I did a lot more exploring during my last few days in Rangoon, but I mostly stayed clear of the tourist attractions. Honestly, Shwedagon Pagoda is pretty much the only “attraction”, in the classical sense of the word, but I actually decided to skip that, and in retrospect I feel good about that. I had seen it from afar a million times so I didn’t want to pay the 8,000 MMK (6.23 USD) entry fee, plus the 20,000 MMK (15.56 USD) in collective cab fairs, to see it up close. I had also been thinking about taking the boat across the Yangon River, but when I got to the boat station I discovered that they charge white people almost 10x the normal price for a simple ticket across the river. It’s one thing when some tour guide at Mingun Pagoda tries to hustle me, but when the price discrimination is systemic like this I have a real issue with it. So I didn’t cross the river, and I don’t regret that either.

Overall though, these instances were standouts. Throughout most of my experience in Burma, I found people to be much less discriminatory towards me than in other places, like Vietnam or Indonesia. To give you some examples, at one point we got a long taxi ride for free in Mandalay, if you remember that story. At another point, in Rangoon, a few of us were in a taxi that was stuck in traffic. The driver turned to us and said, ‘it will be faster for you to get out and walk from here’. He gave us directions and refused our money. These kinds of experiences were a breath of fresh air after a year in Hanoi, where I had to have my guard up 24/7, lest I be ripped off.

My unofficial tour guide gave me the architectural city tour, as well as a few tips on buying street food, so take a look through this gallery. It includes the secretariat building, where Aung San, who led Burma to freedom from the British, was assassinated. Conspiracy theories about this aside, the building is now completely closed, but for 1 day per year. Unfortunately, that 1 day was not any of the days that I was there. Look at my pretty pictures:

It was beautiful weather for most of my time in Rangoon, but towards the end my luck ran out and I got caught in a rain storm. Here are a few photos I took of that ordeal as I jumped from umbrella to umbrella to get back to my room: