Our own Road to Mandalay from Heho featured 30 minutes in a river boat, 45 minutes in a car, and an hour and a half flight delay. A word on domestic air travel in Myanmar: in Yangon, where the domestic terminal is large enough that you can’t see the runway from the waiting area, flights are announced by an airline employee holding up a 2 foot x 1 foot flip-board sign with your flight number on it. In smaller airports, where you can see the runway and there usually is open seating, the advice is, “Look out the window. When you see your plane land, get up and move towards the door. You’ll have 15 minutes to board before the plane takes off again.” 

Following this advice, we sat pretty close to the window in Heho, so we had a lot of fun watching esentially every other domestic carrier land and take off (including a bonafide jet from Asian Wings) with ours nowhere in sight. At one point Myo inquired after the status of our flight and came by with the verdict: “Late.” The good news is it did finally arrive, we boarded quickly, and off we went for our terrifyingly bumpy, but thankfully very short, flight to Mandalay.  Oh, and another air travel note: every flight begins with an offer of a “refreshing towel” (the country is obsessed with these: basically large Wet Ones in plastic packages) followed by a beverage service and some kind of food. The poorest country in Asia and you still get food on airplanes. Now that’s service!

Thanks to a lot of Chinese interest (Mandalay is the largest city close to China) the airport and city vibe are much more modern than in Yangon. The airport is about an hour away from the city center, so by the time we sat down to lunch it was mid-afternoon. Having been informed by several locals that tourist restaurants serve a poor proxy of local food, we took Myo up on his offer to visit a Shan (a large ethnic group in Myanmar famous for its spicy food) restaurant for lunch instead of the regular tourist place. The place looked clean enough and the food tasted great – and, yes, it was crazy spicy.

Due to our late arrival, we managed to squeeze just one sight in on this day: Mandalay Hill. It’s a religious site with a number of pagodas and VERY popular with tourists and localsat sunset. Mandalay is incredibly smoggy (due, we think, to a number of factors: dust, diesel exhaust, and agricultural burning) so the view from the hill is actually not that great. So that, combined with the swarm of tourists, made for fairly medocre photographic conditions. This was the best I could do.