Well, Burma was absolutely amazing!
It started out with me being sick as a dog! I passed out on deck with a fever
of 103 and pretty much started swabbing the decks after I knocked over a table
full of water and other drinks. Not only that, there was a memorial service for
one of the professors, on our voyage Professor Lancaster passed away in china
and had a funeral service on the ship when his wife had returned in Singapore.
I was never cleared to leave the ship but since I had already paid for the trip
I just left! We were headed up to Mandalay, which was a province in Burma, It
was absolutely and had an amazing time, and we drove up into the mountains and
saw some very amazing sights!
After taking a short flight into
Mandalay, which was about an hour and half and while we were at the airport we
had no atm’s, Wi-Fi, or any technology whatsoever. Our boarding passes were
pieces of paper that were stamped and we had received a sticker to place on our
chest to inform the flight crew that we were on the flight manifest. The plane
was not even a jet; it worked with propellers and literally had spiders and
bugs crawling around. 
We arrived into Mandalay airport,
which wasn’t even in Mandalay, they just called it that! We had roughly a 3-hour
bus ride to where we were going to stay, the scenery was astounding, and I
wouldn’t have imagined seeing pagoda after pagoda literally every few hundred
yards. I didn’t even need to go to bagan to see the land of a thought pagodas,
they were literally everywhere on the side of the road! Our food any things
were already paid for so every time we ate dinner, we paid in fat stacks of
cash. No credit cards or atm’s only paid in thick wads of paper.
Our hotel was in the mountains, it
was nice and cool, and fortunately it wasn’t humid at all! While everyone else
in Yangon suffered from intense humidity we were drinking brews and eating food
next to a warm campfire every night. The bus ride was mostly a one-way road all
the time, if you looked to the right or left you pretty much starred death into
the eyes! Cliffs on both sides with jacked rocks at the very bottom, it was
quite scenic, but also really scary!
Our
itinerary consisted of going to a school for the blind, it was very interesting
to see how kids that were born blind still continue to live their daily lives.
We sat for a while observing the kids and how they go about their daily
routine, some kids would walk around with cell phones to make noise to let
others know to get out of their way and some walk around knowing exactly where
they are headed with out any guidance. We quietly observed as we saw them eat
lunch, every meal they pray and thank the donors for the help in maintaining
the school and giving them food to eat. On behalf of semester at sea we had
donated 10,000 Kyats to the school to put towards new housing for the kids.
Shortly
after, we went to a nun school; it was here when all the little girls had their
heads shaved to become nuns! While we were at the schools the little girls
would run around or away from us, they were very shy! Shortly after they all
grouped up and sang us songs. It was like a battle between them and us! I don’t
know at all what they were singing but when they were done we sand itsy bitsy
spider and if you’re happy and you know it. We all had a great time; at the end
of this we also donated more money on behalf of semester at sea to the nunnery
school.
This entire
time I was still really sick from my what ever I had, people definitely said I
had yellow fever and some people just thought I had a stroke and yelled CPR!!!
So not only was I sick but it didn’t help that I was traveling in the cold,
with no jacket, not drinking any water, and definitely not eating enough, It
started to get worse! For the last few days I powered through and tried to
enjoy what was left of Burma. Since I’m very tired I'm gonna wrap this up by fast forwarding, we also went to a botanical
garden, the longest bridge in the world, boated through some lakes and rivers and Also we ate plenty of local food, met a lot of monks and visited a lot of holy
places. The people in Burma are very friendly and this is definitely a country
I would love to come back to!!
Stay tuned for India!!
-Raj Patel
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