Holy Yangon!

I'm back! On my ship that is. After all the drama over the luggage limitation, I found out at the airport that I'd overdone the tight packing and my two bags weighed in a full kilo under the stipulated limit :(. What made it worse is the knowlegde that other members of the crew happily landed up with luggage weighing upto 12 kilos and didn't have to leave anything ashore!! Life is so unfair :((.

Anyway, to get to the point. I was expecting nothing different from my usual visits to cities during crew change: one night, walk around a little bit, which wouldn't be all that exciting since airports and airport hotels are situated in the most boring bits of almost every city. However, a late stroke of brilliance ended in a brief but fascinating visit to Myanmar's largest and most celebrated pagoda: the Shwedagon Pagoda, and boy, is it big!!! And golden like nothing I've ever seen before. There is this immense conical temple in the centre of the gigantic marble floored quadrangle! And all around it there are beautiful structures, golden, white, red, yellow! All this with the innumerable images of the Buddha enshrined within them cast a wonderful spell upon the onlooker!

Of course the spell might also have a little bit on the fact that the lower part of the central stupa is plated with 8688 solid gold bars, the upper part with another 13153! The tip of the stupa, so high that it threatens to touch the sky, is set with 5448 diamonds, 2317 rubies, sapphires and other gems, 1065 golden bells, and at the very top, a single 76-carat diamond!! But then all that I came to know only later :).

Still rather in awe of Shwedagon the next morning, I embarked upon my first ever helicopter flight! The most radical difference, as might be obvious to anyone with half a working mind, is in the takeoff. There's no long taxi-ing, no violent thrust of the powerful jets being brought to full power, no sudden upward surge. Instead, what there is, is a violent shuddering as the overhead rotor slowly builds up to max speed, a slight tentative roll along the runway, and then one is simply spirited off the ground. I actually had to look out of the window to reassure myself that we were indeed airborne! And at the end of the hour-long flight I finally saw the ship the way I've seen it in so many pictures: from high above! Quite a wonderful crew change actually, in the end..

Current Mood: quite happy actually!
Listening to: U2 - All because of you