Trip 2015-16. Day 318. Myanmar, Magway - Mrauk-U

Today started with a simple but tasty rice and omelet breakfast at the guesthouse. The village was just waking up, children cycling to school and many ponies and carts. We realized that at night we ended up in Taungdwingyi which was still 100 km from Magway. The guesthouse owner assisted us with a local minibus which was quite quick to make the journey to Magway.

It turned out to be dusty, noisy, unpleasant place. We have seen no other westerners in the whole town. We hitched across 1.8 km bridge the Ayeyarwady river to reach Nimbu. It was hot. People tried to help us with the buses but it was clear that hitching any distance westwards from there was nearly impossible.

We decided to head back to Magway and book a bus all the way to Mrauk-U, the great west Myanmar temple town. A local travel agent was keen to help, he was the only one to approach us. The profit margin for the travel agent was clearly high but we were faced with no other options and he was very attentive and focused on his business goal. Eventually we purchased the ticket for the 11 pm bus and spent the afternoon in the town only to be found early evening by one of his stuff in a small cafe overlooking the sunset on the river and bridge. He was quickly joined by the travel agent himself who shared he'd found us seats on a bus leaving at 8 pm (he suggested it was only for a small fee of 5000 kyats :).

He and his cousin transported us to the drop-off point and saw us onto the bus. The bus was full of Burmese people and their belongings, we were the only westerners on it. We drove off into the night. We had very small space, surrounded by transported goods, the seats were hard and uncomfortable. All the local passengers handed in their id cards to the driver's assistant. As foreigners, we were obliged to give five copies of our passports for the journey and at one particularly big checkpoint our passports were also requested.
At about five in the morning we arrived at a remote tiny village where we saw other vehicles waiting. People were walking in the dark with strong flashlights, there were women cooking on the fires, like something off the set of the Apocalypse Now.
As the sun rose we realized that all this time we were waiting for a ferry service to start which replaced the bridge that had a clearly missing span in the middle. We crossed the river on the ferry and continued our way across the dry country-side.

The only other interruption was stopping to pick up goods from a bus which had crashed into another bus. We stopped at small villages on the way for passengers to alight the bus and join their families.

Finally at about 2 pm we arrived to Mrauk-U, following three days of challenging yet amazing traveling.