You'll never be bored on a Myanmar bus

And I don't think I've said a truer thing this entire trip. I probably could write separate posts for my various bus trips, but by this time they have all blended into one crazy bus ride, so that's how I'll write this post.

On our first bus trip out of Yangon, I was impressed simply by the bus station. It's massive and its organized by the company sponsoring the trip not the destination of the bus. So as far as I could tell it was two really long rows of massive buses with tons of taxis, motorcycles and people lugging packages. Some of the buses said things like LAS VEGAS and others were covered with marijuana stickers. Just mindblowing really.

We got on our bus and were sitting right in the front. Sweet. Great views and foot room. HA. These are the types of buses that stop all the time and pick up extra passengers. Extra to the point that the aisle is packed. For a while Cheyenne had a laptop case in her face and a small child on her lap. So much for room and a view.

Quite quickly it became apparent that Myanmar people get motion sick. And I mean just the motion of the bus. People would be throwing up before the bus had even gone around a curve. And generally they would just toss the bags of puke out the window. The solution to this? Keep your stuff on your lap not the floor, put some headphones on and keep looking out the window.

Myanmar busses ALWAYS came with cheesy TV or music videos for endless entertainment

There was one bus trip that stood out as particularly wonderful. As we were loading our bags onto the bottom of the bus we noticed that we smelled dried fish particularly strongly. I vaguely thought, "Hmmm I hope thats not near my backpack." When we got on the bus we realized that the smell permeated the entire bus. So it definitely was near my backpack. Add that to the smell of the various people around me puking and you're got quite the bus ride.

Even if the busses are only a few hours, if they're driving during a mealtime there is always a meal stop. This is common in other countries as well, and these stops are always hit or miss. At any of them, veggie fried rice is a safe and cheap food to order. And at this particular stop they had no idea what fried rice or friend noodles were. Instead they brought us rice and some veggies, including this really awful corn that had the texture of lentils or cardboard somehow. After we ate as much of the rice and veggies as we could convince ourselves to, I went to go use the toilet. When I reached over to throw the toilet paper in the garbage, there was a flurry of motion up the wall and I saw a gecko run way away from the wall. The thing that had scurried from behind the garbage can was a GIANT grey and brown furry spider that was probably about five inches in diameter. I made the most undignified bathroom exit ever as I squawked in fear and surprise, yanking my pants up and exiting the bathroom as quickly as possible. I got the weirdest looks from the people waiting to use the bathroom but I decided not to try and explain. I don't think spider hand gestures would have made me look any less crazy.

When we finished our ten hours on the dried-fish-bus we collected our bags and confirmed that they definitely reeked of dried fish. This continued for about a few and caused us to apologize to a few dorm mates for the smell.

You taking photos of me? I'll take them of you.

The next say we had a shorter bus trip (no fish!) and it still stopped for lunch. This time it stopped at a tea shop. We were delighted. We were even more delighted when we saw the large number of steam buns and samosas for us to choose from. The problem is that we didn't know what was in them. And Cheyenne is a vegetarian. So I tried to ask one of the young kids and he smiled awkwardly and went to get someone else. He didn't speak much English but we managed to establish that some were chicken "by flapping our wings" and that some were pork and vegetables. He then pointed to one and said "coconut." I immediately went right for that one and it was a bao full of coconut. In one tea shop, it made up for the bus ride from the day before. A coconut steam bun is one of the best things in the world.

I generally like to take big buses instead of minivans. I feel reassured to be one of the bigger vehicles on the road. When we went to leave Bagan, we tried to book a bus and it was full. That is actually the first time that anyone in my trip has told me that. Southeast Asian logistics may look crazy, but they're actually pretty impressive. Anyway, we were on a schedule, so we bought tickets in the minivan. We loaded up and took off around 9 am. It became pretty clear that we were caravanning with another van, and they stopped and switched drivers at some point. I think one of them wasn't super comfortable driving a stick shift so he wanted to drive the automatic van.

As we are going up this nerve-wrackingly curvy road, there's a traffic jam. We come to a dead stop. Our driver motions at us a lot and says "Picture picture!" A truck had gone off the road and plunged town a very cliff-like hill into a tree. And the driver was letting us get out to go take pictures. Everyone politely declined, but it was clear that the traffic was due to the series of cables they were using to pull the truck up the hill. We got back in the car and they let some cars through. About ten minutes on the other side of the truck, our driver got a phone call. I don't speak Burmese but the driver was MAD about something and flipped a u-turn and headed back down. We figured we must have lost some stuff off the top of the car. False. The other van had broken down. And overheated. Apparently we went back to pick up some of their stuff and their passengers. So we moved some stuff around, switched drivers again, and took off through the traffic jam again.

The van that had broken down took off as soon as we got through the traffic. And we noticed that the roof rack was rattling quite a lot. Several windy turns later, the entire roof rack went flying off of the top of the car. We all hopped out and picked up the bags that had gone flying. The poor driver was up on the top of the van sweating and trying to use some ropes and bungies to keep the roof rack on. But he seemed like he was keeping his sense of humor. We grabbed even more stuff to put inside the car and took off again. We had almost made it to our destination when one of the packages fell off the top and the driver had to run back and pick it up. By the time he dropped us off at our respective hotels he looked exhausted.

Roofrack problems.

There is a bus company that runs some incredibly new and nice tourist busses between some of the main tourist destinations. Cheyenne and I managed to miss all opportunities to take these busses. The night bus we took was basically just any other bus. But it ran at night. Oh, and we had the air conditioning unit under our seat. So we spent the night curled up and wishing we had all the layers. When we arrived, our hotel showed us to little beds they had set up for us in a storage-ish room. We were allowed to sleep there until we checked into our rooms. That was the best news ever and we both passed out.

To get to our last city, we took the train. This was entertaining but in an exciting and scenic way. Great people watching on a bumpy and super old train.

Safety first? Not so much. No cover over anything.

Just a massive bridge over a massive canyon.

So there you have it. You won't be bored on in transit in Myanmar. Sometimes maybe a little boredom would have been nice?