7/19 Mandalay

7/19/2013: My original plan had been to spend the day visiting Pyin Oo Lwin, recommended by Toki the Bucknellian in Yangon. Pyin Oo Lwin is an hour or two outside of Mandalay and apparently is where the British higher-ups lived during the colonial period. He said it's very pretty, still has residual British features, and is much cooler. However, I had read that there was recently a motorcycle bomb in Pyin Oo Lwin, and the article mentioned that a handful of other undetonated bombs had been found around town in the past few weeks. That was more than enough reason to not make the trek, so I stayed in Mandalay.

I had heard some mixed things about Mandalay during previous travels. Some people said there wasn't much to do and that it was dirty, and others said they liked it enough but it wasn't anything special. I had been traveling for around three weeks at this point and was running out of steam. I was ready to head home to cooler weather, cleaner bathrooms, faster internet, and English-speakers. Instead of bucking up and doing one more big touristy day, I decided to just rent a bike and cruise around and see what sort of interesting things I could find.

The bike I rented was possibly heavier than the one in Bagan, but luckily the area was mostly flat. I headed west to the Irrawaddy River, and pedaled along it for a few miles. There was a lot of activity along the river - lots of people loading up rickety little boats in preparation for (I assume) getting across the river to their smaller villages. There were also people that appeared to be living in little floating covered docks, too small even to stand up straight inside. As I continued on, I passed lots of little shanty towns along both sides of the road, which was still paralleling the river. Everybody I passed smiled and waved and shouted "hello!" but it was probably one of the poorest areas I've seen.

my trusty bike

I eventually curved away from the river, and headed east along the north side of the city. I could see "Mandalay Hill" on the east side of town, so I headed towards it, thinking I might hike up it or take the cable car up. I approached from the wrong side and didn't manage to find the path up or the cable car, but I found a nice shady area to cool down. Eventually I moved on and got back into the city.

Mandalay is one of the biggest cities in Myanmar, but it isn't very big. There are a few tall buildings, but I wouldn't call them skyscrapers. The downtown streets are in grid-form, but there are very few traffic lights and very few stop signs - the standard approach is to slow down a little at intersections, and gun it if you get there first. Once one person goes, everyone else heading that direction goes, until that flow peters out and the cross-traffic gets its opening to become the dominant direction in the intersection. Unlike Yangon, there are tons of motorbikes, but since it is still a poorer country, there are also lots of bicycles and even the occasional horse cart.

Horse cart carrying people and hay

Produce for sale in Mandalay market

I grabbed lunch at another Chinese restaurant, which was very tasty, then tried to find the Mandalay brewery, hoping that they'd have a tasting room or tour or something. It turned out to just be a nondescript building surrounded by barbed wire fence, and it was clear that tasting rooms are a Western phenomenon. I decided to start my search for gifts for family and friends, so I hit a few markets without much luck before deciding it was time to return the heavy bike and proceed on motorbike taxi.

I had a guy drive me to the mall, which was an odd experience, but I was able to find some good gifts. He picked me up an hour later, and drove me back to the hostel, where I decided I should go see the famous "teak bridge" before the sun went down. We agreed on a price and he raced through the unregulated intersections and got me to the long 1.3ish km bridge made entirely of teak wood. There were lots of tourists walking along it, and I enjoyed a beer while I strolled along it and felt it wobble from all the tourists. One Myanmar girl was watching a snake down below in the water, but I couldn't see it after sitting with her for five minutes trying to spot it.

After getting back to the hostel, I went to an Indian street food spot that was also highly rated in Trip Advisor and enjoyed some tasty curry with roti.

7/18 Bagan to Mandalay

7/18/2013: Once again, it was a long journey to Mandalay, and we arrived at the bus terminal in the dusty outskirts of the city around 3pm. I caught a motorbike taxi into downtown, with the guy squishing my ever-expanding backpack in the area of the motorbike where your feet usually go. He dropped me off at my hostel, where I'd made a reservation the night before over the phone.

