Day 167: Hiking Out, Overnight Bus

Up very early this morning, literally up at cock crow as they used to say. The roosters woke us at about 4:30am, and once they start there's basically no getting back to sleep. We dozed for probably another 2 hours, but were up by 6:30 having dried granola for breakfast and getting ready for the trip out.

We left the village by around 6:50am and started hiking, again across beautiful rolling countryside. This time it was bathed in a beautiful early morning light, with mists drifting around and plenty of animals as well. It really felt like walking through the Shire from Lord of the Rings, as if Frodo and friends were going to peep out from behind a hedge at any moment.

We walked for an hour or so before we'd almost finished the trail and Byron arrived in his truck. We'd arranged to meet at the trailhead around 8am, but since he had other customers arriving in town at 8:30 I think he was a little nervous we'd be running late and so proceeded to head down and find us.

In we hopped and drove the 30 minutes or so back to town, where we stopped at his favourite Shan noodle restaurant for breakfast. Unfortunately the noodle counter was closed (probably all the workers were hung over from New Year celebrations), but the chicken soup and grilled bread replacement was just as good! The other customers turned out to be a trio of Australian guys from Perth, so we chatted to them for a bit before we all headed back to Byron's house/office.

He organised some bus tickets for us to get to Kalaw, and we in turn entertained his 8 year old - very talkative, especially on the subjects of Lego and Star Wars, and even more so about Lego Star Wars!

Not wanting to wear out our welcome, we took our leave from Byron at about 10:30 and headed into town, to the same bakery we'd been to a couple of days previous. It was clean and comfortable with decent food, so we sat there for about 4 hours eating, getting work done and entertaining ourselves.

Just after 2pm we headed to the bus station in time for our 3pm bus. It was going to be a long ride - from here south to Tsipaw, then down to Mandalay before finally arriving in Kalaw at 4am. Bus was semi-comfortable; seats as usual not quite wide enough, but it was only half full for the first couple of hours down to Tsipaw.

Lots of people got on in Tsipaw so that the bus was full, the sun set, and we were off on our long voyage. The worst part of it was that the air-conditioning was set to "Siberian winter" for some unknown reason - maximum coldness and full blast. Everyone on board was rugged up with beanies, scarves, big parkas and so on, and they handed out woolen blankets to every passenger as well. Seems like madness to me - maybe just turn the air-con down a little bit?

I managed to fix it a little by blocking the vents with tissues, but it was still fairly cold. A couple of stops for dinner and midnight snacks; one at about 9pm and then again around 12:30am, but otherwise the trip was uneventful. Shandos slept for most of it, I dozed and listened to music as I didn't quite have enough space to sleep properly.

Finally around 4:15am we arrived in Kalaw, a small hill town that basically caters entirely to tourists doing trekking down to Inle Lake. It was cold but not freezing, and we managed the 5-minute walk to our hotel pretty easily. We'd actually booked to stay two nights, of which this was the "first" night, so we were able to head straight upstairs, freshen up and then crash by around 5am. Very long day!Read more