Nothing to see in Nay Pyi Taw

Which is exactly why we were visiting!

Construction of Nay Pyi Taw only began in 2002 and it replaced Yangon as the capital of Myanmar in 2006. It is the seat of government for the country and is decidely odd!

We took a taxi to Yangon bus station at 5:30am ready for our bus at 7:30. As the drive only took about 45 minutes at that time of the morning, we had a bit of time to kill at the bus station so James went in search of breakfast, coming back with some rather good banana loaf.

We’d opted for the VIP bus and it really was impressive, with TV screens in the back of each spacious seat. James watched a couple of films, while I enjoyed playing puzzle games and listening to Now 35 (the first song was Say You’ll Be There by the Spice Girls, just to help you date it!).

We’d chosen to stay at the New Aye Yar hotel to the south of Nay Pyi Taw as we’d read that the bus would drop us there on the way, and this proved to be the case. So at 12:45 we were dropped on the side of a road in the middle of nowhere. A short walk later, we were checked into a rather large, but quite deserted hotel. Weirdly, our room had an automatic blind between the bathroom and the bedroom. Needless to say, we kept that down!

We went downstairs for some lunch, where the manager of the hotel came and sat with us to explain some of the sights of the city. After our early start, we went for a quick nap before hiring a couple of motorbikes. These were manual bikes, something we weren’t used to after the automatic scooters we’d used elsewhere, and I’m not sure I entirely got the hang of it, but as most of the roads were deserted, it didn’t really matter!

Just north of the hotel is a large grid pattern so we started our tour here. After passing a large convention centre and many huge hotels, including a Hilton, we reached the grid complex. The outer road felt a little like a racing circuit, due to the red and white curbs that were being repainted as we drove past. As expected, there was nothing here apart from a few stray dogs and lots of termite mounds. We’re not sure what was meant to be here.

We continued past many lotus-topped roundabouts to the 20 lane motorway. This was simply ridiculous. The first section had a central reservation separating the two ten lane carriageways, but if you drove a little further on this disappeared, leading to a simply massively wide slab of concrete. Again, it was practically deserted. I felt like I could have been in a running or swimming race and everyone had their own designated lane. You could see evidence on the road where people had done doughnuts.

Just by the parliament building, there was a police checkpoint, where they had put barriers across seven of the lanes on each side to funnel the traffic through three lanes, not that anyone was there to check anything. We did a couple of laps, enjoying being able to use twenty lanes to do a u-turn!

Our next stop was the Uppatasanti Pagoda, which we decided just to look at from the outside rather than going in as it was starting to get dark. This was also partly covered in scaffolding.

Our final stop on our drive was the Water Fountain Garden. Now this pretty much summed up our trip to Nay Pyi Taw as when we arrived, only one of the fountains was on, although there was no explanation as to why. We had a walk around the lake, which had an odd statue of penguins at one end before deciding to leave. However as we were getting our bikes, the attendant said at 7pm the fountains would come on, so we went back only to watch what appeared to be music videos being projected onto one fountain. After about five minutes, we left, still not entirely sure what we should have seen!

We had dinner at the hotel outside on the veranda, where they had a bbq. There was a table of Burmese lads next to us and after about ten minutes, we heard a Google translate automated voice saying “can I have a photo with you?” so we knew what was coming! That said, they were very polite and pleased to meet us.

The next morning we decided to have a lazy one, making use of the hotel pool, which unsurprisingly we had all to ourselves. We then got a taxi to a service station by a toll gate on the main road to Mandalay to pick up our bus to Inle Lake.

We were pleased we stopped at Nay Pyi Taw, just for the sheer strangeness of the place. It’s been massively over-specced and doesn’t appear to get many visitors, but for one day, and to break up the long journey to Inle, it was definitely worth it.