After checking in, I was fiddling with my phone trying to get the internet to work (with no luck) when I started chatting with a girl from California and a guy from Canada. They invited me to join them to get some beers at a nearby cafe that had working internet, so we wandered a few blocks down the road and had a few beers. The Canadian guy was a self-absorbed "place-dropper" (like name-dropper, but brags about having been to exotic places....i.e. "oh that reminds me of this time I got hammered with some tribesmen in Ethiopia...blah blah blah."). The girl had gone to CU-Boulder so we talked about Colorado some, and then we both subtly rolled our eyes at each other as the Canadian yammered about his various travels where apparently the locals are more tolerant of total tools.

We decided to walk around the city some, and followed along one side of the massive moat that separates Mandalay from the "old city." The moat is a huge square, and while Chiang Mai's moat was around one mile per side, this one was probably two or three miles per side. We didn't get very far before we decided to go grab dinner at a Chinese restaurant that had gotten high ratings on Trip Advisor. Mandalay happens to have a huge Chinese population, so I was excited to try out some of the Chinese food in the city. We picked up another backpacker from our hostel, an Australian, and we hired two motorbikes to take us about twelve blocks south to the restaurant. The food was good, and the owner thanked us for visiting and asked us to give more positive reviews on Trip Advisor. Our motorbike taxis were still waiting for us, we squeezed back on (two of us + driver per motorbike) and blasted through the countless intersections with no traffic lights or stop signs of any kind.

Mandalay moat

 

7/17 Bagan

7/17/2013: Bagan is a major tourist attraction in Myanmar and is often referred to as the "Angkor Wat of Myanmar." It doesn't come close to the big, impressive temples of Angkor, but it has an incredible amount of old pagodas scattered around a large swath of arid land. Apparently there was a long period where the current ruler of the day would have pagodas built to celebrate various events - his birthday, his mom's birthday, some anniversary, some Buddhist holiday, etc. The result was just an overwhelming smattering of pagodas plopped around the town of Bagan. The typical approach for tourists is to get a driver, a bicycle, or a horsecart and to tour around and explore the pagodas. I decided to go with the super-heavy bicycle, so I hit the road in the morning with a vague idea of what direction I needed to go.

I first stopped at an open-air tea shop, which seemed to be the breakfast spot of choice for the men of Bagan. I didn't have to order anything, they just delivered some tea to my table along with some samosas dripping with grease and a big hunk of crusty-looking bread that the server obviously had just snatched from the table nearby when it was obvious that the other guys didn't want to eat it. There was a women's soccer match playing on a small TV - I think Denmark vs. Finland, and I wondered if the few guys paying attention thought it was some game from another world, with a bunch of tall blonde ladies running around and actually playing a sport (I didn't see any Myanmar girls playing any sports during my time in Myanmar).

I continued on with my rusty steel bike and found the first pagoda, which turned out to be "renovated" and looked extremely new. I kept moving, pedaling through the loose dry sand on the road. For the next three or four hours, I just biked from one place to another and wandered around and climbed on some of the pagodas. The sun was very intense and I was already templed out, but I enjoyed the scenery and the exercise.

Goat herding near the temples

I kept moving, and ended up in Old Bagan around lunchtime. I stopped at a Myanmar restaurant, which had some Myanmar patrons, and ordered some Myanmar food from a girl that was skeptical about my actually wanting some Burmese food. I enjoyed the beef curry with rice, but the many pickled things that came with it tended to taste a bit like feet. I washed it down with some Burmese Coca-Cola and moved on, stopping briefly at a market to buy some rambutans.

