Bago and The Delta

The train ride to Bago

I had a few days left in Yangon before I returned to Bangkok and as luck would have it, one of my dear friends from Rotary happened to be in town!  Ann Marie and I met at our Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship Orientation – in San Jose, two years ago.  She is on scholarship in Malaysia during the same year that I am in Thailand.  We’ve met in Viet Nam and at the Rotary Convention in Bangkok, but this was the first time we had a chance to travel together.

Beautiful golden pagodas in Bago

We took two day trips, the first of which was from Yangon to Twante – a small village on the Delta where the journey to Twante was an adventure in itself.  We took a beautiful rickety ferry ride across the Yangon River, past large freight ships and tiny fisherman boats.  Then, we spent over an hour sitting in the back of the pickup being hustled by local people for rides.  We were the only foreigners and it appeared it had been several days since the last ones (we were told later that last week there were two Australians…) and it was apparent that people were not accustomed to random tourists hanging around.  We wandered around town and realized that there really wasn’t much to see.  We documented the trip to Twante as an interesting interaction with local people, and turned around and came back!

Can you see the three chickens in this snake's stomach?!

But the following day, we took the two hour local train to Bago.  Lonely Planet describes it as a “Disney-flavored theme park of gaudy religious sites” and they couldn’t be more accurate.  As we climbed the first pagoda and stared out into the tree line, beautiful massive pagoda tops grazed the green.   But unlike Bagan, where the skyline was filled with ancient brick and sand tops of pagodas that had been weathered down, this skyline sparkled in gold.  The highlight of Bagan was the snake monastery, where a 124-year old Burmese python lives.  Legend has it that the snake told its owner the exact address he needed to go to in Bago in order to complete the construction of the stupa begun in a previous life.  Every year, tons of pilgrims come to pay homage to the snake, who chows down on 11 pounds of chicken every ten days…we could even see the three chickens in three huge blobs in his stomach.