Early on Saturday morning I joined a small group of tourists on a guided bike ride out of the city. From the main downtown area we collected our bikes and rode the short distance to Pandosan jetty on the Yangon river. The river doesn't really feature as part of downtown Yangon unless you seek it out. Its very much a working river and a working shoreline. It links Yangon to the Andaman sea and is therefore very much a working port.
Its hard to see the river from downtown Yangon unless you are right on the river itself (or if you are up high), but thousands of people use the river each day to make the short river crossing between Yangon and a number of towns.
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| the ferry terminal before the arrival of the ferry |
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| the large ferry turning up |
As we reached the terminal we saw a large ferry pull up and hundreds of people exited to start their day in Yangon. The ferry journey only took about 10 minutes to cross. At that time in the morning a lot fewer people were heading the other way. The towns across the river are a lot more rural with fewer work opportunities, so a large population cross every day for work.
We got off and started the ride through the town of Dalah. It had a lot more of a rural feel about it but is still pretty heavily populated. We passed lots of houses and inceasingly smaller roads as we got further inland from the shoreline and ferry port. Dalah is a predominately Indian village, but we passed lots of interesting pagodas and saw several Muslims walking the street.
There wasn't a lot to Dalah itself but it was nice to ride around and see how normal people were going about their day. There were lots of dogs around, saw a few cows and it was nice to see a few goats around too. We crossed a few picturesque estuaries which provided other transport options for people.
After riding around for a while along increasingly narrow paths, we stopped at a dam - where people get their drinking water. The company providing the bike tour had installed some water purification systems for the surrounding villages.
We then rode over to the local wet market which was selling loads of great looking fruit and vegetables. There were some beautiful flowers and yummy looking local sweets. Along with the usual interesting meat and fish section.
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| fruit and vege at the market. There were also lots of types of dried fish |
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| some of the local sweets |
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| Not sure what these are? A local eggplant? With some interesting flowers |
We road for another 20 minutes to a local tea house for a break of lime juice, a really tasty potato cake and some bananas for refreshment. It was starting to get pretty hot and humid.
We took a small road across another canal to another small island, Kanaungto. There are no cars on this small island so it had a calmer feel about it. While there were still lots of people it was even more rural. People were super friendly, and everywhere kids ran out onto the street to give high fives to us riding past.
After 30 mins or so we took a larger boat back across the river to Yangon a bit further down the river.
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| different types of boats on the river |
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| the port |
It was good to get out of the city and see a different side of Yangon. The bike tour was the Islands and Rivers tour from here:
https://www.uncharted-horizons-myanmar.com/
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