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.
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