January 17-19, 2015: Mandalay to Yangon (Rangoon)

Mandalay's streets were wet from overnight rain on the morning of the 17th.  Clouds filled the sky all day.  I had to get to Yangon for my flight to Dhaka in Bangladesh.  There are all night buses from Mandalay to Yangon, but I dislike traveling at night.  I wanted to take the train, a 385 mile trip.  (It is 343 miles from Mandalay to Myitkyina and 178 miles from Mandalay to Lashio.).  Trains leave every day at 6 in the morning and 3 and 5 in the afternoon for the 14-15 hour journey to Yangon.  Again I didn't want to travel overnight, or leave at 6 in the morning, so I took the 3 p.m. train as far as Thazi, less than three hours from Mandalay. 

The long train, with thirteen carriages, left Mandalay under dark clouds.  Soon it was lightly raining.  It rained harder while we stopped at Kyaukse at 4, but soon stopped.  The train arrived in Thazi before 6 and I walked through the puddle filled streets to the little hotel where I had stayed three days before, and before that on Christmas Eve (plus another three times in 1994).  It rained again about 8 or 9 that evening, but this time there was no monk or priest wailing on a loudspeaker all night. 

The next morning at 8:50 I left Thazi on the train, another long one, that had left Mandalay at 6.  My ticket for the more than ten hour journey cost only about $6.25.  It was raining as we left, but soon stopped.  My upper class carriage was uncrowded and comfortable, and I enjoyed the long train journey.  I noticed the train tracks crossed over a very wide road, maybe 16 or 20 lanes, at Naypyitaw, the capital.  I think it is the road from the airport. 

The sun came out in the afternoon, a welcome sight after four days of cloudy skies.  The countryside became greener as we headed south, with lots of vegetables and even some newly growing rice.  In several southern towns there were enormous dilapidated wooden warehouses, often several of them, near the tracks.  They looked empty, with ugly rusted metal roofs.  I suppose they once held rice and other commodities.  They must have been much nicer with tile or thatch roofs. 

The sun disappeared into clouds over the horizon about 5:30 and it got dark between 6 and 6:30.  I got off the train not at Yangon, where it was scheduled to arrive at 9, but at Bago, where it arrived just after 7, only a few minutes late after a thirteen hour journey from Mandalay.  Just before reaching the station, I could see Bago's golden Shwemawdaw Pagoda, the tallest in Burma at 376 feet, all lit up.  I checked into a decent hotel I had stayed in during my 2013-2014 trip to Burma and had my first cold shower in a while, bearable at Bago's low elevation and latitude.

It was cloudy the next morning until about 10.  I wandered through Bago's interesting streetside market and spotted several whole ducks, plucked and with slit throats, on sale.  I left Bago at 10:45 on a slow train coming all the way from Shwenyaung, north of Inle Lake.  In fact, this is the same train that travels from Kalaw to Thazi.  There were few passengers.  Traveling very slowly once it reached Yangon, it took two and a half hours from Bago to Yangon's big train station. 

I checked into a hotel, ate lunch, and then looked around.  I enjoyed being back in Yangon, and wouldn't have minded a few days there.  I walked past the old colonial buildings in the center and noticed that one had been completely renovated, by a bank, and another was being renovated.  Plenty of others, though, are in varying states of disrepair.  I noticed the large, white Immanuel Baptist Church had a sign with the times for services in English, Myanmar, Chinese, Telugu, Kayin, Shan, Mizo, and Lisu.

I walked to the huge Secretariat, the government center of British Burma, built in 1889.  I had seen a photo of President Obama visiting it in November and wondered if it had been renovated.  It is still a massive ruin for the most part, though it seems an inner courtyard may have been renovated.  Tourists aren't allowed inside, unless, I guess, you are President of the United States.  Aung San was assassinated in the Secretariat.

