My My it's Mandalay

The taxi ride back to Mandalay was a breeze, it was a long breeze but compared to the bus, fantastic, a 7 buck classic. Along the way we passed a truck that had tipped over in the middle of the road, it was a perfectly flat piece of road in the middle of a town. Perhaps it had been horrendously overloaded just like many of the other trucks we passed through the narrow-twisty-sheerdrop mountain passes. We got our driver to stop, grabbed our cameras and jumped out the car. I managed to get two snaps before a policeman came over to stop us taking pictures saying words like "No" and "Crime", what was he on about?

01 A Quick Snap Before the Policeman Stopped Me

On arriving in Mandalay I returned to the Royal Guest House to look for Rachel, she'd gone but had left a note. She'd gone to the doctor after I'd left for Hsipaw and had been given a course of anti-biotics. She'd then phoned her parents (6 bucks a minute here!) and found out that her boyfriend's underwater welding job in Thailand had been cancelled and he was waiting for her there. As an aside, underwater welding is apparently not as glamarous as you and I imagine it to be. So, she'd hopped on a plane back to Yangon in order to get back to Bangers. She'd meet her boyfriend, recover and then try again in the land of food poisoning, good luck.

My time in Mandalay wasn't overly exciting. It'd say three great things happened here.

1) Shane introduced me to Passion Fruit. My goodness it's brilliant and only 3 pence each here, compared to 70 pence in Tesco! Just like the log-flume, how could I have lived for 30 years and never eaten one before. I urge you to go out and share my experiance.

2) Shane and David got up at 5am to catch the boat to Bagan, they said their goodbyes, left and I then rolled back over and went back to sleep, sweet. I'll be meeting up with them again in Inle Lake in a few days.

3) I met Thomas the Norwegian again, he told me that he was still thinking about that chess game two days later. He really didn't like it.