Burmese Days Continued

In light of our jarring arrival in Mandalay, we decided to cut our visit from two nights to one. That just left us time to eat dinner at a Thai restaurant that could have come straight out of an American strip mall and to stop by the Mahamuni Pagoda on the way to the airport. It is the home of a gold Buddha figure that is slowly assuming blob-like proportions because they add gold leaf to it every day.

From Mandalay, we flew to Heho, took a cab to Nyaungshwe, and took a boat to our hotel, which was literally on Inle Lake. (It was a bunch of cabins on stilts.). The next day, we took a boat ride around the lake, mostly stopping -- involuntarily -- at various markets and artisans shops where we were the worst tourists in the world and hardly bought anything. We also saw more blob-shaped buddhas at the Daw U Pagoda and -- best of all -- cats that have trained to jumps through hoops at the Nga Phe Kyaung monastery. Which was pretty much exactly as touristy as it sounds. But mostly we just gawked at the people who seem to lead a very traditional way of life, fishing, growing vegetables in floating gardens, and getting around by canoe.

We spent two more days at Inle:  one just sitting around our hotel reading (ask me about the North African campaign in World War II) and one in Nyaungshwe, where we ate a really excellent Shan meal -- a potato based curry, fried minced peanuts, and fresh tomatoes.

On Friday, we woke up early and flew back to Yangon. We tackled one of the mysterious sidewalk teashops where we were served noodles and about five different kinds of meat wrapped in dough. We were then utterly defeated in our attempt to walk around the gardens surrounding Shwedagon Pagoda by the ungodly heat. In retrospect, setting out to do this at 1 o'clock in the afternoon was not a good idea. In our defense, we did make it most of the way around and it was cold at Inle, so we weren't acclimated to the heat. Also, we are wimps.

We ate dinner at the 50th Street Bar & Grill, which Lonely Planet billed as an "expat hangout," where we were the only people there for about an hour and a half. We ate pizza and read old issues of the International Herald Tribune. Our first news since Bangkok eight days earlier. We flew to Bangkok the next morning.