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Mandalay & Bagan, May 2018Mandalay & Bagan, May 2018
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A 38-day adventure by Erik Read more
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  • TravelerMandalay & Bagan, May 2018
    Day 5

    Popa

    May 25, 2018 in Myanmar ⋅ ⛅ 18 °C

    We managed a bit more of a leisurely start this morning, only 0730, and had time for a bit of breakfast before we were collected by our car to take us on the roughly 50km drive to Popa.
    For those who have never heard of Popa, and I hadn’t before we started looking at coming here, it is a monastery in the mountains that sits at the top of a volcanic plug, it has pretty much vertical sides all the way round and there is a staircase that winds round the outside to get to the top. A small village has grown up around the base of it, no doubt initially to look after the needs of the monks but now probably as much for the tourists as the monks. Visually it is quite spectacular. It’s also a welcome few degrees cooler than Bagan.
    There are a couple of different entrances you can use to start your ascent, our driver directed us towards one that was flanked by a couple of painted stone elephants but was still less obvious than the main one, which most people use and where the majority of the lower down monkeys hang out. There are quite a lot of monkeys and they are quite bold, running up to people and grabbing stuff, one tried to grab my bottle of water but soon realised that was a mistake. Now with there being quite a lot of monkeys there is quite a lot of monkey poo, much of which seemed to be on the steps and the flat bits between the steps. But there are guys whose job it is to clean up so apart from the smell it wasn’t too bad. That is until after just a short way when it was time for the socks and shoes to come off and go in a locker (to prevent the monkeys stealing them) and for us to continue in bare feet. If I were to say that Tanya was not happy at having to walk in / around the monkey poo that would be an understatement, but we pushed on.
    Now about those steps, I was sure that I’d read one of the quotes that there were about 260, give or take a few, depending on which route you took and I had told Tanya as much. Well it was quickly apparent to me that there were quite a few more than that, 812 to be precise - I counted them on the way down. I don’t think Tanya would have made the ascent if she’d known that, I think I would have been dispatched to take photos and she would have retired to the nearest coffee shop or bar. But I didn’t tell her and she made it, I think she was quite glad she did.
    Needless to say we didn’t race to the top and every time we stopped we seemed to get approached by local people asking us to have a photo taken with them. It’s happened at other locations while we’ve been in Myanmar, we don’t mind but it does seem a bit strange that you might end up posing for someone else’s holiday photos. It’s mainly ladies that have asked us so I did suggest to Tanya that perhaps it was my photo they really wanted but they asked her as well because they didn’t want her to feel left out, I can’t put what she said in reply as persons under the age of 18 might be reading but I could perhaps summarise it as, “don’t be silly!!!”.
    The view from the top was well worth the climb and the descent was a whole lot easier than the ascent, then it was back in the car for the journey back to the hotel. We got back around 1230 giving Tanya plenty of time to scrub the monkey poo off of her feet and have a couple of beers before we went for a bit of late lunch.    Read more

  • TravelerMandalay & Bagan, May 2018
    1
    Day 5

    Popa, exta photos 2

    May 25, 2018 in Myanmar ⋅ ☀️ 22 °C
  • TravelerMandalay & Bagan, May 2018
    Day 5

    Sunset Cruise (and return to Mandalay)

    May 25, 2018 in Myanmar ⋅ ⛅ 27 °C

    So to round off our day today I had booked a sunset cruise on the Irrawaddy River, which is the original ‘road’ in Kipling’s Road To Mandalay and I’d booked a private one because it wasn’t much more expensive than a group one and you never know if you’re going to get lumbered with an idiot on a group one. It probably sounds a lot grander than it was, which was something similar to a large wooden long tail boat. We had to clamber down the banks of the river and walk along a plank to get aboard but then we were off and spent a very pleasant hour and a half or so watching the sun go down and keeping an eye on the weather, it was rather blustery and we had a bit of a sandstorm going on to our left and a big rain storm off to our right, fortunately neither hit and all we got was just a little sand. Anyway, photos duly taken of everything we returned to the hotel, noting all the temples and pagodas we hadn’t visited yesterday. Another visit is definitely in order.
    That was going to be it, after writing this yesterday I had intended just to post it when we got to the Mandalay hotel and some decent WiFi (because the WiFi in Bagan had stopped working) and call it a day until we ventured out again tomorrow. However, the bus trip back to Mandalay has prompted me to write more. It was a different company to our bus trip a few days ago and it was an older bus, same type of bus, just older. Which wouldn’t have been a problem but the air conditioning didn’t work properly, well it didn’t work at all - it blew out warm air and our allocated seats were broken. We thought it was just my seat to start with, which was stuck in recline and leant in towards Tanya’s so that I couldn’t use it without rolling in to her. This wouldn’t have been so bad if we were in a cooler climate or the air conditioning was working but as it was it wasn’t pleasant. So the only thing for it was for me to sit forward in my seat and sit as close to the side of the bus as I could, it didn’t help matters that on the aisle side of the seats was one of those old fashioned fold down extra seats that you sometimes find on older buses. I also opened the window to get a bit of air in, I wasn’t the only one doing this. As if things weren’t bad enough as it was, apart from us and one French couple the bus was full of Chinese.
    Anyway, after about an hour and a half we reached our first stop and i had a chance to see just how broken our seats were - they were held together at the back with bungee cords hence the leaning in and supported underneath by a large metal toolbox. I had hatched a plan to move to a vacant single seat at the front before we set off leaving Tanya with the double seat, which would be okay for one. Unfortunately my plan was thwarted by one of the Chinese who got there before me, having moved from a perfectly serviceable seat. There was nothing for it but to move to the little fold down seat for the rest of the journey, at least Tanya was able to get some sleep, although I discovered that the back of the fold down seat was broken as well so I still couldn’t lean back. Oh well, all part of the experience again 😎.    Read more

