The next morning we headed back to Yangon for the last full day of the trip. We stopped a few times for photos, but nothing really that stood out. We went to the largest reclining Buddha in the area, and we stopped for lunch. The rain was coming down pretty hard for much of the day, and since it is so novel for me, I had to take photos of the rain.  This was actually the last day of the tour, we still had one full day in Yangon, but I didn’t have any plans except to get some money exchanged. That brings up the problem with this country, and as far as I can tell, it is it’s only problem, they need at least one ATM. It is so hard to get money if you don’t bring enough with you in the first place. The last few days I was stressing on if I was going to make it to the end of the tour with the cash that I had. In the end I didn’t make it, I borrowed a little, and eventually got to an exchange, so everything worked out.

The last day of the tour we all went to the market in the morning and had a last dinner. I was going to be the first person to leave Yangon so I said by goodbyes at the end of dinner. It was a great experience and I have to say that I think the people on this tour have been great. In fact I think this has been the best tour of all the ones that I’ve been on just because of the people. For tour leaders, Katya will always be the best and for locations, there have been some great places that I’ve gone, but for the people, this group has been the best out of all. Chris, the Aussie that I was bunking with the whole trip made the whole tour work. His humor and ability to work with everyone made for a great adventure. Rose, the nurse with the heart of gold was an inspiration to me of what you can do if you just are willing to open up. James, the English teacher was great and I was always impressed to see him reading Milton. Carima the nurse (yeah, another one) who has seen so many countries I had to be impressed. Brian, the only American that I’ve traveled with that I can say it had been a pleasure, and finally Sophie, the Aussie. She and I started hitting if off later in the trip and I can say that I wish there had been more time to just chat with her. Min, the assistant tour guide, he was kind and generous person and I wish him all the best.

Everyone had been so nice to me I wish I could let them know how great they all are.

Back row: James, Min, Me, Chris

Front Row: Sophie, NyeNye, Carima, Rose, Brian.

We left Nyaung Shwe (Innlay Lake) early with an ultimate destination of Golden Rock, but that doesn’t explain the journey. Soon after we left the city we stopped for a photo opportunity at an old monastery for monks. We weren’t there for long and we soon headed on to Heho, or maybe it should be, headed to Heho Airport for a flight to Yangon.

We took a bus from Yangon to a temple in the mountains called, Golden Rock. Even after seeing it I’m not really sure what makes it so culturally important or unique. It’s a large boulder that is resting on the side of the mountain. It does look like it could slip down at any minute, and I did see a portion of a video on it that shows that it rocks back and forth at times. So I guess it’s cool, but what was really cool was the journey to the top of the mountain. We stopped at a kind of “truck stop” looking place, there were quite a few open air trucks sitting under cover, people were walking around, and nothing prepared me for the next hour or so. As soon as there were enough people to fill the back of one of the trucks, we headed off. There was a good chance that it would rain, so all of us except for James had either our rain gear on, or ready to be put on.  It didn’t seem that we had been on the road for more than 30 seconds before the rain started. In no time it was coming down in buckets, my rain jacket did nearly nothing to stop the rain, in retrospect, I think we all got soaked by the downpour, James and our tour leader the most.

It only took about 35 minutes of winding up this hill before we reached the basecamp. It was very similar to the first place, but this time it was raining and the area was very foggy. From here we’d walk the remainder of the way up to the temple, about 40 more minutes. I say this every now and then and I can’t express how true it is, there is no real way to describe this trek. There are times that the road is going up at a 60 or 70 degree angle, water is streaming down similar to a waterfall, and the fog is so thick that you can’t see more than 40 meters ahead of you.

Eventually we did get there and after some tea at the hotel we made our way the last kilometer up to the temple. Photographs will show you how foggy it actually was.

Day two in Nyaung Shwe, was a free day. Almost everyone in the group headed out to do whatever they wanted. I think many eventually used the day for some “alone” time. Most of us started at a local market and then separated to do what each wanted to do. I didn’t make any plans but I thought I’d use the day to explore the city. Somewhere along the way I just got tired and decided to lay down. It was about 10 am and I couldn’t stop yawning, but I really didn’t feel that tired, but I was tired enough to go back to my room and lay down. Probably the not the best idea since I ended up falling asleep and sleeping until about 3 in the afternoon. The guys in the tour kept waking me up to go to lunch and to make sure that I was okay, and each time I’d fall back asleep until someone else woke me up. It was highly unusual for me to sleep in the day like that, not to mention for that long. I must have just hit some physical wall or something, because I felt fine except for being tired. I even slept at the normal time that night too.

