The Road to (and from) Mandalay

13 February 2017

The night bus from Inle Lake arrived to Mandalay early this morning (4am). We were able to find a guest house that allowed us to check in early and we crashed for a while. Once we were back in the land of the living we headed to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. The breakfast was all laid out in bain-maries - but they weren't hot. Given the gastro experience was still fresh in our minds we went with the safe option for breakfast.

Safe breakfast - complete with cup of hot water as Mark couldn't work the tea machine.

Mark was keen to hire motorbikes so that we could explore further afield than just on foot around Mandalay city. He had found an ex-pat American chicken farmer / motorbike rental shop so we headed there. We were able to get two semi-automatic motorbikes together with helmets and lots of great advice about places to visit, including the four ancient capitals outside of Mandalay.

We then drove back through the morning traffic to our hotel. It was horrible. Within about two minutes of leaving the rental store there was a head on collision between two scooters and one of the drivers ended up lying on the road. There are traffic lights which are generally adhered to but if you want to get from A to B and it is easier to just drive straight down the oncoming lane so be it. Mark and I seemed to be the only ones using indicators - everyone else signalled by coming up behind someone and then honking the horn until the other vehicle pulled over to the side of the road to let them pass. Once we were back at the hotel Mark asked me how the ride was - fucking awful. He very sensibly agreed that there was a bit more traffic than he had anticipated when he suggested that we should hire motorbikes.

We dumped the bikes and headed around the corner to a roadside stall to get Mohinga (a noodle soup) for breakfast. We had a great chat with the next door stall owner about our trip around Myanmar and how we were enjoying it. There was then some frantic chat between our new friend and the owner of the store we were eating at - the price of our breakfast dropped by a third. We must have said the right things!

Revived after our breakfast it was time to give the motorbikes another chance. The first stop on our ancient capitals tour was Sagaing Hill. From the temple on the top of the hill there were views over the Irrawaddy river, a whole bunch of stupas and back towards Mandalay itself.

Giant Buddha complete with flashing LED's

These young monks got in trouble from the temple keeper for being too boisterous

School's out for the young Buddhist nuns as we head away from Sagaing Hill.

Our next capital was Amarapura - it is the home of the world's longest teak bridge. It was a very long teak bridge. There were many many people who wanted to see the large teak bridge. We stayed to watch some of the sunset and then decided our time was better spent by making sure we had finished our ride and were back at the hotel before it was dark.

The large teak bridge

[So large - M]

On the drive back to the hotel Mark and I got separated as he nipped across a railway crossing and I got stuck behind the barriers. This did provide Mark with the perfect opportunity to get a sweet photo of the volume of traffic we rode in - much to the amusement of the crowd around me.

Where's Frank?

We made it back to the hotel safely and utterly exhausted. After dumping the bikes we headed out for dinner at a local restaurant. As seems to be the Burmese way although we ordered just a curry each by the time all of the various accompaniments arrived we had a small feast.

So much delicious food....

14 February 2017

Valentines day was the perfect day for more motorbike adventures. The motorbike rental company had suggested a circular route that took us from Mandalay to the Anisakan Falls and then back to Mandalay over the course of a day.

Vroom vroom

The ride to Anisakan Falls was about an hour and a half and then the walk down to the falls itself was about half an hour down a fully formed path. But once we got to the falls - wow. Pools of crystal clear water and a large waterfall. We jumped in for what was a very refreshing swim. The mild hypothermia helped us with the walk back up the hill though.

Anisakan Falls - complete with random other tourist

We left the falls and continued on the circular loop back towards the city. The route recommended by the rental store had us on back roads that took us through small villages and crop plantations. The only other people we saw for much of the ride were the children from the villages who waved to us as we whizzed by. At one point when we stopped for a break on the side of the road Mark asked how I was enjoying the ride. I had to admit that I had had a bit of an epiphany - I loved travelling by motorbike!

15 February 2017
Today was the end of our time in Myanmar as we were catching a flight to Siem Reap in Cambodia. We got up early as we had heard that the sunrise from Mandalay Hill - the highpoint of the city - was worth seeing. We paid the 20 cents so that we could drive our bikes up the hill, rather than having to walk up, like the many people getting their morning exercise.

We wandered around the temple at the top of Mandalay Hill as we waited (and waited) for the sun to rise. Unfortunately due to all of the smog you weren't actually able to tell that the sun had risen until it was well up in the sky.

