Mandalay

UPDATE: Pictures are now available in our gallery!

Mandalay is over 600 km north of Yangon and totally unaffected by the cyclone. We made it as usual on an overnight bus. Although very long, the bus ride was bearable mostly I think to air conditioning and an easy going style of the driver. All in all it was a piece of cake in comparison to some of our other trips in the region.

In the morning we arrived to a bus station outside town which looks more like a town lined with houses and innumerable amount of buses run by different companies . How one makes sense of it is a mystery. In fact it is just like in Yangon where we took a taxi to the station and the taxi driver after 15 minutes of roaming around found our bus. In Myanmar we tend to book our hotels in advance and get a pick-up to the hotel - makes life easier after a long bus ride - the reason why pick-ups are readily available is very simple. Already during the ride to the hotel we learned that we were the first tourists since two months in our hotel (one of the more popular in better times). Together with our fellow co-travellers - a couple from Australia who we met on our plane from Bangkok, we have however probably started some better times as everyday since we arrived at least one person additionally checked in to our hotel.

Already the first days we ventured to climb up Mandalay Hill it became clear to us that this is the land of Pagodas. They are just ubiquitous and huge majority of them kept in very good shape (clearly supported by the junta as there are always pictures of the military visiting that particular pagoda). For the second day we had an organized full day program. We hired a mini pick-up taxi (car dating back to the sixties) and drove to visit three former capitals of Myanmar which are in the vicinity of Mandalay. This country has always had a tendency to shift capitals (sometimes as often as every 10 years) that the fact of moving the current capital by the ruling junta to Naypyitaw should not come as a surprise. Though I have never heard of a capital out of reach to anybody as is the case here...

In order to get Inwe (one of the old capitals) we had to take a boat and a horse carriage. There was basically no other way of going around the sites. Among one of the site we visited was a very old wooden monastery in which a single lonely monk lived and was heading a small school for kids. There we learned the Burmese alphabet which for me consists of a set of smiles in different shades (very cute!). On the way back our guide took us to a place where he gives English classes. It was in fact probably a home of the students. The group was very diverse both in terms of age and advancement. In fact they did not have any language books to learn from, just their notebooks to write the phrases into. We offered to send books but the probability that they would reach them would be very small. Anyway everyone was extremely excited to converse with us and we enjoyed it and the sugar cane drink very much.

In the next days we have visited lots of other interesting places including the Manadalay Glass Palace. Although it has been restored very poorly it was amazing for us to see the pictures and main characters of the Glass Palace book by Amitav Ghosh. It was really for some reason surreal.

We have also been lucky to see the workshops were marble Buddha statues of gigantic proportions were made. In fact the artifacts were wonderful and cheap and we were tempted to buy a 150 kg marble lion but could not figure out how to get him out of the country :)

On other occasion we were taken to goldsmiths were gold is flattened into very thin sheets (by hammer by a guy who does not need a workout for his body). The sheets so thin that they glue themselves to any surface one put them onto (usually Buddha statues here). We bought some sheets since they are also very good addition to drinks.

We had also the pleasure of visiting the famous banned Moustache Brothers who spent years in prison camps for their politically incorrect performances. We met personally two of them. They still cannot perform in public but they do shows at home without costumes for foreigners. Unfortunately they did not perform for us as they were in the middle of preparations for sending rice they gathered for the cyclone Nagris survivors.

All in all we spent quite a few days here and once we were about to embark on the 14 hour boat journey to Bagan, traditionally one of us got food poisoned (there is hardly any electricity here - it is worse than in Nepal and I believe the food storage conditions are terrible). This time Rita got sick so we had to wait two days for her to recover before moving on...