I walked through the street sellers all over the main streets and came across an English language street tour, which I followed for a while.  The air felt humid and it was warmer than Mandalay.  I broke off the tour at the Strand Hotel and sat inside for a while, until past dark, before making my way back for dinner and my hotel.  The newly renovated bank building was covered with strings of lights.  The city hall next door was also lit up, as was the golden Sule Pagoda down the street.

January 13-16, 2015: Inle Lake to Mandalay

I left Nyaungshwe, just north of Inle Lake, on the 13th, but not until almost 4 in the afternoon.  I spent time in an internet cafe and had a final crepe and guacamole lunch at Inle Pancake Kingdom.  I left on a huge modern bus, coming from Taunggyi and headed to Lashio.  Several other tourists boarded it heading for Hsipaw, but I was the only one for Kalaw.  It took only about an hour and a half to reach Kalaw, arriving as the sun was setting.  I checked into the same hotel I had stayed in before and headed out for a dinner of Shan noodle soup.  At 4300 feet elevation, Kalaw felt chilly.  My thermometer registered 64 degrees in my room just before I went to bed.

The next morning it was 61 degrees in my room when I got up.  This morning was Kalaw's five day market, and after breakfast I spent about an hour and a half wandering through it, under mostly cloudy skies.  I never seem to tire of these markets.  I recognized two of the young women chicken butchers I had watched in Nyaungshwe.  There were fewer tourists than at the five day market in Kalaw ten days earlier, when I was previously there.  Burma seems to get a particularly large influx of tourists who come for two or three weeks over the Christmas-New Year holidays.

I got to the train station after 11 and at 12:10, only 25 minutes late, left on a train bound for Thazi.  The ordinary class carriages were packed, as was the sole upper class carriage, where I had my seat, with local people returning home from Kalaw's five day market.  Beside myself, there were only two other foreign tourists in the upper class carriage.  It was full of boxes and bags and bundles of all sorts of stuff from the market.

Thazi is northwest of Kalaw, but the train first headed south through the hilly countryside, with lots of pines.  A few small rice terraces, already harvested, appeared here and there among the forest.  I think the train began to turn northwest about the time we reached our first stop, at the village of Myindaik, about a half hour from Kalaw.  We spent about 40 minutes there, waiting for a train coming up from Thazi, but it was a very interesting stop.  The platform was filled with hill tribe vendors, a very colorful scene.  Besides fruit and vegetables on sale, several ladies were selling flowers, carrying big bundles of them in their arms and on their heads.  I enjoyed walking around and was able to buy a chicken, vegetable, and rice lunch, packed in a styrofoam box, for the train ride.

We reached the summit, at 4608 feet, soon after leaving Myindaik, and I enjoyed the beautiful mountain scenery as we very slowly descended.  We had some long views down valleys towards distant forest covered hills.  I think this may be the prettiest train journey I've taken in Burma.  The stops were very interesting and picturesque, too, often with small, colonial era stations of brick with chimneys in small villages.

At one point the terrain was too steep for the train tracks to curve, and our train simply backed down a lower set of tracks, dropping from 3237 feet to 3031 (so said the signs), before again reversing itself and heading down a still lower set of tracks, the three sets of tracks forming a zigzag.  There was another, shorter, zigzag about a thousand feet lower. 

By about 4 the long views over the hills had disappeared and we were traveling through forest, which we emerged from more than an hour later into a sort of rolling plain at about 1400 feet elevation, reaching the town of Yinmabin.  Heading west from Yinmabein, we again descending through hills, much drier ones, at dusk.  We very slowly crossed a long and high viaduct, with no guardrails, just before dark.  It was dark soon after 6.

We were soon in the flatlands, reaching Thazi, at 700 feet elevation, at 7:40, forty minutes late.  I checked into the same little hotel I had stayed in three weeks before.  At this lower elevation, my room was a very comfortable 79 degrees when I went to bed, almost twenty degrees warmer than my room had been in Kalaw, at 4300 feet, that morning.  Unfortunately, a Buddhist monk wailed away all night on a loudspeaker, stopping only about dawn.

