After taking the 1 PM train from Yangon (which was miraculously on time), we arrived in Letpadan a little after 5 in the evening.
The first thing we noticed was that we were definitely off the beaten track here. There was many a stare as we lumbered out of the tiny train station after assembling our bike back together. A dusty town that's most famous for the beatings and arrests of 100 students during the government riots in 2015, it's safe to say that not much else has happened here since then.
We walked along the single main road until coming across the Dream Guest House on Lanmadaw Street.
15,000 kyats per night gets you a decently sized room with air conditioning, TV, and a bathroom with a cold shower. Easily the best value for money so far – it's as cheap as Kawkareik, but much nicer.
The room has its quirks, as we amusingly found when we discovered that our bed and sheet were cut to fit a protruding column on the wall.
Note that about 1 kilometer down the road is the Pine Motel and Restaurant, which seems to be another guesthouse that takes foreigners. We didn't discover this until after we'd already checked in, but we couldn't complain.
Letpadan is a bit unusual in that it doesn't have a real town centre, but instead is arranged around its western and eastern poles. The train station is to the west, the highway a few kilometres due east, and everything is clustered around one or the other. In the middle of the two there's little but dust and grumpy dogs giving passers-by a hard time.
There's bugger all going on here but as a stopover, it does the job. Cheap and cheerful enough, as we continued to find during dinner at the Dawn Restaurant, which is a typical bus stop establishment with bright lights and decent grub at the crossroads of the main Yangon-Pyay Highway.
Back in the saddle mañana, and we're raring to go.