Inle lake

From Kalaw we moved out of the hills back to the lowlands - another few changes of scenery! At one stage I could have sworn the countryside looked like England with patchwork fields and hedges - an illusion spoilt by some of the hedges being bamboo at closer sight, but you could see why the British Colonials felt at home!

There was also a lot of cabbage - it was harvest time so every pick up truck was filled to the gills of cabbage - it must be the entire countries supply grown here as there wasn't a huge cabbage theme in any restaurant we went to...

We managed to chase the 5 day market from Kalaw to Pindaya so I got to see a lot of the wares (surprisingly few cabbages!). Here we stopped for lunch as well as a visit to the Shwe Oo Min natural cave pagoda. 

At last count there were 1098 Buddhas (not including 'Buddha images') in the cave... This calls for another montage...

Meditation cave

The legend of Pindaya is that seven princesses were bathing in the lake and took shelter in the cave during a storm - only to be imprisoned by the evil spider. Luckily a passing prince managed to kill the spider and rescue the princesses.

View from the caves

Cutest little boy!

Barb relaxing by the fruit stall

Next up on arrival at Nyaungshwe (our base for Inle Lake) was wine tasting! This helps to continue my mission to wine taste around the world! We got tuk tuks up to Red Mountain Estate for a sunset wine tasting - and tasty it was too! Our favourite was the Cab Sav.

Alison and Barb getting into the spirit!

The view from the winery at sunset over Inle Lake

The next day we spent on the lake - almost literally when our boat broke down! We were in the long tail boats with the one size fits all motor (they use the same motors for tractors, water pumps and boats - you name it and they can use these motors for it!).

The girls boat

On our way across the lake we were lucky enough to see the fisherman doing the traditional leg rowing. Rowing with their leg wrapped around the oar allows their hands to be free to pay out the nets from the boat - the traditional way of catching fish was to snare them in the basket and then spear them, but now all the fisherman use nets and scare the fish into them using the flat of their oar smacked on the surface of the water.

On the other side of the lake we zoomed up the canals to Inthein - another truly spectacular site of hundreds of pagodas - the old and spooky and new and shiny (another montage....)

Old atmospheric pagodas - little bit tomb raider with trees & plants growing out of them

Shiny shiny - new pagodas

The markets nearby were also interesting - the local tribes wear very colourful longi which were on display for sale:

We visited the local silk & lotus weaving and cigar workshops in huts on stilts on the lake, where I had the opportunity to apply some of the local face paint, made from ground sandal wood. 

Not as good as the local women's make up!

Village houses on stilts.

We then returned back through the floating tomato gardens on the side of the lake - these apparently are made from piles of floating weeds and are anchored with bamboo stilts at either end.

After Inle we returned to Yangon for our final night as a group - another great G Adventure - thanks all!

Hill station Kalaw

,On the way to Kalaw we stopped at a road side stall demonstrating the making of local products. The oxen powered grinder, here demonstrated by Irene, is to make peanut oil - a stable of Myanmar cuisine. The ox gets to eat the leftover peanuts when the oil has all been pressed out!

We also tried the palm juice that they boil into the palm sugar and make the most amazing sweets out of - some with coconut and some flavoured with tamarind - a real sugar rush!

Snack time Myanmar style - fermented tea leaves with various toasted beans, nuts and seeds served with sweet tea. Note the beautiful lacquerware box they are served in - traditionally made near Bagan.

Next it was off up to the hills. We went from the flooded plains of Bagan through drier areas where the local people have to carry their water home, back into lush jungle like foliage up the hills. We were looking forward to enjoying the coolness up there, but first we had to stop and visit the spiritual home of the Nats up Mt Popa.

Yup it's up that hill (well volcanic plug)....the one in the clouds

Only 777 steps stood in our way - oh and some monkeys (we were warned they would try and nick things - especially food!), so off we went - nothing to stop a good sweat!

Some one lost a sprite...

Looking back down from the top!

Nat spirit statues - the Burmese worship these as well as following Buddha - a timely donation to the right spirit will help you with your prayers - however when they are answered you need to go back and say thank you with the right gift, else the spirits will curse you!

We didn't see any yeti on our climb (slow stepping hermit monks) :(

When we arrived at Kalaw - an old hill station back in British colonial times - a few of us decided to try the local $1 rum - it went down well!

