Journey to the Golden Rock

      Following our week long Myanmar tour we had a couple days of relaxing in Yangon before we went on our next little venture. This time it was to Golden Rock. On the top of Mt. Kyaiktiyo a small pagoda was built on top of a rock (covered in gold leaves – not leaves from trees but little leaflets of gold, that sort of look like gum wrappers…this is important, I swear) that sits precariously on a cliff (looks as if it is about to start tumbling down the mountain) and is a popular site for Buddhist pilgrimages. So we left early one morning and began our own pilgrimage of sorts. Since we had to wake up early, we were all planning to sleep in the car. However, a cd with a grand total of 3 Burmese pop songs played a repeat for the first 2 HOURS. When we finally told Rose that were getting a little tired of the “Da-nay-nay” song her driver changed to a classical cd. Perfect for sleeping. WAIT – we didn’t want the driver falling asleep too…as sick as we were of “Da-nay-nay” it was better than death. Needless to say, we made it to the base of the mountain a bit tired.

       Once we were there we were informed that we were taking a different vehicle up the rest of the mountain. I saw a couple of tour busses and figured we’d be hopping into one of those soon enough. NOPE. We went to this garage full of pick up trucks. I saw one completely stuffed with 50 people (no joke) in the back end and figured we would wait for the next one. NOPE. The back of the pick up truck had 8 or 9 little benches and somehow squished in (I really don’t understand how this happened..). As I went to sit down my knees were in the next row… these were definitely Burmese size benches. So 50 of my newest friends and I started up the mountain in the pick up truck. We drove for about 30 minutes, switch -backs the whole way. While I was definitely concerned about the truck tipping or rolling backwards, I still managed to enjoy the beautiful greenery that covered the hillsides.

As we climbed out of the truck I realized we still had a significant chunk of the  mountain to ascend…it quickly dawned on me that we would make the rest of the journey by foot. The next hour consisted of an incredibly steep hike with our luggage on our backs. The experienced locals zig-zagged up the mountain to slightly reduce the gradient. It was very exhausting. Halfway through this hike Megan turned to me and said, “Just think about how amazing the view will be – I think this will be worth it.” I replied, “Yeah I think I’m going to go in with lower expectations… that way they can be exceeded.” We were anxious to see the rock thing. When we got to the top we stopped at our hotel to check in before going to see the pagoda… just building the suspense.

       When we FINALLY took the short walk to reach the view we had all been waiting for, we stopped in our tracks, our jaws dropped and we COULD NOT BELIEVE what we saw… the WHOLE THING WAS COVERED!!!!! WHAT?!?!?! You have to be KIDDING ME?!?! Ohhhmaigawsh. So after a little investigation we realized that for 2 weeks every 3 years they covered it up with thatch to reapply the gold leafs! And yes, we managed to go right in the middle of those 2 weeks. Bravo, us. Hahah. Did we really just go through all of that to see the covered rock?! Glad we decided to lower our expectations… To be fair the views of the mountains themselves were beautiful :) It was a little ridiculous, but fortunately we were able to roll our eyes and then find the humor in the whole situation. They had a smaller version of the golden rock nearby so we went there and took zoomed-in photos…close enough right?!

       The following morning we hiked ALL the way down … and 3 hours later we had very sore bodies that were ready to sleep all the way home. Not even “Da-nay-nay” could keep us awake. Our trip to Golden rock was a very clear reminder that traveling is about the journey, not the destination.