Day 174: Back to Yangon

Our time in Myanmar is slowly winding to a close, and today was the first step on that journey, as we took the bus from Inle Lake back down to Yangon. Had our last hotel breakfast and got picked up around 8:15am in a small ute thing, drove around a bit picking up some other passengers before arriving at the bus stop around 9am. The bus showed up about 10 minutes later, already mostly full (it had come from a city a couple of hours further down the road).

Thankfully our reserved seats were empty, so we settled in and got comfortable. Probably the nicest bus we've been in so far - it was a Scania which is I think Swedish, so built with European bodies in mind. Nice wide seats, lots of leg room, even a small TV in the seat back facing you! Air conditioner was still set to "Siberia" of course, though with the sun out it wasn't too bad.

Not a whole lot to report from the journey really as we were traversing roads we'd already seen. The first hour was spent heading back west to Kalaw where we'd started our trek, then a few more hours heading back west out of the mountains. The view here was actually pretty spectacular, and we obviously hadn't seen any of it on the way in since it was dark!

But once we descended from the hills and stopped for lunch around midday, we were back in the dry central plains area which is mostly unpopulated and fairly uninteresting. Stopped again at about 4pm for another break, where we were informed our arrival in Yangon would be about 7:30pm (we'd actually had no real sense of when we'd arrive).

True enough, we pulled into the enormous sprawling bus terminal on the outskirts of Yangon around 7:20pm, making it a 10 hour bus ride. Aside from the freezing temperature after sunset, it wasn't too bad on the whole. Found a taxi with no problem, bargained him down from the hilarious to a moderately outrageous fare into town, though a little surprised that his wife and infant daughter were occupying the front passenger seat. Oh well!

Arrived back at Hotel Clover around 8:15pm, almost precisely 12 hours door-to-door. Settled into our room (identical to the previous one, just two floors higher), went a few doors down the road for a Japanese dinner, then bed around 10:30pm. We have one final free day in Yangon tomorrow which we're not sure what to do with, before flying out to KL the following morning.Read more