Day 32: Yangon to Mandalay

-After breakfast we were picked up and headed to the bus station. We were taking a ‘JJ Express’ bus from Yangon up to Mandalay, approximately a 9-hour journey. It was a super nice bus, complete with blankets, water, and hand wipes. We stopped for 30 minutes at a rest stop where we grabbed some lunch, not realizing that we would be served a huge snack on the bus. Additionally we had brought food with us because we didn’t know if we were going to be fed. Needless to say we ate a lot of food. I finished the 4^th Game of Thrones book and Jodi Picoult’s new book Between the Lines, which she wrote with her daughter.

-The scenery on the drive was just gorgeous. There were just fields and fields of green flat land with no buildings to be seen. There were just huts, farmers, and oxen. We even saw four elephants walking down the side of the road helping out with the farming. We were on one of the major highways in Myanmar but it was hard to believe with the lack of development around us.

A view of the landscape:

-Once we arrived in Mandalay there was a person waiting for us to take us to our new guesthouse. We checked in and just 'vegged'. We had no reason to be tired after doing nothing all day, but sometimes that just makes you more tired. We ate where we were staying then crashed.

The bus station in Mandalay: