Finally these are posted!
Mandalay is north of Yangon and is typically cooler than the capital, but when in Burma cooler than the capital means 80 and not 100 degrees.
My dad’s family all hail from this town and not that I could say with any authority, but there are Mandalay people and then there are Yangon people.
Mandalay has a long history of two wheel vehicles and to this day it’s still holds true. Everywhere you look, thousands of wandering, whizzing, wheeling characters cut through traffic, of yet more two wheelers. Although Yangon had it’s fair share of motorbikes, when I was there, a ban on all motorbikes were in effect. Some incident involving a government official’s son apparently prompted the ban.
But for me, this trip to visit Mandalay with my parents and my sister and her family was one of the few memories of my family travelling together like that.
On the flight north, my family take a flight with a ’start up’ airline that offerred cheap tickets to travellers through Burma. In the inflight magazine, the first page shows a photo of the CEO, an upstanding, handsome, well groomed Burmese business man in his late 30s. He welcomes me to safe travels!
I hear later that he’s in cahoots with the government and is in fact a massive gun runner. Nice guy huh?
Please take a look through these photos here.