I left Thazi the next morning before 10 on a pickup headed to Meiktila to the west and about 11 left on a very crowded small bus, with folks on the roof, heading north to Mandalay.  The sky was overcast all day.  We arrived in Mandalay about 2:30 and I checked into a hotel I have stayed in a couple of times before.

I spent the rest of the afternoon at travel agencies and the government tourism office.  I had hoped to be able to travel on the upper Chindwin River and then leave Burma into India.  You are permitted to do so, if you get a permit, but the price of the permit seems to have jumped from $50 to $150 since I was here in November, and I was told I would have to wait a week for my permit, picking it up in Mandalay.  Plus, there are difficulties getting a permit because of my overstaying my visa.

I walked along the southern moat and wall of the palace in the late afternoon, but they were much less scenic under cloudy than under sunny skies.  There are fewer tourists here than when I was here a little over three weeks ago, just before Christmas, but there still are quite a few tourists.  At 244 feet elevation, Mandalay felt warm, and I enjoyed being able to walk around at night without a jacket.

The next day, too, was cloudy, with a few drops of rain.  I finally decided to give up the Chindwin and the land crossing to India, at least for this year, and fly from Yangon to Dhaka in Bangladesh.  My ticket, on Biman, Bangladesh's national airline, cost only $185.

January 8-12, 2014: Inle Lake

I left Pindaya about 8:30 on morning of the 8th on a bus heading south back to Aungban.  After the hour or so trip, I almost immediately left Aungban on a not too crowded pick up headed east to Shwenyaung, again retracing the route I had taken earlier.  We reached Shwenyaung about 11, and then it was a three wheeler for the last seven miles south to Nyaungshwe, the main town for Inle Lake.  At the entrance to the town foreigners have to pay a $10 Inle Zone Entrance Fee.  (I had also had to pay a $2 fee to enter Pindaya.)  A sign at the entrance to the town said the elevation was 2950 feet.  Burma seems to almost always use feet, not meters.

I checked into a hotel on a busy canal and got the first question I have had about my expired visa.  My 28 days expired December 12, but not once since then has anyone questioned me about it, even though I went through several police checks near the Chinese border.  You are allowed to overstay your visa, and pay a $3 a day fee, but I have heard different accounts of how long you are allowed to overstay.

I noticed lots of tourists in town as I walked to lunch at a restaurant called the Inle Pancake Kingdom, with a convincing sign asking, "Are you tired of rice?"  Nyaungshwe is much changed from when I was last here in 1994.  There are now several multi-story hotels and it now seems a town largely devoted to tourism.  It is still a small place, with only about 10,000 people.

After my tomato, onion, cheese, avocado crepe, I walked to the museum in the former palace of the local Shan sao pha, or "sky lord."  The big brick and teak building was built between 1913 and 1923.  The beautiful building is now much run down, but still very impressive.  It is once again a museum of Shan culture.  The military governments, in order to de-emphasize Shan culture, had for a while turned it into a Buddha museum.  The big throne room and conference rooms behind the throne room have high ceilings.  Besides the building itself, the best part of the museum was the collection of old photos.  Among them was one of a very bored looking Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII and Duke of Windsor) sitting with a group of Shan and Kayah chieftains, in about 1922, I think.

The bespectacled last sao pha, who ruled from 1927 to 1959, was the last of 33, dating from the 14th century.  He was also the first president of Burma, from 1948 to 1952.  He was one of the signatories of the Panglong Agreement.   The Panglong Agreement is on display, as are old, very elaborate formal clothes of the sao phas and their chairs and sleeping couches.

The layout of the palace is very interesting, with a dining room at the back behind the conference rooms and with sleeping quarters off to the sides.  The first floor was used for offices, with the palace quarters on the floor above.  After walking around inside, I wandered around outside, walking around the building.  I walked off a path into the dirt and grass to take a photo and afterwards noticed what look like a recently shed snakeskin where I had been standing to take the photo.  I then noticed several snake size holes in the ground and decided it was time to get back on the path.