The plan today was to go to Innlay Lake and to be honest I didn’t know why I was supposed to care about it. I don’t really study the itinerary too much on the tours that I take, so if there is something that we are going to do that I’ve never heard of, then chances are I’m going to be surprised, mostly surprised for the good, and Innlay Lake was one of those surprises. We were going to take a boat along the canals for a few miles until the canal opens up into the lake. That was the plan, and that was about all I knew what to expect. First, the boats we took were thin, flat bottom boats with propellers that stick very far behind the boat. It’s hard to explain, but if you’ve ever seen them you know what I’m describing. 

As for the day’s itinerary, I think that there were just too many places that we went to actually walk you through each one. I guess I could spend the time, but I haven’t really been in the writing mood since I’ve been on this trip, as I’m sure you may be able to tell by the grammatical errors that I’ve been making. I think though it would be good to give a little bit of a background to the lake and city. First the lake is pretty large, just off the top of my head, I’d say that it was about twenty miles long and ten miles across at its widest, but it seems to be very shallow, almost like a swamp. Everywhere you look there are small islands of grass popping out of the water, this has a way of almost making it look a little bit like a swamp. Also, nearly everywhere you look there are fishermen net fishing from shallow boats, and although that in itself is very picturesque, the fishermen have developed a rather strange way to move through the water as they’re laying their nets. They hook a leg around an oar and without using their arms they row themselves around. It really looks strange, but they’ve been doing it so long, and it has become so “famous” that they even have races with this style of rowing.

It took us maybe about an hour to get to our first destination, a lotus thread weaving workshop. Again, it was the journey not the destination that I liked the most. The city that contained all of the day’s destinations is called, Maing Thout (I think), but what makes it so interesting is that it is on stilts. The houses are on stilts, the markets too, in fact nearly everything in the city was on stilts with each building being connected to others through bridges. If you’ve seen the movie Waterworld, then you’ve got an idea of what this town/city looked like.  The farms that they grew mostly tomatoes weren’t on stilts, but they had to harvest from boats, because the plants were in effect growing out of the water.

As I  mentioned at the beginning of this post we went to too many places to write specifically about each, but I’ll load lots of images of the interesting things on today’s sightseeing.

Sun 08/07/12 07:07

Nothing special today, we headed to a meditation cave a few hours away from our hotel. The cave was impressive with the number of Buddhas that were there, somewhere around 8000, but other than that, meh. What I really liked though was driving through the countryside. I’m not sure how to describe it except to say that the people we went past looked like they could have been doing the same thing hundreds of years ago. There were groups of farmers tilling the soil by hand, men were plowing behind cattle, there were farmers weeding by hand, children were playing in the canals along the road, water buffalos were being ridden by children, and the now common sight of women washing clothes in the river,  I felt that I had stepped back into history.

I’m off to dinner in about 10 minutes and it looks like I won’t have access to internet again. So it will be a while until I get a chance to update my blog.

We’re in kalaw right now, it’s a small town that seems to be pretty much only a halfway point to the next destination, whatever that may be.  There are signs about trekking, so maybe people come here to hike too. On the way here we stopped for lunch at a “truck stop” kind of restaurant, and the only reason I mention this is because of the waitress that was serving us. She was young, in fact she looked very young, but it turned out that she was 17, still very young. But I guess I smiled at her once too many times and she thought that I was flirting with her or something, but from then on she stuck to me for the remainder of the lunch. She stuck out her tongue at me, hid her face when I smiled, generally it was kind of weird, if not a little bit funny. I’ll include a photo of her. Anyone who knows me, knows that I smile a lot, and when I travel, I smile even more than usual. Here it appears that I’m flirting with the girls when I don’t really believe that I am.  I also took a picture of our driver’s helper, he’s young and I never noticed how sad he was until looking at the photo later. Now I can’t seem to shake his image from my head, he just looks so sad even though he’s smiling for the photo.

We got to Kalaw ahead of schedule and one of the first things we did was to head out to explore, pretty much standard. After about 30 minutes we were done, so we did another loop to see if there was something that we may have missed, 20 minutes later we decided that we had seen the city the first time and we might as well go have a beer. Little by little everyone from the group would stop by and have a drink with us, usually they would be walking by on their way back to the hotel and see us. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it turned out to be a lot of fun. So fun that after dinner we went and had more drinks. I ended up meeting a girl from Canada and for the rest of the night our group plus the Canadian girl hung out.  Great fun.