Collecting Moments

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 h

Our second day in Burma started with breakfast on the rooftop in our upmarket but cheap hotel. We said goodbye to U Linn Shwe's wife who came to check that we had a good plan to move on from Yagon. She was a little confused by our choice to walk to a main road and try to get a lift to the highway. There was an overwhelming number of taxis which repeatedly tried to “help” us. Eventually one agreed to take us for a reasonable price beyond the airport to the road leading to the highway. He dropped us off at a gas station and we asked the customers there for help (the gas station attendants didn't mind our attempts to engage their customers). Many people were interested but no-one seemed to be heading north until a woman, an executive assistant who worked at the local Coke factory, agreed to take us to the highway proper, she was on her way to work. She gave us insight into the yellow marking (“tanaka”) on many Burmese women's faces. She said women apply this as it softens the

Our first day in Burma started with a delightfully easy hitchhiking experience. We were very quickly offered a lift on the Asian highway from central Mae Sot to the border in a pick-up truck. The crossing was smooth and quick at 7:30 in the morning. On the other side of the Friendship bridge there were many “black market” money changers with indistinguishable piles of one thousand kyat notes and calculators. As anticipated, in every 100 thousand pack of notes some were taped or damaged. We changed 100 dollars each and got a pile of kyats back. After that we started hitchhiking just from the middle of the town, still within sight of the Friendship bridge. Within ten minutes we got a lift with a gentleman in his Honda car. He spoke very little English (later it emerged he was fluent in Chinese and Malaysian) so his cousin confirmed on the phone his willingness to respond to our Burmese sign (explaining what hitchhiking is) that he would not charge us any money. Initially we were heading

“Слушай, ко мне тут немец один попросился на ночь, а я завтра уезжаю в Лаос за визой. Мне так неудобно его вписывать сегодня. Может, возьмешь к себе?” Так началась моя карьера “вписчика” и “каучсерфинг-хоста” в Таиланде. Немец оказался 27-летним парнем, путешествующим на велосипеде по всей Юго-Восточной Азии. Он без умолку весь вечер и полночи рассказывал мне про Бирму и доброжелательность ее жителей, а утром уехал в горы дальше на север. Потом был Лёша из Перми, с которым я познакомилась в самолете из Новосиба в Бангкок. Лёша появился у меня дома после недели, проведенной в буддийском монастыре, и с порога сказал: “Я буду тебе помогать”. Он подметал муравьев. Вечером мы встретились со светлой, улыбчивой Машей из Москвы. Она после трех месяцев путешествия с попутчицей осталась одна в большом городе и заскучала. Весь следующий день мы провели вместе в джунглях. Сначала в монастыре, стараясь не наступить на голову Будды, а потом в деревне, развлекаясь на детской площадке а-ля “припять”