Afterward I walked some more around town.  There are several modern looking monasteries, where child monks were chanting near the end of the day, but there really isn't much to see in town.  The sky had clouded up during the afternoon, and that night about 8 there was a short, but heavy, rainstorm, followed by another about an hour later.  I later heard that it rained several more times during the night, quite unusual in this dry season.

It rained briefly again the next morning about 6 or 6:30, but the cloudy sky seemed to be clearing, at least to the west, when four of us left a little after 8 on an all day Inle Lake boat trip.  These boat trips are the main way tourists see the lake, and there must have been well more than a hundred boats full of tourists on the lake that day.  Fortunately, the lake is big, though there are places where the boats cluster.  The boats are generally about 30 foot long canoes, with a noisy motor at the rear.  Tourists are provided padded wooden chairs, which are quite comfortable.  You also get blankets, but they weren't necessary that morning under cloudy skies.  With clear skies all night, the lake is much colder early in the morning.  In that respect, we were lucky with the cloudy skies.

It never rained and I thoroughly enjoyed the day.  We boarded the boat on the canal right next to my hotel, briefly traveled west to the main canal leading south to the lake on the west side of town, and headed first down that wide canal and then a narrower one through reeds to the lake.  We reached the lake and headed across for only a short way before turning into a channel leading to the village of Kaung Daing, near the lake's northwest shore, where a five day market was taking place.  The market was very interesting, with lots of friendly hill tribe folks, including several women smoking big cheroots, and lots of tourists, too.

After a bit more than a half hour at the market, we reboarded our boat and headed south under cloudy skies down the long, narrow lake, though the lake is at its widest, about four miles, at its northern end.  The people living along the lake are predominantly Intha, and we spotted several Intha fishermen in their conical hats fishing on the lake.  They use conical fishing nets, about ten feet high, made of wood and some sort of netting material.  I'm not sure quite how they use them.  Even curiouser, they paddle their boats while standing on one foot at one end of the boat and paddling with the other foot wrapped around the paddle. They make quite an odd wiggle as they paddle.  It is a fascinating thing to watch.

After about 45 minutes on the lake we reached the village of Ywama, set among reeds, where we stopped at a silversmith shop, built above the water on high stilts, to watch silversmiths pounding silver after using a bellows to heat and soften it.  Nearby was another shop, this one for textiles, where we also stopped.  Inside about six Padaung women, the ones with copper rings around their long necks, on display, some of them weaving on hand looms and others just sitting around.  These lake tours are certainly commercially oriented in part, but without a lot of sales pressure.

About 11 I talked the others into paying a little more to head up a canal to Inthein.  The half hour trip west up the canal led first through reeds and then through trees.  Along the way were several less than a foot high bamboo dams, with openings in the center for the boats to pass.  Many tourist boats were returning as we were heading to Inthein, which also held its five day market that day.  We arrived about 11:30, and there were still dozens of tourist boats docked there.  The market was wrapping up, as they usually are over by about noon.  We walked around the market a bit and then explored the overgrown, crumbling stupas at the far edge of the village.  In places stucco figures of animals and gods are still intact, or partially intact. 

A long covered stairway, lined with an amazing amount of handicrafts for sale, led up a hill to another complex of more than a thousand dilapidated old stupas, said to date from the 17th and 18th centuries.  Some have been restored, but most have not, though I suppose in time this will become like Pindaya.  With trees and bushes growing out of them, and their steeples leaning at various angles, the ruins are very appealing now.

We spent well more than an hour among the stupas, and then had lunch in the village before leaving between 2 and 2:30.  We headed back down the channel to the lake and then further south down the lake through reeds and open water, passing villages full of houses on stilts, to the village of In Phaw Kone.  Along the way we passed some big resort hotels on the lake, and lots of substantial wooden houses, often of two stories on stilts, of the local people.  Nothing like that was here in 1994.  There are also lots of electricity pylons made of weathered wood, something I've never seen anywhere else.  Lots of birds, especially gulls, were on the lake.