After leaving Old Bagan, the heat and the heavy bike were starting to wear me out, so I stopped at a roadside restaurant and got some iced "lime juice" (pretty much lemonade). A Burmese guy sat down to talk to me, obviously trying to practice his English. He wanted to show me around the temple near his house, and I reluctantly followed him, knowing he'd eventually want to sell me something. He had an old lady show me around the temple, which is well-known for its elaborate fresco that depicts a classic Buddhist story. She carried an incandescent light bulb attached to a long extension cord the whole way around so that the walls were lit up enough for me to see the paintings. When I got out, my Burmese friend was waiting for me, and we walked around the rest of the grounds with him pointing out interesting things, including the "Burmese Rosetta Stone," which told the same story on it in three different languages. Finally he asked if he could show me his paintings, which looked exactly like the ones the guy had shown me the evening before, and I begrudgingly bought the least ugly painting for $6. 

My tour guide

 I finished my long bike ride in the afternoon, at which point I cooled down in my room for a while before returning to the river-side temple for another sunset view. I'd had my fill of Bagan and was ready to move on, so I arranged for a bus ride to Mandalay the next morning - my last city in Myanmar before returning to Bangkok.

7/16 Inle Lake to Bagan

6/16/2013: Well, I wasn't able to finish my blog posts before grad school got started, so now I'm struggling to recall all of the details. Some (i.e. Ariel) might say fewer details would be an improvement to the blog, so we'll see. I just updated the previous 3 days' posts (7/13-7/15) with some pictures I stole from Facebook from Matt (one of my fellow "trekkers"), so it's maybe worth going back and looking at those pics. I added my favorites - he was more comfortable with taking pictures of the locals, so the pictures are nice shots of some of the people we came across during our hike.

Early on the 16th, I hopped on a bus and made the 8ish hour ride from Inle Lake to Bagan. In most other countries, this trip would have taken much less time, but in Myanmar they decided to make all the roads windy, bumpy, and narrow. We were also frequently slowed down by oxcarts and horsecarts pulling people along the old fashioned way. I finally arrived at the bus terminal a little outside of New Bagan around 3pm, then was over-charged for a taxi into New Bagan to find a hotel. I settled for the first one I was delivered to, despite the visible filth and lack of wifi. At this point I had accepted the fact that most places are pretty gross, and Myanmar's internet is too slow to do much anyway. The owners were a very cute and very small Myanmar couple, and I seemed to be their only customer. They rented me a bike, which was possibly the heaviest bike I've ever ridden, and I checked out the town. There wasn't much to the town - just one main dusty street with some restaurants, hotels, and art galleries along the way. The side roads were even dustier and appeared to just be residential.

As the sun started to set, I rode over towards the river, the Irrawaddy, which is the huge river in Myanmar along which most villages are set. There is a big pagoda overlooking the river, and it offers great views of the sunset. Before reaching the pagoda, I stopped at the river edge and noticed big group of people and some cameras. A passing girl told me a music video was being filmed for the "opposition party" (led by Aung San Suu Kyi). It appeared to be a cheesy gangsta rap video with two "thugs" dancing and making "West-side" symbols with their hands in the foreground, and a crowd of people in the background holding Myanmar flags and surrounding two shirtless guys fake-boxing. It was odd.

Political music video being filmed

I continued up the stairs to the pagoda and enjoyed a nice view of the massive river, the mountains on the other side, and the sun set. I talked to a Burmese guy for a while as he was trying to sell me some paintings. Then I watched an over-crowded, rickety old boat with an outboard motor attempt to cross the strong, wide river and hoped they'd make it to the other side as the sun dropped below the mountains.

7/15 Inle Lake Boat Trip

7/15/2013: It seems that the big thing to do at Inle Lake, once you arrive, is a "boat trip." I was hesitant, since it sounds like a major tourist trap. My trekking crew all agreed to go in on a boat together, although Vitse had to cancel because of massive blisters on his feet. Stef, Vic, and Matt met me at my hotel in the morning and we hopped in the long-tail boat. Unfortunately I left my camera battery charging in my hotel room, so I wasn't able to take any pictures. We cruised back south and pulled into a different canal, then the boat driver signaled that we get out and go to the "market." We didn't see any markets, and I was afraid it would be a market with strictly tourist schwag like mass-produced paintings and various trinkets. We had to walk thirty minutes and eventually reached an actual market where we were the only tourists. It may sound boring, but it's pretty interesting to just wander around and see the strange food products for sale, the funny t-shirts in broken English, and just getting a snapshot of a typical day for an Inle Lake resident.