The next morning we were up to hike to a local village for lunch. On the way we saw a lot of different crops being farmed - the area is known for its mandarins and fruit as well as different types of rice depending on whether the paddies were hillside or by the river in the valley.

Lots of Myanmar people are farmers - 75% or so - there are lots of different tribes with their own identities and different crops and dishes, that are traditional to grow - some of these dependant on the tribal location (eg rice needs a lot of water, so rice production is concentrated in some parts, other areas like Shan state have noodles as their traditional meal).

We stopped for tea and beans and a dress up session halfway and then continued to a different village to have lunch.

Charlie and me in traditional dress.

How it should be worn?!

Typical village house in the mist - the walls are made of woven leaves.

Kids opposite - they were waving at us.

Local school supported by the Rural Developement Society 

Lunchtime at the school

View of the village in the mist

At lunch we met the charismatic Tommy Aung Ezdani. He is incredibly interesting - he stood as a politician in the 1990 elections alongside Aung San Suu Kyi and they won. However the ruling junta refused to recognise the result and threw the elected politicians into jail - Tommy was there for one year. His background includes a degree in international conflict management from Birmingham university (he won a scholarship to go there) and he is now the executive coordinator of the Rural Development Society which operates around Kalaw to benefit the local tribes.

Aung San - hero of Burmese independence, although he died before he saw it - & Aung San Suu Kyi his daughter, who was under house arrest for 15 years and even missed the death of her husband as she didn't want to risk leaving the country in case the ruling junta didn't allow her back in. She is now out of house arrest and working with the government on their path to democracy.

Tommy is at the back with the orange head gear (turban?! Not sure what the locals call it!)

He is very inspiring - the local villages have better schools, clean water supplies and even libraries because of the work the RDS does. He runs an 'orphanage' in Kalaw town, however not all the kids are orphans - some parents send children to Tommy to ensure they are looked after if anything happens to the parents (there are still some tribes in skirmishes with the government).

When we visited the orphange it looked more like a boarding school. The buildings include school rooms, a computer room and living quarters. The kids were very shy to talk to us, even though they were being taught English, however we saw some traditional costumes from their tribes and they demonstrated traditional dancing and singing (before going into a rendition of One Direction's 'You don't know you're beautiful'! teenagers are the same everywhere!). We reciprocated with Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Heads shoulders knees and toes - need to practise my karaoke skills sober!

The Boat to Beautiful Bagan

The boat ride down the Ayarwaddy river to Bagan took all day - a very leisurely pursuit (Mark Twain would have approved), alternating between napping in the cool of the breeze downstairs, replacing lost sweat with beer in the cafe and waving at splashing kids as the boat cruised past them. We also got to see 3 teams lining up for a dragon boat race - but we missed the race :(

When we arrived at our hotel in Bagan we rewarded ourselves with a dip in the pool with a beer - to refresh and revive before attempting to hit up as many of the 3000 pagodas in Bagan as possible. 

Bagan used to be a UNESCO site - justifiably, it's gobsmacking! However the Myanmar government was not willing to stick to UNESCO guidelines/rules on preserving and restoring the often crumbling pagodas. A lot of pagodas are covered in electrical wires tacked up willy nilly and have been 'restored' using concrete completely unsympathetically, so UNESCO removed the designation.

A few temples we saw had the hallmarks of good restoration - the UNESCO lead teams did some good work, but even then they didn't get to finish their work as the government only gave them 9 month visas.... My good friend T would be raging!!

Next day temple mania commenced and we managed to visit 10 temples with our guide, so many pagodas, so little time! We must have seen at least 30 Buddhas also - so thats why most of the pictures included are montages!

After a brief siesta in the heat of the day - we were back out to see some more - at the last one of the day (where we waited in vain for sunset) lots of cheeky kids saw us (& our wallets) coming and raced up the temple after us. There were 15 of us up the pagoda and about 10 touts - only space for about 20 people max so the kids were practically hanging off the brick work!

The following day 4 of us took electric bikes out to tour the temples ourselves - Alison was a speed freak, soon a speck on the horizon! We all had minor mishaps - accidentally hitting the accelerator when parking Alison managed to run both me and Howard over, Charlie lost control of the very heavy bike walking it down a slope, hit the accelerator and got dragged a metre - the result was gravel rash :(

Stephen on his sporty little number - apparently it's red not pink....

The basic rules of the road were to hoot if you wanted to overtake and to give way to things bigger than you or VIP motorcades! It was very hot out in the sun so we had to stop in the afternoon for a cooling pool beer or two... See a theme developing?! The local beers Myanmar and Mandalay were very tasty!