In In Phaw Kone we made two more shop stops, first to see iron workers heating iron and then pounding it into swords.  Three men would pound the red hot metal until it cooled and changed color, whereupon it was briefly dipped into a trough of water.  This continued as the metal became longer and thinner.  Lots of swords were on display for sale.  Another shop was full of looms, spinning wheels, and the like, with men an women at work on the looms and spinning wheels. It was all fascinating to watch.  Besides textiles of silk and cotton, they make textiles of lotus fibers, which I had never heard of before.  They showed use how they draw out the very thin fibers from the green lotus stems, and then wind them together into thread like silk.

From In Phaw Kone we headed back north to Tha Lay village and the Phaung Daw Ol Paya, a particularly large pagoda.  It seems to have been completely rebuilt from the original, but in the same style, judging from the photos inside.  Also inside, in the place of honor on the altar in the center of the building, are five gold blobs, a foot to two feet high.  They are five ancient Buddha statues that have been transformed by the application of gold leaf by devotees.  Men were doing just that when we were there.  Only men are allowed near them.  Women have to content themselves with kneeling outside the altar enclosure.

By now the sky had almost completely cleared.  We headed north and then a bit east over the blue lake under the blue sky, with high hills on either side.  We reached the floating gardens, acres and acres of fruits and vegetables grown by the Intha on floating beds of vegetation.  We traveled down some narrow passages with floating beds of vegetation on either side of us.  A few simple shacks of bamboo walls and thatched roofs stood on stilts among the gardens.

Eventually we emerged from the floating gardens and docked at Nga Hpe Kyaung, the jumping cat monastery, where the apparently bored monks have taught their cats to jump through hoops.  No cats were jumping while we where there, at the end of the afternoon.  Several were eating out of bowls of rice, though.  I didn't know cats ate rice.  I thought they were strictly carnivorous.  I remember visiting this monastery in 1994, out on the lake in the middle of the water.  Now the gardens are quite close to it, and one side is completely given over to handicrafts for sale.  There are some gilded Buddha images and altars inside, though they were a little hard to see inside in the late afternoon gloom.  The views outside, however, of the gardens and the lake and hills in the late afternoon sun, were spectacular.

The sun set just as we were leaving, about 5:20 or 5:25.  It quickly disappeared behind the high ridge to the west.  At dusk, under the now clear sky, the lake became quite chilly, especially as we were speeding along it in a boat.  Birds and a few fishermen were still out, and other boats were either also heading back to Nyaungshwe or heading out to villages along the lake.  I put my fleece and windbreaker back on, and wrapped a blanket around me, and was warm enough.  We reached the main canal at the northern end of the lake a little before 6, and were in Nyaungshwe, three and a half miles further north, about 15 minutes later, just at dark.

The next morning, under clear skies, was much colder than the previous cloudy one.  This was the day of Nyaungshwe's five day market, and the canal outside the hotel was very busy.  About 20 or 30 big baskets of tomatoes had been unloaded from boats and were being carried two at a time on long poles by two men.  Some of the tomatoes from one basket spilled into the canal and then were scooped up with smaller baskets.  Close to the market in the town center the canal was packed with dozens of empty boats jammed together like sardines.

I spent about three hours wandering through the very interesting market.  It was very crowded at first, hard to walk through.  My head kept scraping against the canvas and plastic sheets strung up for sun protection, built at a height suitable for local folks, but not taller foreigners.  Later I noticed the top of my cap was filthy, so I guess it was good I was wearing it.  Better my hat than my hair.

I soon gave up walking through the crowded market interior and found a spot where I could stand and watch, near chicken and fish sellers, mostly women.  I watched young women and old women expertly cutting up large chickens.  The fish sellers were squatting on the pavement, with their fish on leaves or plastic.  When one sold all her fish, she got up and left.