The next stop was the goldsmith and silversmith shop. Again, I had low expectations, but it was actually very interesting to see each step in the process of extracting silver from ore and then turning it into jewelry. There were a number of kids working on the jewelry, which was disheartening, but we figured maybe they were "apprentices" and not "child laborers" and that if they weren't working in this shop, they'd just be farming or fishing.

After that, we visited the lotus weaving shop, which followed the same format as the silversmith where they show you the raw material and every step along the way and then try to sell you something by the end of it. The shop was built like all the other buildings in the area, on stilts above the shallow lake. Different buildings were connected by rickety bamboo bridges, so it was fun just wandering around. The lotus weaving was interesting - they take the stem of the lotus, break it apart, and there are thin fibers that can be collected and then spun into thicker string. They showed us some women (and some girls) working looms and producing lotus fabric, as well as silk and cotton. The tour guide girl estimated that it takes between 20-25 lotuses to produce one meter of lotus string. There's a huge swath of lotuses floating outside the shop, so their raw materials are cheap, but producing the lotus material is expensive - lotus fabric costs around seven times more than silk, but supposedly Inle Lake is the only place in the world where lotus fabric is produced.

Working the loom

We stopped for lunch at a "floating restaurant," which was great. The next stop was a pagoda, which wasn't mind-blowing. After that we visited a cigar-making shop, which once again was better than I expected. We just sat on stools and watched four women (well, two women and two girls) make cigars while they explained what goes into the tobacco and how the cigars are made. They let us smoke a "sweet" one, which was decent - along with tobacco, it contained banana, anise, honey, and other things I can't remember. Each girl makes around 500 cigars per day.

Cigar making - the fastest  one in the group

 The last stop of the day was a monastery, purported to have cats that have been trained by the monks to jump through hoops. Clearly this was the grand finale, and we had all been looking forward to it. We got off the boat, entered the monastery, and saw a number of cats lounging around. There were also a lot of other tourists, obviously eagerly waiting for a cat jumping show. Unfortunately, it never came. The cats all seemed pretty sleepy, so maybe they had been jumping earlier in the day. We watched some kittens and petted some cats, but that was it. The end of the day was a bit disappointing, but the day turned out to be much more fun than I had expected.

I grabbed some Indian street food for dinner back in Nyaungshwe, which was more like oil soup with bits of beef, then packed up and got ready for my bus ride to Bagan early the next morning.

7/14 Inle Lake Trek Day 2

7/14/2013: We were back on the trail fairly early, as the village seems to go to sleep rather early and then wakes up soon after dawn. The night before, the family that owns the house we stayed in slept in the adjacent room to ours, and we had all heard the grandmother talking in her sleep and we all had a good laugh. She didn’t remember a thing.

The hike took us past a big monastery where we could hear little monks reciting Buddhist scripture. We had one more big ridgeline to cross before starting the descent towards Inle Lake. We met up with a bigger road, one that can support cars, and apparently it had been built for access to a planned power plant and cement factory. We came across a smaller village as we continued to ascend, and they were in the middle of their annual procession up to the top of the mountain to pay respects to their ancestors and make offerings of food. It was a long line of people in colorful clothes, maybe 50 or 75 people in all. Many of the women had big plates of food balanced on their heads, and some of the men were carrying large drums, others with big crates of potatoes or other vegetables. One man offered a potato to Stef as he passed by, and he didn't know what to do with it. We waited for the procession to pass and it felt like two different worlds colliding. Many of the hill-tribes in Myanmar still practice some mixture of animism and Buddhism, where they believe that certain animals are spirits and they worship their ancestors.

