add more color and details when the rest of the group chimes in more. Internet service is spotty here so I wanted to post this while I had the chance.

Things we learned:
- There are 8 strands if Buddha's hair in the Shwe Dagon pagoda. It has 5 tons of gold, 1800 carats of jewels.
- No "spaghetti blouses" are allowed there.
- There are 135 tribes in Burma. There is one language but with different accents. But each tribe also has its own language.
- Burma is having elections in 2015 but they don't know what month yet. They seem cautiously optimistic about this.
- When President Obama came here, they broadcast his speech live on TV and everyone watched.
- Like there are Buddhas for each day of the week (Moira thinks it is appropriate that she is the reclining Buddha), the Burmese also associate animals for each day you were born. Stephanie is the rat. Moira is the lion. Lallande is a guinea pig. I am something called a Garuda which I think is made up. It looks like the flying monkey from The Wizard of Oz.
- A SIM card cost $1500 here three years ago. Today, they are only $2.50. Now so many people here have cell phones. That has only just exploded. There are also skynet satellite dishes everywhere.
- Bangkok air can serve a meal on less than a 90 minutes flight while we can barely get a drink on a US one.
- The sun is really intense here. Many people carry umbrellas. It feels hotter than Vietnam but not as humid as Cambodia.
- Women and children wear thanaka, which is a paste made out of tree bark which smells like sandalwood. It looks like they are painting their faces yellow but it is really to protect from the sun. It is only used here.
- Everyone here seems to love and respects "the lady."  She (Aung San Suu Kyi) encourages everyone that changes will happen if they are patient. She won the Nobel peace prize a few years ago. If you don't know her, you should. Google her. We'll wait. She was under house arrest for 15 years
- All the school kids here wear green skirts and white shirts. You can distinguish which school they go to by the badge on their shirts. They have the equivalent of our elementary, middle and high schools. How you do in high school determines what track you get for college which makes it seem like you don't have the option to choose your own major.
- They are very particular about the US money they accept here. It has to be crisp, unmarked in any way bills, minted after 2006. Try finding a lot of those before you come here. Lallande used her citi contacts to find out which bank had the best.

Number of flight segments to date: 3
Number of airport bus trips: 2
Estimated number of sleep in past two and a half days per person: 6 hours