On our last full day in Yangon we decided to do the Lonely Planet walking tour of Colonial Yangon. I actually edited the Lonely Planet tour, and have created a map and tour of downtown Yangon of my own. If you are interested in that tour, I will link it here SELF GUIDED WALKING TOUR.

We visited Sule Pagoda, Yangon City Hall, Immanuel Baptist Church, the High Court (and clock tower), the Independence Monument, before walking towards the river. Along Strand road we visited the Yangon Customs House and the Colonial Era Post Office. We purchased postcards from the post office and posted two to our family back in Canada (which took about 8 months to get home because covid started just as we left Yangon).

We then stopped at a Japanese fusion place called Gekko Restaurant for lunch. The food was amazing, and they played an amazing mix of old school jazz music!

After lunch, we headed back to our hotel room to get out of the worst of the mid day heat (about 34C without the humidity).

We went back out at about 3pm to explore Chinatown, it had been all decorated for the Lunar New Year, the year of the rat 2020. We walked by men cooking what smelt like pots of tar. This area of the city made me feel so foreign, and outside of my comfort zone. Everyone was out in the street living, cooking, pouring concrete, washing clothes, everything…

We then walked back to our hotel to eat dinner on the roof, but we didn’t end up doing that. We went up to the roof top and the nice man up there greeted us with “are you here for beer?” and we definitely wanted beer, and we are awkward and didn’t want to ask for a menu. So we sat on the roof for a few hours splitting beers and eating nuts. We talked to the two nice men that worked there, Patrick and Lin. They taught us some Burmese words. We thoroughly enjoyed our stay up there, but eventually decided we actually did need food.

We decided to head back to see our friend, the Vegetarian Chinese food restaurant owner. We ordered double what we had the night before: heart in hot sauce, spicy crab, meat cubes in bean curd sauce, and a plate of veggies. It was delicious! Our friend saw that we had returned and looked really happy! The total was about 10,000 kyat or $9 Canadian.

We then headed to the grocery store to stock up on some food for the long bus ride to Mandalay the following day. We got some peanuts, tempura seaweed , chips and water.