Tag Archives: #GlobalScavengerHunt

Adventure Travel, around-the-world travel, Global Scavenger Hunt

Global Scavenger Hunt: Leg 3 Concludes Back in Yangon

Shwedagon Pagoda, Yangon, Myanmar © Karen Rubin/goingplacesfarandnear.com

by Karen Rubin, Travel Features Syndicate, goingplacesfarandnear.com

Another perfect day in Myanmar – our fourth and final on Leg 3 of the Global Scavenger Hunt. Returned from Inle Lake to Yangon. Got back to the Shangri-la Sule Hotel (tried to take the public bus but after two buses went by, hopped a taxi).

Planned a day that included a visit to Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue, the last synagogue in all of Myanmar. By the time I got there, it was 1:40 pm (it was just about 15 minute walk from the hotel) – so lucky because it closes to visits at 2 pm (open daily except Sunday). A lovely synagogue in the Sephardic style, built in 1896. At one point, the Jewish community in Yangon numbered 2500 before the mass migration of WWII; today, there are only 5 families (about 30 people). The Samuels, one of the last remaining Jewish families, has maintained the synagogue for generations, a plaque notes.

Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue, Yangon, Myanmar © Karen Rubin/goingplacesfarandnear.com
© Karen Rubin/goingplacesfarandnear.com

Getting there was interesting, going through all these street markets with sounds of chickens (for sale), live fish for sale (one almost got away), and the scent of spices.

Perhaps not surprising, a short distance from the synagogue is Bogyoke Aung San Market, which since 1926 has been the city’s major marketplace. I was surprised at all the sellers of jade and jewelry (which is what the market is known for), as well as traditional longyi, and just about anything else you can think of. I came upon a seller of interesting post cards, and found the post office on the third level (one of my traditions of travel).

Shwedagon Pagoda, Yangon, Myanmar © Karen Rubin/goingplacesfarandnear.com
© Karen Rubin/goingplacesfarandnear.com

Went back to the hotel, which was just a few blocks away, to refresh (it was 104 degrees), in order to prepare for a visit to Shwedagon Pagoda (one of the mandatory scavenges of the Global Scavenger Hunt was to visit at dawn or dusk), to be there at dusk (but back at the hotel by the 6 pm deadline for the scavenges), but nothing, could have prepared me for the experience of seeing it. Fortunately, my teammate, Margo, who had traveled to Mandalay when I went on to Inle Lake, had to take a taxi back to Yangon (snafu with air ticket and all flights booked, ironic because I had a ticket that I wasn’t able to cancel when I changed my plan to go to Inle Lake instead, but such mishaps turn into marvelous adventures), but luckily, walked into the room at 4 pm, so we could go off together.

Margo cleverly hired a guide to show us around and it was fascinating: this was the first pagoda in the world, and is one of the most magnificent, and also considered one of the most sacred. It was built between the 6th and 10th centuries. We watch as workers on scaffolding work to restore the 60 tons of gold that decorates the tower. Most interesting was coming upon a procession of family celebrating the indunction of two young boys into the monastery. (The Sule Pagoda which I visited the evening we arrived – was it four days ago? – was also magnificent, but Shwedagon is on a different scale of breathtaking.   

Shwedagon Pagoda, Yangon, Myanmar © Karen Rubin/goingplacesfarandnear.com
© Karen Rubin/goingplacesfarandnear.com

We dash back in a taxi to get back to the Global Scavenger Hunt group a few minutes past 6 pm (we aren’t competing to win the challenge so we did not have to turn in scorecards).

After a hosted dinner (Japanese), where all of us traded our stories of exploration from Yangon and some combination of Bagan, Mandalay and Inle Lake, we return to the hotel to learn where our 23-day “Blind Date with the World” mystery tour continues next:

Out the door at 5:15 am (we will be provided breakfast boxes), on to Bangkok, for an eight-hour layover challenge, and then on to Abu Dhabi – essentially having breakfast in Myanmar, lunch in Thailand and dinner (or nightcap?) in the United Arab Emirates.

