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.