Eventually, the crowd thinned out a bit and I could walk about some more with less difficulty.  I saw plucked ducks for sale, and much else.  Later I came back to the chicken sellers and one of the young women was now cleaning chicken intestines, using a sort of metal implement to thread out the chicken shit and then washing the intestines in water.  She dumped them into a bowl, and I saw several women buy a big bag full.

I left about noon and headed to the Inle Pancake Kingdom for a vegetarian lunch.  Besides a crepe with avocado, tomatoes, onions, and cheese, I had a bowl of guacamole with rice crackers.

From about 2 to nightfall I took a walk, first heading north about a mile and a half out of town along a tree shaded road to Shwe Yaunghwe Kyaung, an old teak monastery on stilts with two large oval windows at the very front.  Two child monks were sitting in one of the windows.  I looked around inside, with a golden Buddha and some beautiful wooden chests covered with gold and jewels, or colored glass, for all I know.  When I arrived most of the young monks were watching a movie on tv in an adjacent building, but at 3 a monk rang a gong and the monks began to gather and chant in front of the golden Buddha in the old, teak building.

I walked back to town, and then through town along the main canal, and then out of town to Namthe, a little village just about ten minutes walk from town.  A very modern looking 26 foot high standing Buddha is just outside the village.  It is said to be 700 years old, but looks more like seven.  Instead of spending much time with the Buddha, I sat on a wooden pier on the canal in the late afternoon sun, until the sun disappeared behind the mountains.  Lots of noisy boats sped by, with the local people often waving to me.

The next morning was again clear and very chilly.  I sat for a while in the sun on the balcony of my hotel after breakfast.  About 10 I rented a bike and biked first to the museum in the former palace of the sao pha, to take some photos of it in the morning sun.

From there I biked out of town to the southeast on a good paved road and soon reached an open air sugar cane factory, with ten or fifteen men working there. I stopped and watched for about half an hour, and the workers seemed to enjoy having me there.  Sugar cane was fed into a grinder that removed the juice, which eventually flowed through pipes into big vats with a fire underneath.  A man kept feeding the fire with dried sugar cane stubble.  The vats, about six of them, steamed and bubbled and were quite a sight.  It was all very interesting and primitive, though the grinder and a pump were run by small motors.  Nearby were about ten 55 gallon drums, several filled with liquid with scum on top.  One of the workers encouraged me to stick my finger in one and then lick it, and I instantly obeyed.  It was very sweet.  Besides the workers, a woman and her very shy son were there.  He would surreptitiously look at me, and then bury his head in his mother's lap if I looked at him too long.

From the sugar cane factory I biked further south on a good road, stopping here and there to watch things.  A solitary young woman was swiftly cutting sugar cane that towered above her, maybe 15 feet high.  With a machete she quickly cut it at its base, cut off the thin top half, and then stripped the long cane of it leaves.  Others were raking up cane debris.  There are other sugar cane factories along the way, and I passed the turn off for a fancy lakeside hotel where Mick Jagger is supposed to have stayed.

About noon I reached the lakeside village of Maing Thauk, about seven miles from Nyaungshwe.  I parked my bike and headed up a hill to monastery with a gold stupa, a climb of about 500 feet over a half an hour.  Near the monastery I came across some road builders at lunch.  While I was examining their work, one offered me a long bar of sugar, one of about 20 they had in a bag.  It was very hard and, not surprisingly, very sweet.  The view from the hilltop was disappointing.  The sky was hazy in the middle of the day and an electricity pylon was situated right in the gap in the trees in front of the stupa.  A nice touch.

On the way down I watched the road builders for a while.  A man was cracking big stones into smaller ones with a sledgehammer.  Women were carrying wet concrete in metal pans and then pouring it over the rocks laid out in the road bed.  This is a concrete not an asphalt road, leading up to the monastery.

When I got down the hill, I biked the short distance to the head of the canal that leads to the lake.  Alongside the canal a quarter mile wooden walkway, about five feet wide, on stilts leads to the part of Maing Thauk village that is on stilts over the water.  Walking along the wooden walkway, I had beautiful views of greenery, water, and simple huts.  At the end, among the houses on stilts, is a restaurant where I had a late lunch, about 3:30 to 4, and a very good one, a fish soup, with a whole fish, for about two dollars.  The views from the restaurant were great, with boats passing by.

