After an evening dining on the streets of Mandalay ($1.50 roti curry meal for two by the roadside – yes please! Usman Chapati near 82nd and 28th St junction) and a few Mandalay Beers elsewhere, we had one further day to indulge in Myanmar. Trying to see as many areas of local life as possible we started by taking a taxi to the Jade Market.
A few other people had turned up on their motorbikes before us.
The Mandalay Jade Market is famous in the industry and is where dealers from all over the country and region come to buy and sell wholesale, quality jade. Tourists have to pay a $1 entry fee for the market but it is well worth it. Inside is a bustling hive of activity – locals are carrying everything from unprepared rocks to tiny polished stones and all are looking to do business.
It’s not really a place for tourists – there is no-one trying to hawk items as you walk around – and that makes it all the more interesting. A walk into the further corners of the site reveals small workshops where workers are cutting and polishing the stone into all manner of shapes and sizes. Definitely one of the more interesting and authentic places we visited in the whole of Myanmar.
From the Jade Market we started walking on towards one of the finest temples in Mandalay – the Mahamuni Pagoda. Shoes and socks were off again as we made our way inside, through the standard tacky religious mall and into the centre courtyard. It was a busy place with shrines dotted all around.
Of special note was the gallery of huge paintings which lay just off the courtyard.
There were also bronze statues which the Burmese looted in the sacking of the Thai ex-capital of Ayutthaya (but they had nicked them from Angkor Wat so that’s a little demonstration of karma right there!).
The main reason visitors flock to the temple however, is to visit the Mahamuni Bhudda image contained in the centre. The 6.5 tonne bronze image is one of only 5 created during the life of the Bhudda and was reportedly breathed upon by the main man himself. Nowadays hundreds of pilgrims visit the Bhudda to apply gold leaf to the statue for luck. So much so that the coating of gold is now over 15cm thick, and much of the image is now unrecognisable!
The gold leaf on the Mahamuni Bhudda means much of it is now unrecognisable.
The heat of the day was building up as we put our shoes and socks back on and made for our next destination – the gold-leaf workshops. I had read about a small area of town that produces most of the gold leaf used throughout Myanmar, and that these workshops didn’t mind people stopping by to see. We wandered into one of the ‘big-name’ workshops and were instantly surprised by how small it was. Looking more like a mechanic’s workshop than anything else, we were drawn in by the rhythmic clank of metal on metal. In the back corner, two young lads were hammering away alternately – smashing huge sledgehammers into small fabric wrapped packages. A lady came over and gave us a piece of paper with an English explanation of the process.
All very intriguing and at no point was anyone bothered enough to try and sell us any gold leaf. We thanked them for their time and left them to it. By now the full heat of day was in force and we made a retreat back to the hotel to escape it and see out the last of our final day napping in the air-con.
Later on we went out to a local bar for some nightlife (after another bargain roadside roti with the Usman Chapati guys) and found a bar called Rainbow. It was quite busy with locals – no tourists about at all – but the atmosphere was lively and the beer Mandalay was cheap and cold so it was good enough for us.