Mingalarwar Myamar! - The road to Mandalay

We arrived at noon in Mandalay and were immediately confronted at Immigration to a large billboard of advertisements celebrating the upcoming Sea Games hosted by Myanmar this December. This is a kind of Olympics for the South East Asia countries, e.g. Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore. There were 35 athletic events with numerous countries participating. Later we could see both participants and spectators at the bigger cities enjoying themselves. 

We hopped on a shared taxi (4000K per person) and drove us to the lovely “Golden Mandalay Inn Hotel”, close to Palace. The host family was wonderful and we can really recommend this Hotel to everybody! They were a family owned business which had been started by a couple and they have since handed it over to their children.

 They organized things for you and never jacked up the price like a lot of other hotels did.  We immediately set off to see the Palace which was unfortunately burned down during WW2. Much of the area is forbidden to foreigners since the army still occupies the grounds.

We walked to the palace and enjoyed the afternoon sun in there.

We then climbed the Mandalay Hill and enjoyed the sunset, followed by two motorcycle taxis got us back to our hotel. We decided to have dinner at a local beer garden. The atmosphere was great, beer was good, but the food was not the best. Everyone looked at Shelly since there were no other women to be seen there. It was a very interesting experience:

The next day we rented a car (38000K the whole day) and we drove to the deserted cities of Amarapura, In-Wa, Sagaing and the bridge of U-Bein. Early in the morning we started at the bridge, which is the longest teakwood bridge in the world, build in 1784. It was wonderful, strolling over the wooden blanks and watching the fishermen and the peasant with their boxes, plowing the fields:

Like always, you can buy everything from the local hawkers, but one was really unusual and shocking: a woman had three cages crammed full of birds and owls (!!!). You can give her money and she releases a bird (small bird 1000K, owl 5000K) which is supposed to bring you luck. I actually thought of buying all the birds and owls to set them free but then I thought that would only encourage her to capture more of them.  It was pretty strange and left me with a haunting feeling and not a lucky feeling…

On the other side was a nice local village, where you can see monks gathering their food donation, markets (later I strongly believed that Myanmar is just ONE market, as you can see always people selling whatever you can imagine…), school kids in green/white school uniforms (boys in the traditional longy), motorcycles, rickshaws and people, just carrying unbelievable loads of chicken, sack of grains, straw, bamboo…. It is really a different world!

Coming back from the bridge we visited a monastery, but it was more like a zoo, so we quickly drove to the first deserted city In-Wa. We took the boat over the river and chartered a horse cart for one hour (6000K). Between the villages inside the jungle you could see the old temple of this former capital of Burma. We finally talked the horse driver into taking us to a nice place to eat. It was so wonderful and cheap.  We then returned to our driver who took us to a Buddhist University and then to two more wonderful temples in the hills. What was amazing is you could see where this maze of temples used to connect throughout the hillside even though it has long since been broken apart with the modern infrastructure.

That night we had a very nice dinner at the “Green Elephant” with Linda and Rens, a nice Dutch couple, who also were planning to go to Pagan and Inle Lake. At breakfast Rens gave me a money belt as a present since mine was broken and because we had lost already so many things along the way. It was very sweet! 

(Remark 1.1.2014: it served me very well until today. I even had to repair it once again in Mandalay after our tough Mykiynta trip. The tailor wouldn’t accept money so it looks like people are trying to take care of me. 

After our Mykiynta excursion, we planned to come back to our sweet home away from home hotel here in Mandalay and then book a boat down to Pagan for our next adventure. I decided to rest while Shelly took off on a bike through the city.  She said it was hard to figure out the rules of the road.  She was stopped twice by little old men who spoke perfect English, one told her not to go to the Jade store and the other one told her she was driving too fast.  She definitely had the feeling that she was being watched.  Close to the end of her bike ride she got to watch the girl soccer team from Myanmar win their game on the big screen with many of the other inhabitants of the city.  The crazy thing about the screen is that it was at an intersection of two major roads and not a quiet square somewhere where everyone could just sit and enjoy the game while drinking beer.  Instead everyone watched the game but had to watch out for cars as well. We both hope that our laundry will be finished so we can get our stuff packed by tomorrow where we will get on a boat and head to Pagan.