We reached the top of the pass at around 4,500 feet, high enough and cool enough for pine trees to grow, then dropped 1,500 feet down to a long inlet on the west side of the lake. The other side of the pass was much drier and hotter, and reminded me more of the New Mexico landscape. We arrived at a little village along a canal that leads into the lake and had some fried noodles and celebrated a successful expedition. We hopped in a long-tail boat and cruised across the lake to Nyaungshwe, on the northern edge of the lake. Along the way we passed people fishing from dug-out canoes, as well as other people practicing the traditional fishing technique that Inle Lake is known for - standing on the back end of the canoe and handling a net while using their leg to operate a wooden paddle. The sun was shining and the surrounding mountains were beautiful. Inle Lake was a nice, clean, cool relief from the rest of Southeast Asia.

Photo album: https://picasaweb.google.com/108933817613007660268/20130714InleLakeTrekDay2?authuser=0&feat=directlink

 

7/13 Inle Lake Trek Day 1

7/13/2013: At my hotel I arranged for a two day, one night trek from Kalaw to Inle Lake. Inle Lake is a popular tourist destination between Yangon and Mandalay and a little to the east. It is higher in elevation, so nice and cool, and is home to many different hill-tribes. Two days of hiking is not enough to get from Kalaw to Inle Lake, so I was driven part-way and met up with a trekking group that had left Kalaw the day before and were just starting their second day. This was nice because it made my trip cheaper and I also had some companions that spoke English instead of just the local guide.

There were two incredibly tall Dutch guys named Steph and Vitse and an English couple - Vic and Matt. Steph and Vitse were really getting stared at a lot - Steph was probably 6'5, and Vitse around 6'8. I'd guess that Myanmar is one of the shorter countries in the world. Everyone was very friendly and had really enjoyed their first day on the trail. Our guide was Uzaw, a 60 year old Burmese guy from Kalaw that has been guiding for fifteen years.

The hike wasn't really in the wilderness, but more through farmland and villages throughout the rolling hills outside of Inle Lake. The scenery was beautiful, and it felt like another world seeing how the local people lived. Uzaw was pointing out all the different crops and explaining how people make cement, etc. Whenever we got to a village, he would explain what hill-tribe it was and some of their customs. Children would come running, knowing that Uzaw gives them candy, and then some would get scared and run away when they saw us. These villages all had their own local language and customs, and in some of them, marrying outside of the tribe meant being ostracized from the village. All of the people were very smiley and friendly, although there was no way of communicating with them. People still typically wore "longyis," but the women typically wore some colorful scarves around their heads. Most people were out in the surrounding fields working on their crops. 

A hill-tribe village

We stopped for lunch in one village and were seated on the floor in a room upstairs. We had the same cook for each meal. He would cook for us in whatever house Uzaw picked in the village, then clean up and drive ahead on his motorbike to the next village and get the next meal ready. We joked about the term "trekking," which no one uses in regular conversation at home. I thought it sounded a bit more grandiose than what we were actually doing, and we debated about how to classify hikes, treks, and expeditions. For the rest of the trip, we were on any one of those three types of trips, depending on the current conditions (i.e. drinking a warm beer bumped the trip up to an expedition). A little girl, around maybe 10 years old, was hanging out in our lunch room with us and made a "paper flower" for Vic, and was practicing other origami (like "fortune tellers"). I only know how to make a cup in origami, so I made her a cup with some scrap paper I had, but she didn't seem very impressed.

The hike continued through the afternoon, passing over ridges, then dropping back into farmed valleys, crossing paths with local people along the way and smiling and waving. We eventually reached the only gap in a steep ridgeline where a bigger village had formed, and Uzaw told us we'd be sleeping there that night. 

Our sleeping arrangement for the night

Complete with electricity

We got settled into our sleeping area - an upstairs room in a wooden house, sleeping on straw mats on the floor. The little kids from downstairs were curiously watching us and eventually ended up playing with all of our electronics. Dinner was delicious, and then we headed down to the main road where there was a little shop with tables and chairs and we drank some beers before calling it a night.

Photo album: https://picasaweb.google.com/108933817613007660268/20130713InleLakeTrekDay1?authuser=0&feat=directlink