Enigmatic and Beautiful Myanmar

After Mandalay we moved south to Monywa.  This was a chance to visit some wonderful temples and very large Buddha statues.  On a very bumpy tuk tuk ride, we visited Thanboddhay Paya, which was interesting for the sheer number of Buddhas on display.  Amongst the various corridors were large Buddha statues, but then looking closely there were even more behind, with some only a couple of inches high.  With half a million Buddha statues adorning the inside and outside of this building, it was an unusual site.

We then moved on to Bodhi Tataung, a site with a large reclining and enormous standing Buddha.  Climbing up the hill, the reclining Buddha is impressive, but behind stands the second highest Buddha in the world at 424 feet high.  We decided to climb the 25 floors to the top, only to find the 25th floor shut, and no views from the top.  It was still a good visit, and a good day.

Beyond Monywa, we travelled to Bagan.  This was an enormous area of temples built in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries across twenty-six square miles.  We explored the temples by bicycle and E-bike, or electric scooter.  It was great fun visiting the mix of large and small temples, through the maze of roads and dusty little lanes and tracks.

The highlight was bumping into a young, local guide who offered to show us the way to some temples we could climb up.  As most temples are only accessible on the ground floor, this was a great opportunity to see the vista from Bagan.  We were taken through lanes and fields to a small, brick temple where we climbed up inside and came out on a platform.  We climbed up some more levels to a point where we could just about stand up with our backs against the wall and look out to see temples in all directions.  It was great to see, and a real highlight of our time in Bagan.

We took a bus to Kalaw further east.  It was a real switchback journey up into the mountains, but demonstrated the real problem that the political situation is having on tourism, as for much of the journey we were the only people on the bus.  The political situation is very complicated, and is a real balance between the military rulers and the Democratic Party led by Aung Sang Suu Kyi; much of which is misunderstood and mis-reported in the West.  This is having a devastating effect in some areas as the delightful Burmese suffer as the economy falters.

We joined a two day trek from Kalaw to Nyaung Shwe on Inle Lake with nine other European travellers.  It was a great group as everybody bonded and chatted, so much so that we barely noticed the ten miles walking on the first day and the eight miles on the second.  We walked past lots of villages and farms, and learnt a lot about the local area.  The group sat up chatting around the fire at the homestay where we stayed the first night, and started walking through the mist-filled valleys the next day.

On the second day, we descended to the stunning Inle Lake for lunch before getting on small boats which took us on the hour-long journey to Nyaung Shwe at he north of the lake.  On the way we passed fishermen who are famous for rowing with one leg while reeling in their catch, which is a strange but interesting site. We capped the day with evening drinks and a rather strange meal at an Indian restaurant run by a man who thought he was Eminem.

On our second day at the Lake, seven of the walking group took bicycles and cycled around the lake itself.  We stopped at monasteries with views over the lake, as well as a village making tofu products – apparently there are 22 different ways of doing so.  We crossed the lake, again by small ferry boat, and cycled back to a vineyard on the hills overlooking the lake.  After some wine tasting, we sat out watching the sunset while enjoying a nice bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.

After three busy and active days we are having a quiet day in Nyaung Shwe as we wait for an overnight bus to take us to our next destination, Hpa-An.