Mandalay - Myanmar

  Mandalay, Myanmar
Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Just when we thought all our bad road experiences were behind us........on the bus on the way back to Rangoon over a particularly massive pothole, the already cracked windscreen busted open and swung in, almost decapitating the front row of passengers.  The driver's mate knocked out most of the window, but decided it would be a good idea to leave a big jagged shard hanging by the silicon at the top.  Karen spent the rest of the journey cowered under her blanket for fear of being impaled.  The rest of the journey saw two other close calls - a truck laden with bags of rice a few minutes ahead of us nosedived into a drainage ditch, and the old taxi we got in to get back to Rangoon central, narrowly dodged a bouncing truck wheel (which came off a semi trailer and followed us for at least a kilometre).  Back to back buses to Mandalay made Yangon seem like a thriving metropolis.  An old royal capital from 18th century and centre of all things 'monk' (Mandalay has over 500,000 monks, ~10% of which are in Mandalay and surrounding towns), and many of the main roads still practically need a 4WD to negotiate.

Mandalay old city walls

Noddy taxi rank

Power is supplied in the evenings every other day (if yer lucky!).  Walking around we got chatting to a watermelon-truck driver, who invited us into his home to meet his family, his young daughter practiced her English, and he gave us an 8kg watermelon to take with us (good benchpress work for the hours walk back to the guesthouse!)

Watermelon girl

Next day we hooked up with MoMo, a local taxi driver (we use  the word 'taxi' loosely - they're actually tiny Mazda 2 stroke minivans from 1960s - picture Noddy's car in blue as a ute!).

The Noddy-mobile taxi

Brad a bit heavy on the gold makeup

The guy was a great character, his English was great, but just the worst jokes in the world!  Over 2 days he took us to some great spots - magnificent pagodas and monasteries, places where they make gold leaf by bashing lumps of gold with hammers for 12 hours solid, and round the old kingdom capitals with their ruins.

Planting rice

Fishermen on smoko break

Karen from the Quality Control dept

Flattening gold leaf

Burma or Athens?

Monastery commercial kitchen

Breakfast at the monastery

Local festival

Crossing the lake

Check out the sunset shots of the monks on the 1.2km teak bridge that links monasteries across the river from each other.

Monks in contemplation

Monks crossing at sunset

Bicycles crossing

Watching the sun go

1.2km bridge

We climbed this massive hill from where you could see over 500 pagodas around the old capitals, all topped with solid gold.  Incredible the amount of gold, diamonds, rubies etc used on these temples when an average wage is less than $20 per month.  On the way up we met up with Unendasana, a lovely old monk who wanted to hear all about places outside Burma,

Our monk mate on Manadaly hill

and fired so many random questions at us :
"In your country......
how much is a haircut (not sure why he wanted to know, monks shave their heads anyway!)
how many soldiers do you have
how much is it to go to the movies and how often do we go
as well as
"who was the funiest out of both of us and who laughed the most" (we couldn't agree on that one!)
We were waiting for him to ask us what our strengths and weaknesses were, and where we wanted to be in our careers in 5 years!

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