I was finally feeling well enough to leave town so we took an excursion to what I had thought (based on information in the travel guides) would be one of the highlights of the trip. The town of Pyin U Lwin is a former British hill station - to which the Brits escaped to avoid the heat of the central plains of Burma during their colonial occupation.
We rented a taxi for $40 for the day for the 67 kilometer trip. This hefty price included visits to a couple of waterfalls, only one of which we ended up visiting because the other one was too far away. Needless to say, not visiting the much further one didn't result in a reduction of our taxi rental rate.
One of the main attractions of this hill station was that it was supposed to be cool. To tell the truth, one of the main reasons for my visit to Burma was to find a cool place in the mountains where I might be able to spend some time each year to escape Bangkok's hot season. Well, this place WASN'T it. As has so often been the case, our travel guide once again mislead us. Pyin U Lwin was only slightly less hot than Mandalay and had little of interest to see. The only thing of interest were the miniature horse-drawn stagecoaches used as taxis in the town. After an hour or so walking around the town, we headed off for the nearer of the two waterfalls in the area. This provided an unexpectedly pleasant dose of nature - the likes of which city dwellers like myself rarely get to see. So this turned out to be the highlight of the day, contrary to our expectations.
We then headed back to town to try to have a picnic lunch in the famous botanical garden. The Burmese authorities had other plans for us: They recently raised the entry fee for the park from 1 dollar to 4 dollars for foreigners. We found that a bit steep just for a place to sit under a tree for lunch, so we ended up sitting on a bridge under some other trees (for free) and ate our sandwiches for lunch. More thumbnails ...
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