Leif Pettersen takes to two wheels on the roads of Mandalay

To Myanmar With Love

View Photos (1) Image © 2009 To Myanmar With Love

Excerpted from To Myanmar With Love: A Travel Guide for the Connoisseur, available from ThingsAsian Press.

I arrived in Mandalay at four in the morning after a sleepless, ass-smashing, nine-hour ride from Bagan on a bus seemingly designed by torture specialists. Not even Eden would be all that appealing after such a journey, and my spirits were appropriately low upon arrival. But a five-hour nap straightened me out, and after a large meal and several coffees, I was primed to see the city.

My impulse to rent a bike turned out to be a rare flash of genius. Not only is biking by far the quickest way to cover the great distances between sights, but at less than $1 for a full-day rental, it was also easy on the budget. Moreover, cycling in Mandalay provided the most intense adrenaline rush I'd had since I'd jumped out of a plane in New Zealand, screaming all the way down.

The traffic in Mandalay is exceptionally lawless, as Myanmar is a country where most driving conventions are improvised. Certain disaster is faced and somehow magically avoided every few seconds while plunging through traffic that would make a New York cabbie weep. At the end of the day, the clouds of dust and debris that coat your body make it look as if you really did something. 

Although I have to assume that tourists on bikes must be seen on a regular basis in Mandalay, each local nevertheless stared at me as if I were riding a winged yellow hippo, executing cartoonish double-takes as I whizzed past. A slow-moving pickup-truck-cum-bus full of rambunctious guys encouraged me to speed up and catch them, and I did, at which point one guy daringly hung out the back to take my hand, towing me for about two blocks before the truck took a turn and I had to let go.

My first stop was a neighborhood in central Mandalay. Tooling down the bumpy dirt street, I stopped at Gold Rose, a shop that makes gold leaf. I was greeted the instant I dismounted the bike by a young woman named Moh Moh, who served me cold water as I recovered from the kamikaze biking.

After an hour learning about the torturous manual process for making delicate gold leaf, I departed and pedaled furiously around the perimeter of my next objective, the gigantic Mandalay Palace and Fort. The compound is surrounded by an imposing wall and colossal moat filled with water from the city's irrigation canal. The fort has been around since the 1800s, but during WWII the palace burned down. It was eventually rebuilt in concrete and aluminum.  

My hastily conceived plan to avoid the government-levied entry fee to the fort by seeming naive while I resolutely pumped my bike through the entrance gate without slowing down was foiled by several alert guards, standing at the ready for people like me. My plans derailed, I had to be satisfied with what little I could glimpse through the imposing gate. From this brief peek, it appeared that the fort was far more impressive outside than inside.

Saluting the guards, I headed for my final goal, Mandalay Hill and the pagodas clustered around its base. It was difficult not to notice by this point that I was by far the fastest biker in Mandalay. I don't know if it was in deference to the fantastic heat or due to the fact that most people were riding half-busted bikes, but the locals were pedaling along only slightly faster than typical Manhattan walking speed.

I kept up my pace until after dark, which was probably not the best time to be weaving through dense traffic on unlit, crumbling streets with the occasional open, concrete ditch. Still, I raced on, defying death at every turn, dramatically careening to a stop in a cloud of dust at the bike shop, five minutes before closing.

I pitied the rube tourists, cruising around Mandalay in their vans with tinted windows, stereos, air conditioning, cold beverages, and genuine seats with seatbelts. If only those suckers knew what they were missing!

FACT FILE:

Renting a Bike
In Mandalay there are many places that rent bikes to tourists. You will find one no-name bike shop directly across the street from the Royal Guest House (41 25th St.). Rates for bicycle rental in Mandalay normally range from 1,000 to 1,500 kyat per day. If you plan on touring the Mandalay Palace and Fort, you must pay the $10 Mandalay Archaeological Zone fee, which gets you into Mandalay Hill and other sites.

Gold Rose
108 36th St. (77/78)
Mandalay

To find out more about To Myanmar With Love, go to ThingsAsian Press.

To read more essays from To Myanmar With Love, click here.

Published on 2/6/09