Riding the circular train in Yangon is like having a front row ticket to the daily local life.
It was our first contact with the Burmese reality. After we checked-in the hotel we immediately headed towards the Central Station. We bought our ticket from the counter located at platforms 6 and 7 and patiently waited for the train to arrive.
It was perfectly on time and at 08:20 we had already started our first adventure. Built during the British colonial era, the circular line is long 45.9 km and it takes a little more than 3 hours to complete it. There are 39 stations and the farther we went from the Central Station the closer we got to ‘real’ Myanmar. A different scenery was unfolding after every single stop. We could see the surroundings slowly but steadily change from urban and concrete to rural and verdant.
The people in our carriage were constantly changing. Our travel companions were monks, young, old, kids, guards, ladies carrying baskets, bundles of market prouce, households an other useful merchandise which I would probably not be even able to lift but they, on the contrary, were nonchalantly balancing on their head. (I should consider adopting this practice in Milan too as I noticed that it significantly improves the posture). Some were sleaping, others eating or spitting betal through the windows, stastions were passing and everyone was getting on with their lives.
After the first two hours, however, my attention capability dramatically dropped, not without the help of the monotonous track rumble sound and the lack of sleep the previous night, and all I wanted to do is to sleep on the arm of the sweetest-one.
Here are the pictures before this happened, but before that some useful tips:
- The ticket for the Circular Train costs 200 kyat (0.16 usd) and can be bought directly on the platform 6/7
- Keep the ticket during all the trip. There are ticket inspectors.
- The train travels both clockwise and anti clockwise. You can choose which one to take if you have the time to wait for the right one.
- There are also air-conditioned trains but I wouldn’t suggest them as you would miss the breeze and all the fun of being in a (luckily) not yet developed country
- As of 02.01.2016 the time table from Yangon Central Station was: 06:10; 08:20; 08.35; 10:10; 10:45; 11:30; 11:50; 13:05; 13:40;14:25; 16:40; 17:10.
- Try it before it gets substituted by a modern and comortable train.
A short video I snapped is also available on Youtube
