As an Easter present, I’ve finally uploaded another one of the Myanmar travel videos.
It’s a short one about the Irrawady river. Nevertheless, it might still be interesting as there are not so many moving images available for the trip we did:
The Irrawady (or Irrawaddy) is the lifelie for Myanmar. It tansports people and goods through all of Myanmar. This river is large and highly unpredictable. Tourists tend to charter one of the private „speed“ boats when they travel on the Irrawady, as they’re faster and safer. No native would be able to afford that, though. We wanted to come in contact with the Burmese people and so we booked a ticket for the national boat line from Mandalay to Bagan.
The boat is coming only once a week and the trip should take about 15 hours. For us, it was more like 2 days, though. In the video, you can see some reasons why:
The national boat (also called „slow boat“) PuTTY download , though being exhausting, is highly recommended. You get to see how this country’s distribution works. Communities are always waiting at the riverside for the boat to arrive and handing them needed goods and material – sometimes they wait until late in the evening, as no one really knows, when the boat is coming. You’ll also spent your day(s) with the native people and other backpackers from all over the world that don’t want to afford the high prices of the speed boat. If you don’t want to drink the Irrawady water (the only water supply on the boat) you should bring your own water and warm cloths just in case you need to sleep on deck like we did.
Well, then only part one, two and six is still missing – which contains images of the two large cities of Myanmar, Yangon and Mandalay. Stay tuned! 🙂