I realize that time is really fluid – not really stable or fixed, ordering our day.

Adventure Travel, around-the-world travel, Global Scavenger Hunt, Mystery Travel

Day 1 global scavenger hunt: practice run in vancouver bc

Selfie of the Margo Polos (Karen and Margo) to prove we found the Hotel Europe, in historic Gastown, Vancouver BC. The first day of the Global Scavenger Hunt was a practice round for our 23-day around-the-world adventure (c) Karen Rubin/goingplacesfarandnear.com

by Karen Rubin, Travel Features Syndicate, goingplacesfarandnear.com

We gather at 9 am on the first day of our 23-day Global Scavenger Hunt, a “Blind Date with the World,” where 10 teams of two people each don’t know where we are going until Bill Chalmers, the Global Scavenger Hunt Ringmaster and Chief Experience Officer, tells us. We have come to the meeting prepared for anything – a 4 hour notice to pack up to our next destination, perhaps? – and learn that we will spend the day doing a practice scavenger hunt, to level the playing field between newbies (me) and troopers/vets (one of the teams has done it 12 times). He has prepared the same kind of booklet and score sheet as we will get on arrival at every mystery destination.

We can choose the scavengers out of the selections – they each have different points . Among them are a choice of “mandatory” including at least one “experience”.  During the course of this day, we will have to complete 10 scavengers by 8 pm when we get together again. We are told this is a Par 1 in terms of difficulty, which can go as high as Par 6.

We start in search of “Affluent Alley” – after all, we are staying in Vancouver’s famous Hotel Vancouver in a toney boulevard off Robson Street where we were told you had to drive a Rolls or BMW in order to park on the street. We look at a couple of streets which are called Vancouver’s Fifth Avenue and Los Angeles’ Rodeo Drive. We are only allowed to ask locals – not the hotel concierge or any actual guide – but no one has heard of Affluent Alley – possibly because everyone we ask is either too young or a transplant. One woman at a bus stop is extremely helpful when we ask where a certain shoe store is located, and about how the bus system works. As for Affluent Alley, I suspect that it actually refers to the opposite (maybe East Hastings), or is the red-herring (and doesn’t exist at all).

But we are in search of the high-end shoe store, John Fluevog – go into several stores, finally Coach, and the salesperson directs us… We walk the several blocks to the store – unbelievably wacky, creative, magnificent (better art than the modern art I had seen at the Vancouver Art Gallery). We learn we are the 6th team to ask

Walk to Olympic cauldron, take our selfies, record the time. Pouring rain now when we walk to the bike rental shop on the list to rent bikes to ride around Stanley Park’s seawall, find the Totem Poles, stop at the Teahouse (fantastic carrot soup to restore our energy). Go to Gastown to find more scavenges (Hotel Europe, Angelo Calori built 1908-9, no longer a hotel, is “social housing,” ad haunted, looks remarkably like a smaller version of the Flat Iron Building in NYC), see the statue of Gassy Jack, the garrulous bartender that  gave Gastown its name, and, of course, the steam clock.

Scavengers give purpose to your wandering – more than that, they become a platform for a completely different perspective on a place and people. The Global Scavenger Hunt is designed to have us interact as much as possible with local people, to trust strangers, which we have been doing all day long, and finding how incredibly friendly and kind the Canadians are (even the many who have come here from all points of the globe and made Vancouver their home.

One of the scavengers is to write a haiku, and with time running out to our 8 pm deadline, I write:

What a way to see

Vancouver’s many treasures.

By bike, bus, on foot.

We gather at 8 pm, and Bill,the Ringmaster of the Global Scavenger Hunt (he also refers to as a traveling circus) tells us we are off tonight on a 2 am flight to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, hands us our airline info and visas, and we are off.