We didn't actually see the pagoda that was mentioned on this sign - not sure if that's a good or bad thing! 

That evening we met up with the majority of the group to get dinner out of New Bagan where we'd been staying and then had a temples at night tour on the way back - I was glad the power cut didn't last so we could see them!

Yangon & Golden Rock

After meeting my G Adventures group at the hotel in Yangon on the Saturday night, our first activity was to visit Shwedagon pagoda - which is the most sacred site in the country - on Sunday morning.

In pretty much most of downtown Yangon you can't miss this immense stupa - the city's defining image and a symbol of Burmese identity for 2500 years. We took an elevator up to it, but you get more 'merit' by walking up the long covered steps, so this is what the locals tended to do (bare foot of course - no shoes allowed in pagodas in this region!)

The stupa is built on a hill, enshrining the hair relics of the Buddha and has grown in size as gold leaf was added to the outside. It's now 98m tall and has more than 53 metric tonnes of gold!

Inside there is not just the large stupa but 82 other buildings - smaller stupas, temples and statues representing the guardian animals for each day of the week. There are 8 of these in total as Wednesday is split into 2 - elephant with tusks and elephants without tusks. Each person would make offerings to the statue that represents the day of the week they are born - with Wednesday morning and afternoon being different.

Can't remember which day this one was...

When we went it was raining and being Sunday lots of local people were visiting in their days off - so trying to get a picture without umbrellas in it was a challenge that some of the group were determined to try, not sure if they succeeded though! Walking bare foot in the rain made the ceramic tiles very slippery and after an hour there we all had pruned toes!

So a little education on pagodas for you - pagoda refers to a religious site generically, however the focus of the site can then be either a solid monument, which is a stupa, or hollow, which is a temple. Sometimes the main stupa or temple is surrounded with ancillary stupas or temples. The Buddhist belief in Myanmar is that paying for a stupa or temple will bring merit for the next life and for Shwedagon this is the out holy place in which to gain the merit - hence the 82 buildings surrounding it and also the accumulation of gold on the main stupa (gold leaf is commonly used as an offering around Myanmar - more on this later!)

After the stupa we headed out of Yangon up to Mount Kyaiktiyo, stopping briefly at the Second World War cemetery and monument on the way. This honoured the British and local groups who fought and fell in the region during the war as Burma was under colonial rule at the time.

When we got to the town of Kyaikto we had to transfer to a truck with benches (padded for the tourists, not for the locals!) to make the trip up to the 'base camp' at Kinpun. From here is either pay more to get the truck to the top, hire a sedan chair (!) or walk up the winding path. A few of us elected to walk and we got wet! Not from the rain, which thankfully held off, but just from sweat - boy it was humid!!

Truck shot!

The reason to come here though? To see the Golden Rock at the top of the mountain - the third most sacred place in Myanmar. This rock balances precariously on a ledge at the top of the mountain and has remained there even through earthquakes - surely proving that it must be a miracle?!

The rock is golden due to the gold leaf applied by many pilgrims and visitors and is topped by a stupa containing a Buddha hair donated by a hermit in the 11th century. Interesting fact - only men bare allowed to get close and touch the rock, I'm not 100% sure why - there doesn't seem to be a restriction at less sacred sites.... So I paid Stephen to do the deed for me, I should have some merit for the next life!

We were lucky to have a beautiful sunset at the rock with most clouds chased away and those remaining adding contrast to the sky by being lit up.

We also saw some of the ubiquitous Burmese dogs - a lot of the dogs and cats live off the offerings at the temples and unfortunately with walking around bare foot and not paying attention to the tiles can result in some squidging between the toes - best not to look and just find a puddle to wash it off in!

Early morning cloud view from the hotel up the mountain.

The next morning we were up early to walk back down the hill - I think harder than going up - and also to see the monks collecting alms. All Buddhist households give alms - usually this results in an extra pot of rice and food being made to dole out to the monks at their early morning collections. For wealthier families it will include donating to the temples and monasteries - the monks collect all things, including sweets and cash, not just rice and curry. The food they collect is communal - gathered up at the monastery and dished out equally. However they only eat before midday - nothing after, I guess if you're up at 4am you go to bed early!

When we'd finished walking down the mountain we headed to the airport to fly up to Mandalay, the second biggest city in Myanmar.