Mark made his own fun at the temple

Later that evening we arrived to Siem Reap. The visa on arrival process was bureaucracy at its finest. You handed your passport and cash to the official. Your passport then went along a line of nine more officials who made some small important handwritten change to the visa sticker or stamped the sticker officiously. Despite the many pairs of hands the visa process was remarkably efficient. The same could not be said for the immigration officials. We dutifully stood in a queue which then just randomly closed and then another counter opened - causing a flurry of tourists to run to the newly opened counter. This happened multiple times. [over the course of the better part of a friggin' hour we spent in a queue that was only like 10 people long. -M]

From Mandalay we had changed planes at Bangkok en route to Siem Reap. Unfortunately the quick turnaround was not long enough for our bags to make it onto the plane with us. We stared forlornly at the baggage claim for a while before giving up and heading to lost and found. We then had the best introduction to our time in Cambodia.

The man managing the lost and found counter at Siem Reap airport welcomed us into his office. He promised that the bags were on the next flight from Bangkok - an hour away. We could stay at his office or have the bags sent to our guest house later tonight. As we didn't yet have a guest house we elected to wait. He then made it his mission to help us book a guest house. Mark and I would randomly call out phone numbers of guest houses as we located them and he would telephone the various options speaking to them in Khmer for us. Once we had a guest house secured he then rang the plane to see how it was tracking against the scheduled arrival time. As promised, when the next plane arrived our bags also magically appeared.

Airline company lost your bags - no problem!

Kalaw and Inle Lake

9-12 February 2017

We'd been told the scenery between Bagan and Kalaw was worth seeing, so we jumped on a day bus to get to Kalaw. We cruised past endless Toddy Palm plantations, the ubiquitous roadside shacks selling food & drink, and eventually started climbing some serious hills, Kalaw being at 1300m altitude. It was actually cold when we arrived, a completely foreign sensation for the past week.

Kalaw feels like Ohakune or some American ski town in the off season. It's full of alpine-chalet style buildings (somewhat clashing with the pagodas), and surrounded by pine forest. We went out for a wander and found an awesome little "boat bar" crammed into a space smaller than some walk-in closets, where the seating surrounded a tiny area where the barman created excellent rum sours and we could easily chat to the locals and other tourists opposite us, with every surface covered in graffiti from patrons past as we munched on a stream of delicacies that continuously appeared.

Realising we could easily spend all night there but had an early start for our trekking, we regretfully left and trooped off to a nearby eatery. Turned out it was run by a Shan women (one of the local hill-tribes) who had left for California in her early 20's and lived there for 17 years before just recently returning to Myanmar to look after her mother and open the restaurant. We were stuffed with a variety of food and had a great talk with her about the region, the country, and her life.

Trekking

Moderately early the next morning we set off trekking through the hills on a two day walk to Inle Lake, having our lunch and tea stops in various hill tribe villages along the way. This is well and truly on the tourist route now, so some of the villages looked like their population was temporarily at least 50% white with our fellow trekkers, but such is life.

Luckily Frank was wearing her hat so I could tell her apart from the water buffalo.

We decided that New Zealand has pretty thoroughly spoilt us for scenery and hiking, but it was interesting, and a much-needed break from looking at temples.

Our night's accommodation.

Breakfast. We ate like kings on the trek.

This is a good a time as any to mention my biggest complaint about Myanmar. The people are lovely and genuine, and there are some fantastic things to see and do, but my god is the air little short of unbreathable. Half my clothes still reek of smoke from the unventilated indoor fire we discovered the family was burning in the room next to us that night, and all over the country you can see crop stubble being burned in fields, rubbish and garden waste being burned, small smudge fires for mosquitoes, and of course the exhaust from the hordes of trucks and scooters in every big town or busy road. The horizon is never visible, everything more than a couple of kilometres away dissolves into a greyish brown pall of smog. 

Apparently the WHO reckons 22,000 Burmese a year die from the air pollution, and I'm not surprised. This overnight stay living like the locals (as opposed to an air-conditioned guest house room) really cemented that: I woke up to the sound of phlegmy coughing from pretty much everyone nearby, and I was (am) badly affected by it as well.  It was a great relief to be able to wear a dust mask on the boat ride and motorcycle later on and give my lungs a bit of a rest. Seriously made me appreciate New Zealand...

Makes for nice photos of the light though.

Inle Lake

At the end of our trek we had an hour boat ride to the main town nearby, and we did another boat ride around the lake the next day. Many photos were taken.

Cruising out past stilt villages and floating gardens.

Kind of  boring photo because it doesn't capture that we were going full speed at the time.

Sweet amphibious digger pitching forward violently with every shovel.

Mark on a floating island. They chuck a bit of dirt on top of the floating Water Hyacinth plants and grow tomatoes or whatever on it.
 Not pictured: The fact that I'm slowly sinking and need to keep moving to stay dryish.

   

Three second video of basically what the lake trip was like. Watch this clip while running a lawnmower with the muffler cut off for the full effect.

