Tuesday, June 10, 2014 - Bike ride to Letkhokkon Beach

Yeah, so I wanted to go to the beach. Since Ngapali beach was not possible to reach we decided to go for the beach closer to Yangon which is Letkhokkon beach.

We took the ferry to cross Yangon river and get to Dalah where we hoped to find a ride down to Letkhokkon which was supposed to take about 2-3 hours.

The ferry was 2 USD per person one way.

 

 

The pier on Dalah side. One the ferry we met two guy who started talking to us. They wanted to show us Dalah by bicycle.
When we asked for a recommendation how to get to Letkhokkon they offered to bring us there by motorcycle.
Of course I was wearing a short skirt.

The road was disastrous. We were always just about to crash.

The day was grey and we were lucky to escape into one of these small huts when a heavy monsoon shower came down.

But still a different experience! Have not done anything like it before.

So much fun! We saw lots of animals water buffaloes and such. My favourite was a piglet that was so shocked to see us that it lost it's footage and fell to the side - so cute.
Once one of the cows which we overtook took a jump to the side which was not cute but fucking dangerous.

Our guys. The red one was a lot faster. The guys claimed that was due to my weight...

It took us about three hours to reach the beach. Man my back hurt!

Well lets say the beach did not turn out to be what I had hoped for...

These used to be little cottages to rent.
Destroyed 2008 no one had the interest or financial means to rebuild them.

Cyclone Nargis was a rare, eastward moving at low-latitude strong tropical cyclone that caused the worst natural disaster in the recorded history of Myanmar. The cyclone made landfall in Myanmar on Friday, 2 May 2008, sending a storm surge 40 kilometres up the densely populated Irrawaddy delta, causing catastrophic destruction and at least 138,000 fatalities. Damage was estimated at over US$10 billion, which made it the most damaging cyclone ever recorded in this basin.

An eerie place...

But still a woman and her kids were living there. 

Organising us a fisher man who took us out in his nutshell of a boat to a sand spit.

Hope

Well it is monsoon and the next rainfall just around the corner...

picturesque

For some dumb reason I had my passport and money on me while riding the boat - shit I was scared to topple over!

The boys playing with some fisher net.

On our way back through the wetlands.

This might be quite nice at times but had something depressing about it...

Well the day ended on a not to nice note. All four of us where tired and wet when we came back to Dalah. We had not agreed on a price before we started the trip. Because the guys said we should set the price (most likely hoping we would unknowingly pay a lot more) we on the other hand being used to ride the bus for 10 hours for 13 USD though it could not be that much so on a whim agreed. While we wanted to pay them about 25 USD in total they where expecting 200 USD. Well we met somewhere in between. Still this ended the day on a bitter note. So glad I was with a man and we got to our hotel save!