TheBigTrip: Toungoo - Funny Name, Fabulous Town

If Yangon was an interesting introduction to Myanmar, then Toungoo is the place that has made us fall in love with this country. Jen and I were keen to break up the long journey between Yangon and Inle Lake with a stop somewhere on the way to get away from the tourist trail and Toungoo fit the bill nicely. To be honest, this dusty old town is actually "on" the tourist trail as pretty much every bus between Yangon and Inle passes through here, but very few travellers actually get off the bus and so end up seeing the place purely out of a moving window. Jen and I decided to buck that trend.

And we are so, so glad we did. Let's get this straight - there is virtually nothing to see or do as such in Toungoo, it's not a tourist attraction in any real way, shape or form. And this is precisely the town's appeal - it's "real" Myanmar, a place to get away from the tourists and the touts and engage with the locals. For starters, our guesthouse was a gem. It's something of a paradox that one of Myanmar's loveliest and most celebrated guesthouses is in a place that gets few tourists, but who cares for such details when you have a room like this?

A verandah like this?

Or a view like this?

It was just like being on our own sugar cane plantation. We ate tropical fruit, drank fresh lime juice and ate the most staggeringly indulgent local breakfasts brought to us by staff who couldn't do enough to help (seemingly a common trait among the people of this country).

To top it off, we had two wonderfully memorable nights out. Having searched quite thoroughly and found, to our delight, that we were the only foreigners in town, we did what any good out-of-towners would do - we went and got drunk with the locals. The first night involved dinner at a local restaurant called "Happy" where we ate excellent, cheap food, drank excellent, cheap beer and befriended a truck driver who had clearly indulged in far too much of the latter and not nearly enough of the former. He was passing through Toungoo on a job and was missing his family in Yangon who he hadn't seen for some time. Jen and I (perhaps unwisely) bought him another drink and he took to us like family, telling us his life story and making us promise that we would not forget him. Well, we're told that's what he said because he didn't speak any English, and so our waiter - who spoke quite good English - was roped into joining us at our table to translate the conversation both ways. Eventually our new friend became so drunk that he started muttering to himself. We looked hopefully at the waiter to translate, only for him to deadpan "I'm sorry, even I don't know what he's saying now."

We decided that Mr Min (our truck driver friend's name) needed some rest so we took him to his truck for some much needed sleep - though, clearly with ambition undulled by drink, he thought we wanted him to drive to the next town and so started his preparations for the journey. Thankfully, we managed to take his keys and he passed out roughly four seconds later. We certainly won't forget him.

Our second night involved drunken shenanigans with Mariano, a young football-obsessed lad (as is just about every male in Myanmar - football, particularly the English Premier League, is beyond massive over here) who was one of our brillant staff at the guesthouse. We'd struck up a conversation at breakfast and found that he and a friend were going to watch the evening's matches at a local beer station, and he asked us to come. So, enticed by the unbeatable prospect of adding football to beer, we joined them.

A bike ride took us to the beer station - it's said that you never forget how to ride a bike but in the fifteen years or so since I was last on one I've given it a real shot. Still, I managed to just about get there in one piece and celebrated with the imbibing of large quantities of the local brew, eventually having to apologise to the entire place for my unbridled celebration when Blackpool scored their second against Liverpool. Mariano had an accumulator on all three games that involved him wanting Liverpool (and Manchester City) to win their matches and so Jennie, in support of our new friend, cheered for both those teams over the course of the night. She thought I was joking when I told her the wedding was off, which was kind of cute.

Despite the question of loyalty, however, it was another absolutely cracking night.

Mariano, his family and his home village are all Christians (rather than Buddhists, which is the dominant religion in the country) and he gave us the most brilliant explanation why. In the old days, his tribe village didn't actually have a religion at all. When the Buddhists came to convert them, they described the hard life of abstinence and endeavour that comes with their beliefs, which the villagers thought sounded too much like hard work. The Jews came and told them they couldn't eat pig - to which their reply was "but we like eating pig!" - and so Judaism was out too. Then the Christians came and told them they didn't have to give up anything or work particularly hard or even go to church and pray very often...so the village decided Christianity was definitely the way to go.

Sadly our beautiful but all-too-brief affair with Toungoo is at an end - the bus to Inle Lake awaits. Some of the greatest experiences you can have as a traveller come when you're least expecting them. Toungoo was such an experience, and will stay with us for a long time.

Things Jennie will remember:

1) The wonderful and sweet Mariano and his congratulations-on-your-engagement 'card' set neatly to a bunch of flowers for us one breakfast.