Frank being sun smart and stoically posing driver.



Bouncy Castle full of happy children at the night market.
Not pictured: the ear-splitting electronic dance music being played at the kids.

Things that didn't photograph well:

• Going up the canal streets of the stilt villages with little pedestrian bridges and rickety wooden power cable towers around the place.
• Water buffalo bathing and wallowing in the mud and water off the the side of the river and lake.
• Going up river to the In Thein pagodas where you had to cross half a dozen small dams they'd built. The dams were sub-beaver-quality bamboo affairs with spillways over the top middle and only up to 6 inches or so difference in height, but still fun when you're snaking up a narrow river dodging other boats and water buffalo and then have to gun it to get up the dam.
• The In Thein pagodas. It's a dense forest of them, cool to be surrounded by, but beyond my photography skills to capture.

We'd wanted to rent motorbikes to explore the region here, but apparently that isn't legal here, so we ended up having a bit of a rest day prior to our night bus to Mandalay.

5 days in Bagan

3 February 2017 - 7 February 2017

Although the music and soap operas stopped the night bus from Yangon continued to be fairly uncomfortable - particularly for someone as tall as Mark. We had seen people mention that the air-con would be cranked right up (keeping the driver awake!?) and so came prepared with a blanket to combat that. Despite these inconveniences the bus was fairly flash.  We were supplied with a blanket and pillow each and the bus hostess handed out soft drinks and a tiny box of baked goods halfway through the trip.

We got into Nyaung-U, the backpacking base for exploring Bagan at about 4am. We dropped our bags at the guesthouse and headed off in search of the sunrise. We walked to Bulethi and climbed the temple, eagerly awaiting dawn and the sunrise to arrive together with many others. It was fairly peaceful and then someone yelled out - the balloons are launching. We watched as the balloons slowly filled the sky.

Sunrise at Bulethi 3/2/2017

After the sunrise Mark explored some of the nearby temples and I fell asleep precariously perched at the top of a steep set of stairs on the temple. Thankfully I didn't roll over. We headed back to town via lunch at "Perfect tea house" and checked into our guesthouse. My nap before had probably been a warning sign we had been pushing it too hard over the past few days because we both promptly fell asleep for the next 14 hours.

The following two days in Bagan followed a similar pattern.We would get up before the sunrise, hire e-bikes - the gutless electric scooters that are commonly used to zoom around the temple zone, climb up a temple to watch sunrise and spend the morning exploring the temples. We would head back to the guesthouse via a lunch stop for a rest from the middle of the day sun. Once it had cooled down a bit we would head out again to our sunset temple and watch the sun go down. 

Clockwise from top left: Myauk Guni, hard to capture the steepness in a photo, and Dhammayazika pagoda. Note bamboo scaffolding for repairs from August 2016 earthquake, which damaged hundreds of the pagodas.

The e-bikes were an ideal way to get around the temple fields [Practically silent, can do 40-50 kmh on sealed road, powerful enough to get around the sandy tracks between temples, much better than hearing all the other tourists on motorbikes and much better in mid-30's heat than a bicycle -Mark]. There are approximately 2500 temples and they cover a 40 square kilometre area. [My location history says we traveled 45 kilometres the second day, most of that offroad -Mark] The main temples have road and tour bus access but the smaller ones just have sandy paths to be carefully navigated. Some of our shortcuts lead to a few cuts and scratches where the paths were overgrown. [I maintain it was still a shortcut, and I didn't see you offering to navigate... -Mark]

Depending on the size of a temple and its proximity to a main road you may not see another person or you may be mobbed by a small army of locals trying to sell sand paintings, lacquer ware or pirated George Orwell books [Reading Burmese Days at the moment, is there some sort of message in the fact that people keep coming up to us trying to sell us a book about how awful it is for white people in Burma? -Mark]. During the day we would try and scope out a temple that was just the right combination of view and (fingers crossed) was likely to have no other people on it for that evening's sunset or the next day's sunrise.

We avoided this one for sunset

But didn't manage to avoid the crowds completely

  

Candle lit staircase up to the roof of our sunset temple

Sunset at one of our favourite temples

 Mark had read rave reviews of people taking a hot air balloon ride at dawn over the temple field. We decided this was something worth splashing out on. The balloon company picked us up from our guesthouse and we, together with the other guests were taken out to the launch site. We arrived to three tables set with candles and we were served breakfast while the crews started preparing the balloons.  [We rolled up the van in the pitch darkness at like quarter to 6, and entered a huge field full of tractors hauling baskets around, gangs of men unrolling balloons, and enormous columns of flame leaping into the air as the various balloons tested their burners. I was amping unbelievably hard at this stage, it was both of our first times on a balloon and I was beyond excited. -Mark]

Post breakfast pre launch

Nearly time to go

We were sharing our balloon with ten others. After a safety briefing from our Spanish pilot it was time to jump in the balloon and head off. With a few flares of gas we were up and away. It was awesome!

