Asia Tour - Mandalay - Burma

More festival going today - it’s even hotter so I’m thankful for it.

Again I’ve been targeted by the locals which is welcomed with this heat - more photos, more shaking hands etc hahahahaha.

I think the locals where a bit braver today as more of them come over, it there was a new development today... I was asked to hold babies for photos which was awful as I don’t like babies. However I was polite enough and went along with it. The people seemed to love it and to be fair they where extremely polite and really grateful that I held their kids etc.

Today was also super sobering. I knew Burma was not particularly well off and most people live in some form of poverty like most of Asia but here and Cambodia seem to be the worse for it.

I was being soaked by a little girl, no older than 4 when her water gun broke, she was understandably upset and she ran back to her mum to fix the gun. It was broke, unrepairable and she started crying and I felt awful, so I went up to the girl and gave her some money from my pocket to buy a new one. I only gave her 10kyat which is roughly £5 - her parents started crying and tried to give me the money back. It was £5 - that’s it. I could of dropped it and never noticed. I was insistent that they keep it to buy her a new gun (turns out a new gun is like 50p) but even people who where looking seemed shocked by it. It was nice to make that families day but I was surprised by the overwhelming reaction by it. But it just highlights how good we have it back home - the sad reality is that £5 to most of the worlds population is a huge amount of money to just be given.

I was half expecting more people to come over and beg for money when I saw the reaction - but not a single person came over wanting or begging for money - just to say hello and take pictures.

Overall very cool sobering dayRead more