  • TravelerMandalay & Bagan, May 2018
    Day 7

    Lazy Day

    May 27, 2018 in Myanmar ⋅ ⛅ 26 °C

    Today we had planned to go off to Mandalay Hill, have a wander up to the top and then have a look at some of the pagodas that are dotted around the area. However while I was waiting for Tanya to get ready for breakfast I read up a bit on it and it turns out that although it’s only 240 or 267m high there are 1729 steps if you go up from the main entrance, just try and imagine the look on Tanya’s face when I told her that and what she might have said to me. And that according to Travelfish (a travel site for Asia that I have found, which gives good honest reviews and information) there are quite a lot of stray dogs in the area, which means that when you take off your shoes and socks to make the journey up the stairs (which you have to) you end up walking in dog poo. Now over the last few days Tanya has walked in bat poo and monkey poo but she absolutely drew the line at dog poo and to be honest I don’t blame her.
    After a bit more research, reading maps and the like we decided to book a one day trip to visit the old capitals of Myanmar that are around the outside of the city for tomorrow and to book a half day sightseeing in Mandalay tour for the day after. We decided that as Tanya had been so traumatised by yesterdays bus journey and that a storm had kept us awake for a couple of hours during the night that what was really needed was a bit of R&R. So after breakfast we booked the trips with the front desk then went off for a coffee and to make plans for a restful day. As it’s so hot here Tanya thought we might have a look for a mall to mooch around so asked Mr Google what was available. Well obviously we discounted the two from our first visit here but something promising across the other side of town with ok reviews came up so we booked a tuktuk and set off, giving me the chance to capture some more scenes of life in Mandalay. Tanya ended up having to give the driver directions but in the end we got there only to find that the mall was in fact a department store and a rather small one at that, although it is probably the biggest single store we’ve seen here. But we’d made the effort and it seemed rude not to at least have a quick look round the three small floors of groceries, kitchenware, crockery, hardware, gardening stuff, tools and various other odds and ends that made up quite an eclectic mix. Then a short time later we were back in another tuktuk returning to the hotel. One of the good things about all this tuktuk travel is that we haven’t seen anything that we might be missing.
    So for the rest of the afternoon Tanya caught up on her sleep whilst I watched a bit of TV in the lounge area of our suite 😁    Read more

  • TravelerMandalay & Bagan, May 2018
    Day 8

    Outside Mandalay

    May 28, 2018 in Myanmar ⋅ ⛅ 32 °C

    Today we had booked a day trip through the hotel to go and see some of the sites and old capitals of Myanmar that lie just a few kilometres out the city of Mandalay at Amarapura, Sagaing City and Inwa or Awa as the locals call it.
    We had a nice car and driver all to ourselves and started off with a few temples on the outskirts of Mandalay and it was clear from the outset that our driver knew his stuff because he was telling us how long we had at each place. Fortunately we don’t dawdle so we came in under time at each. We then went to Mahaghandaron Monastery getting there in time to see the monks meal procession. Now I’m told they only eat once a day but I saw the amount of rice going in to each bowl and I’d struggle to eat just that in one session, let alone with the other bits and pieces that get served up so perhaps once a day is enough. After that we squeezed in a couple more temples before lunch.
    Ah yes lunch, we had a choice of Chinese or Myanmar, Tanya wanted Chinese but I thought that as our driver said that both restaurants were very good we should try the Myanmar one. After all Chinese food is quite easy to get in most places but Myanmar is the only place we have found Myanmar food. Well the short version is I was wrong. There is a perfectly good reason that Myanmar cuisine is not renowned anywhere else and that is that it’s just not that good. We had a chicken curry that was just too oily and had very little taste, the rice was ok and with it we had some kind of fried green veg that was surprisingly ok, some purple beans that were just ok, some fish and tomato thing that was definitely not ok, some chilli paste that Tanya reckoned was okay, a tamarind soup that reminded me a bit of something I couldn’t place but again was not very good and some raw veg which was ok. So next time someone gives me a choice between Myanmar food and some other type of cuisine I’ll be going for the other one no matter what it is, sorry Myanmar. I should say though that the staff at the restaurant were lovely and couldn’t have been more accommodating to a couple of foreign visitors.
    After the ordeal of lunch was over we made our way to the ferry over to Inwa and got a pony and trap for our trip around the area, where amongst other things we saw the Bagaya Monestary - a large wooden monastery dating from 1834, where apparently in the past abbots were involved in occult practices, the Nanmyint Palace Tower, or leaning tower as it is also known and The Aungmyae Bosan Monastery. As you can see from the photos we had been doing pretty well with the weather, especially as thunder storms had been forecast, but it caught up with us just as we were leaving the last monastery and we got absolutely soaked on the trip back to the ferry landing. Fortunately our driver was a lovely old chap who let us shelter in his house until the downpour died down a bit and the ferry could make the crossing, he even lent us an umbrella to get to the ferry.
    We then had one final stop at U Bein’s Bridge, the longest wooden bridge in the world at 1.2km before heading back to the hotel. Normally people hang around for sunset at the bridge but what with the cloud and rain it was pretty dark anyway so we gave it a miss.
    Ever so glad we booked a tour as even though we enjoy independent travel there is no way we could have seen even half the tings we saw today without the local knowledge of our driver. Looking forward to our half day tour of Mandalay tomorrow and might even try to squeeze in a trip to Mingun City - another old capital a few kilometres outside of Mandalay.    Read more

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