Mandalay is the second largest city of Myanmar with a population exceeding one million, yet not looking like a well developed and organized city. Chaos on the road is nothing new in an Asian country and it’s there. What strikes a contemporary traveller is poverty, decrepit buildings, someone would have said ‘the grunge everywhere’ and general backwardness in thinking and technology as well.
As previously mentioned in one of our posts on Myanmar, Mandalay, despite of being the second largest city in this country, doesn’t have basic goods available in its local stores (it was hard for us to find any supermarket there) as we couldn’t buy everything we needed in one store (and we’re talking about one of the central parts of the city, 2km from the Mandalay Palace, not far from the place of our stay). Besides, to encounter someone who understands English bordered on the miraculous. Imagine us asking anybody where the nearest market was pronouncing the word ‘market’ only and making gestures believing that it would help – nobody got it where we wanted to go … It was at that time when the map application installed on my mobile had its worse moments and hanged up, so we had to ask anybody about the way, but honestly, we can’t imagine moving around the city not having any map at all (as we couldn’t get any help from the local people).
Does Mandalay have antything to offer, is it able to surprise a traveller? Well, yes! Apart from its abject poverty and the impression that the time stopped there many years ago you would soon be impressed by the wealth and splendor of the temples literally dripping in gold, constructed to honour Buddha. And, yes, the temples are amazing (especially those in the towns near Mandalay) but as soon as you get out of them, you face the sad reality and it strikes you really hard: on the way to the palace you will meet a lot of people having no place to live, begging in the streets, or not even doing so and still worshipping Buddha. It’s surprising that for donations there are always some cents to spend in this country… The people are surrounded by golden temples but live like rats, this is something we couldn’t understand!
It’s visible that the government doesn’t care about its people and the quality of their lives, but anyway, is there any good thing that you can expect from the military junta that rules the country? Citizens have limited access to information what’s going on in the world, what is more, the government makes sure that as little as possible information about their country could be passed outside its borders, and as already mentioned, the tourists mustn’t get to the poorest areas of Myanmar as they’re not permitted to see this abject poverty prevailing in these parts of the country. There is also a limitation regarding the access to standard temples/monuments in cities, e.g. there is a separate entrance for tourists visiting Mandalay Palace, besides, you can not move too close to schools or major state buildings. It is a specific reality, that cannot be understood by any contemporary European citizen…
Going back to what is worth seeing in Mandalay and its surrounding areas: there are many beautiful temples to explore. For sure you will need to spend one day for Mandalay Palace, Mandalay Hill and the surrounding area (a few temples), and also go to Zaycho Market. What’s more, you should haggle the price with the taxi drivers if you want to spend the whole day for visiting a bit distant sights in Mandalay and those in the outskirts of the city. We managed to do such a tour covering 10 places that interested us for 16.000MMK / 12USD per person – it is worth mentioning that we spent almost all day on sightseeing and the taxi driver didn’t make us do it in a rush, and was eager to take us to some more places…
Below you can see 2 typical sightseeing offers that every taxi driver has in his car, the first offer was for exploring the city of Mandalay, the second – its neighborhood.
We combined many places from one offer with those from the other one, and so we visited the following places: Mahamuni Pagoda, Kuthodaw Pagoda, Shwe Inbin Monastery, Ahtumashi Pagoda, the place for marble carving, U Bein Bridge (the longest bridge in the world made of teak wood with the length of 1.2km), Amarapura (producing wool and longyi – ‘long skirts’ for men), Sagaing Hill, U Min Thonze and Soon U Ponya Shin Pagoda. We skipped the visit to the monastery in Amarapura, where you could observe monks eating their meal – not paticularily exciting, so we didn’t go there. Besides, we skipped also visiting the Innwa village, as it turned out, that to visit it you had to pay extra for the shuttle boat to the other side of the river and then for a horse cart, which was taking tourists to the places worth seeing in the village, which was to last about 1-2hours. We were not expecting any additional costs during this trip, and we were not particularly enthusiastic about this point of the tour, so we skipped that.
U Min Thonze
Buddha in Soon U Ponya Shin Pagoda
The temple on Sagaing Hill.
Mahamuni Pagoda
Only men are allowed to come closer to Buddha’s statue (close enough to touch him).
Kuthodaw Pagoda
Ahtumashi Pagoda
Shwe Inbin Monastery
On the first day we visited the following places on our own: Zaycho Market, Mandalay Palace, Mandalay Hill (with quite a few steps up the hill) and Sandamuni Pagoda.
Mandalay Palace
Mandalay Palace – a view from the tower.
Sandamuni Pagoda
On our way to Mandalay Hill.
The view from a temple on Mandalay Hill.
Zaycho Market
The only entrance fee to pay is a joint ticket to Mandalay Palace, Innwa and Inbin Shwe Monastery, which costs: 10.000MMK / 7,50USD. Besides, you don’t pay for the entrance anywhere else (in some cases, probably only 2 places, you will have to pay 0,40USD only to have a permission for taking pictures, but if you’re a couple you’ll pay only once as this is for the numer of cameras you have, not per person. Mahamuni Pagoda has this type of fee.
Well, as you can see the temples dripping in gold do not strike the local people not even able to make ends meet (they would not even think about it the way we do)… Looking at this huge contrast there is one conclusion that comes to our minds – our thinking will not change anything when we deal with the society with the ‘regime imposed thinking’ under tight government control, some places remind us of communistic times, the word: ‘progress’ doesn’t exist in this reality. Sad but true. In no other city had we seen such a transition from one extreme to the other. And to feel it, you have to come and see it.
U Bein Bridge (1.2km long).
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Hi, thanks for your suggestion! Actually this post is the most popular out of all so somehow it grabs people’s attention 😛 There are lots of pictures there. I never add videos, and don’t have them in fact. I’m not a writer by profession, so these are only my thoughts on travelling, still have 5 months to finish our journey through South-East Asia and this blog is quite new (3 months old). Certainly when I come back to my country I will analyze more the posts and polish them, now it’s rather impossible. Hope you understand. Thanks for your support!
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