Morning has broken

  
 

Severely earthquake-damaged but still very popular

 

 

So many balloons

 
The views were amazing and we had about an hour flying over the temples that we had spent the past two days hooning around. It was a day we won't forget for a long time. Once we were safely back on firm ground, the crew set up a table for us all to share a few bottles of champagne with our pilot.

Hot air balloon selfie!!

Unfortunately after that fantastic experience we came crashing back to earth as a result of a dodgy food choice. We didn't venture far from our room for the next two days.

We are leaving Bagan tomorrow morning to travel to Kalaw, which is the starting point for overnight treks to Inle Lake. We have both noticed the smog filled air [Plus everyone burns rubbish and leaves at dawn and dusk for mosquitoes, although that drifting smoke makes for amazing sunrise ambience -Mark] so it will be great to get out into the countryside.

Further notes/pictures probably only of interest to our mums/ our future selves. Normal people stop reading here. -Mark

Takeoff!

 

 

Balloons

More Balloons

Delicious!

I ultimately decided not to cross this. I know you're disappointed.

Snaaaaakes!

We could hear our pilot on the radio telling this guy to stop ascending into us please...

Coming in to land

You want to buy a book? Longyi?

Not  Pictured: 

Mark bent over a partially disassembled e-bike with leatherman in hand re-swaging a terminal connector on the battery after his bike suddenly died in the middle of the temple field

Frank's hat flying off while scootering along and Mark hooking it with his foot and then transferring it to his hand to give back to her, to the great amusement of a passing truck driver who tooted his way past us with a toothy grin and thumbs-up.

So much gastro. I wanted to go to a dodgy local pub called "Dagon Station" after a local beer brand so I could make lame jokes about the "Dagon Station menu." Well, we paid far too high a price for the Dagon Station menu over the next couple of days.

Exploring Yangon

1 February 2017

We had heard about the circle train, which takes a three hour circular route around Yangon as a great way to explore the city. We only lasted about 15 minutes before jumping off at the station to head towards Shwedagon Pagoda.

But first we wandered through a park with a roller coaster - of course we had to give the quality engineering a go -  we were the only two on it, right up the front, and by the double corkscrew stage of the ride it was going slower in a way that made you really grateful you were strapped into the cars.

Pre-roller coaster grimace

After that shot of adrenaline we headed to the more sedate Shwedagon Pagoda. Its 2500 years old and the shining gold stupa can be seen from many parts of Yangon.  

Shwedagon Pagoda. Not pictured: unbearable heat.

We completely underestimated how hot it would be in the pagoda complex in the middle of the day and ended up doing as the locals do and found a quiet shady spot for a nap.A bit more wandering and then the heat and lack of food got the better of us. We sought out the air conditioning and comfort food of the only KFC [indeed, the only western chain restaurant, and it's only a year or two old - Mark] in Myanmar.

Later on once we our energy levels were restored we went out for dinner on 19th street at a delicious local BBQ place.

90 cent mojitos!

2 February 2017

We had had enough of the big city and decided it was time to move on. We made arrangements to leave Yangon later that day by overnight bus.

In the afternoon we took the ferry across the river to Dalah. Although Yangon had been no trouble as far as touts, that message hadn't made it's way across to this side of the river. Even before we got on the ferry at Yangon people were offering to guide us. Once we arrived to Dalah we were offered taxis and motorcycle taxis as "where you go is too far to walk" - impressive as we had no idea where we were going. We headed away on foot and came across a mosque that looked like it had been designed by Walt Disney and then we became the attraction when we wandered past a primary school at 3.00pm. Mark discovered the boat wreckers yard complete with welding and no safety gear [apparently people are cheaper than clamps, the poor buggers holding bits in place while the guy was using a stick welder to cut the boat up had to keep shaking bits of flying slag off themselves :s -Mark].

Artistic boat photo looking back at the city

 Later we got to the bus station on the outskirts of town. This isn't a bus station as we know it but rather a massive area of land where 100's of bus companies all have little shelters for their respective companies - with the names all in Burmese. Our taxi driver found the correct shelter for us with only a few stops for directions.  We then boarded our bus named "Enchanted" decorated with many animals - I was just grateful we weren't on the bus next door - Stunt Mania!

The overnight bus to Bagan is about 8 hours - We were welcomed on board to the sound of loudly playing Burmese pop music and when that was done we were then subjected to Burmese soap operas at top volume. Eventually they got the message that no one was interested and peace (other than the regular tooting of horns) reigned.