Entertaining the troops at Pathein Bus Station

The first leg of our journey is easy today.  The bus picks us up at 8am and takes us one and half hours to Pathein.  There, we begin to make enquiries about our onwards journey.  Firstly, we’re told we’re at the wrong bus station and its the one across town.  We take two motorbike taxis and Fred has a slightly hairy ride with a driver who looks about 10 years old.

We arrive safely and start to ask questions about the 3pm bus we’ve heard about. It appears there isn’t one, or maybe there just isn’t one because its Sunday … its not clear but anyway, we are told that the next bus is 5am the next morning so, we may have to stay here overnight.  The locals are all asking where we are going and what bus we want so we decide to just stay put and stand in the shade by the entrance to the bus station and let people approach us.  Sure enough, we then begin to hear about another, cheaper bus going at 7am the next day, then suddenly a more expensive mini bus going at 12 noon today.  After much negotiation, although the mini bus guy won’t budge on price, he does agree to drop us at our hotel in Pyay so we decide to go with him rather than stay overnight for the 5am (or the 7am which probably doesn’t exist … the man who sells tickets is in bed all day today apparently).  The bus eventually leaves just after 1pm but not before Andy has been persuaded to play violin to all the guys who helped arrange our minibus (all for a fee of course, hence no negotiation on the price of our tickets).  Its a long and very bumpy ride with people hopping on and off but, overall, not too bad.  The roads are terrible and how the driver stays alert for 9 hours, particularly once dark, is beyond us but, with a couple of near misses, we arrive at the guest house around 9.30pm.  Its very basic (but cheap for Myanmar) so we check in and sleep.  

The travelling here is so different from anywhere else we’ve been.  Its really hard to find out any information before you travel as it all seems to be contradictory so you just have to turn up and hope for the best.  Luckily its all worked out ok so far.