Transit through Tokyo to Rangoon

Yangon, Myanmar isn’t quite the antipode of the southeastern United States. That would actually put you in the middle of the ocean west of Australia. However, after more than 20 hours of flight time equaling half the circumference of the globe, let’s just keep things simple and say that we’re on the other side of the earth.

The flight from Chicago to Tokyo was mostly uneventful, but since it was on a 747, it was a bit more grueling than it needed to be. Lousy in flight entertainment that was obscured by some six and a half foot tall guy’s block head… and with no way to charge your devices, things got pretty boring once the MacBook ran out of juice. Oh yeah, and soon after take off they started calling for “any available doctor or nurse for assistance.” I kind of shrugged and chuckled for a minute until a flight attendant ran by with an AED and we decided that maybe we should get up and see what was going on. Some older guy, pale, throwing up, with a whole bunch of excited people trying to help. They moved him and kept him in a jump chair at the back of the plane with supplemental oxygen for the rest of the flight. He seemed to be ok, but I can tell you that we were decidedly not as ok as we could have been, since the distraction seemed to disrupt at least two drink services. I mean, it’s possible the guy was having an MI, but seriously, where’s my Diet Coke?!

We had like an 18 hour layover in Tokyo, so we booked a stay at a brand new “capsule hotel” that just opened in Terminal 2. It had a very intentionally minimalist retro modern kind of look to it, like an apple store meets 2001 Space Odyssey. Lock your stuff up, change into robes and slippers (made for tiny humans with tiny, tiny feet), grab a shower, and crash in your assigned sleep pod. It’s a nice concept, and it was well executed. That had us nicely refreshed and wide awake at like 0300 Tokyo time, which was admittedly a suboptimal time to wake up before an 11 am 7 hour flight that took us another couple hours back in time. We grabbed some katsudon for breakfast and were on our way, and the flight to Yangon was uneventful (for real).

This was our first day in Myanmar/Burma, and we’re still getting a sense of what the place is about. There is a calm here that is a bit disquieting, but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what makes it so. Stepping into the airport terminal before customs you are hit with the smell of mold, like the place really should have been tiled but is instead covered in outdated carpet without air conditioning… the outside of the terminal is covered in gold leaf embellishments that nature is trying to reclaim. There were desks of officers for “visa on arrival,” but there didn’t seem to be any takers for that. We hopped in one of the perfect rows of mostly Japanese foreigners who had arrived with visas ready to go. The visa on arrival officers were having great fun laughing and roughhousing each other, but they were the only noise besides the stamps from the much more serious ladies checking people with actual visas. Once through though, what can I say? The place is a blend of so many places we’ve been. The weather is pure SE Asia, the people seem Indonesian except that everybody is Buddhist and nobody seems to be Muslim, the driving and storefronts seem like India or Sri Lanka, frenetic, a chaos of hobbled together shanties beside new buildings with designs from decades past, all competing against a tropical backdrop, and the food…. well, our first impression is from the Myanmar curries and salad we had for dinner. Not at all spicy, and the curry base was primarily garlic, onion and tomato, lacking the ginger and chile kick you might find in a Thai or even Japanese curry. Very rustic. Kind of plain, but still good. We visited the very large and beautiful Shwedagon Pagoda here in Yangon and toured the place as the sun was going down. Retiring relatively early tonight because, believe it or not… we have an 0500 flight to Mandalay tomorrow. I’m pretty sure we get to relax at some point, just not quite yet.

Sleep pods in capsule hotel