Yangon Workshops: Crafts and Cooking The best souvenir from Yangon isn’t something you buy, it’s something you learn to make with your own hands before you fly home. Traditional Burmese cooking classes Most start with a morning market tour, picking through lemongrass, fermented fish paste (ngapi), turmeric, tamarind, and quail eggs before heading into the kitchen. What you actually cook is the real payoff: mohinga, the rice vermicelli in a spiced catfish-and-lemongrass broth that most Burmese people eat for breakfast, lahpet thoke, the fermented tea-leaf salad tossed with toasted peanuts, sesame seeds, crispy fried garlic, roasted split peas, and dried shrimp, and a rich pork or chicken curry (hin).

Yangon Day Trips: Bago, Thanlyin, Twante Three different day trips leave Yangon in three different directions, and each one tells a completely different story about this delta, so picking between them comes down to what story you want. Bago, the Mon capital that beats Shwedagon on height About 80 to 90 km northeast of Yangon, roughly two hours by road, Bago was the ancient capital of the Mon Hanthawaddy Kingdom. Shwemawdaw Pagoda here stands 114 meters tall, taller than Shwedagon itself, and it’s paired with the 55-meter reclining Buddha at Shwethalyaung, carved in 994 CE, and the four 30-meter seated Buddhas of Kyaikpun facing the cardinal directions.

Romantic Yangon: Gold Spires, Sunset Tea Yangon saves its best romantic trick for last light, when the gold on Shwedagon’s spire stops looking metallic and starts looking lit from within. Couples who time their day around late afternoon get the best of this city. Here’s where that pays off. Twilight at Shwedagon Pagoda Arrive as the late-afternoon sun turns the 99-meter golden spire a deep amber, and stay as the light fades.

Yangon Adventure Tours: The Honest Version Yangon will not give you rapids, zip-lines, or a mountain summit, and the most honest thing anyone can tell you is that the closest thing to an adrenaline rush here is a train that runs straight through an open-air vegetable market. Let’s be straight about this from the start: Yangon sits on flat delta land, and there is no white-water rafting, no mountain trekking, and no zip-lining anywhere near the city.