I had been paddled to the restaurant from the end of the walkway, and after lunch took a half hour tour of the village, in a small boat paddled by a middle aged man.  All the houses are on stilts, as are all the outhouses, made of bamboo walls with blue PVC pipes running down into the water.  Most of the houses have bamboo walls, while some have wooden walls.  After the boatman dropped me off on the walkway, I watched him paddle away, using his leg to paddle while standing.  

I enjoyed the walk back along the wooden walkway, with the golden stupa of the monastery on a hill in front of me.  At quarter to 5 I started back on my bike, as the air was getting chilly.  I had planned to stop at a winery just off the road, but didn't pass it until 5:15, just before sunset.  I did stop at the sugar cane factory for about ten minutes.  Only three guys were still there, one cooking dinner in a metal pot on an open fire.  The works had all been cleaned up, more or less.  Some of the big vats were still steaming.  The ten 55 gallon drums were now all full of liquid sugar.  I got back to town about an hour after leaving Maing Thauk.

I took another bike ride the next day, getting a later start, leaving town heading west over the main canal a little before 11.  I continued west on a tree shaded lane until turning south at the base of the hills.  There were some rises as I pedaled right along the base of the hills.  I climb one small hill with a pagoda for a hazy lake view, passed a hot springs, and reached the village of Kaung Daing, about ten miles from Nyaungshwe.  I pedaled a bit further, to another pagoda on a hill right next to the lake, and then two Norwegians also on bikes and I chartered a boat to take us across the lake to Maing Thauk, about a twenty minute trip across the blue lake. We passed several leg rowing fishermen on the way.

We ate lunch at the same restaurant where I had eaten the day before.  I again had the fish soup, and also had a big avocado and tomato salad, also delicious.  After lunch, as we were walking along the wooden walkway with our bikes, we were met by dozens of school kids just getting out of school.  We had to pause to let them all pass.  When they reached the end of the walkway, there must have been quite a traffic jam until their parents came to pick them up in boats.

I biked back towards Nyaungshwe, passing some cane cutters along the way, and reached the winery turnoff about 4:30.  I walked up the hill to the winery and for two dollars tasted four of their wines.  I sat at a table outside with four others as the sun sank in the sky.  Quite a few people had gathered there at tables inside and outside. The wines weren't all that good, and the red one was pretty bad, but it was a nice way to end the afternoon.  The lake was quite far away.  The winery is only thirteen years old, and has 20 hectares of vineyards next to the winery, with another 55 hectares nearby, to the north.  The sunset was at about 5:30.  I headed back maybe ten minutes later, reaching town about 6, at dark. 

January 2-7, 2015: Kalaw, Taunggyi, and Pindaya

I left Loikaw a little after 8 on the morning of the 2nd on a small bus heading northwest to Aungban, almost a hundred miles from Loikaw.  The bus at first retraced the route I had taken to Loikaw from Taungoo, skirting the big lake north of Loikaw and south of Inle Lake and rising from about 3000 feet elevation at the lakeside to 4000 feet and more in the hilly terrain further north.  The bus traveled slowly, with lots of stops for passengers to embark and disembark, but I enjoyed the journey.  Rice fields and other crop land were along the route, and we often passed the railroad tracks.  I had considered taking the train to Aungban, but it was scheduled to leave at 5:45.  We drove through a village market with dozens of Pa-O women in black clothes and their distinctive orange and black headscarves, wrapped around their heads like turbans.

About 11:30 we made a half hour lunch stop in Pinlaung, where I had a big lunch with a surprising amount of chicken (usually you just get maybe three little pieces), a bean and chicken soup, and a solitary vegetable dish.  The bus was all local folk but for me.  Videos were shown, the Burmese movies almost invariably with what I suppose are heart rending hospital scenes where one young lover stares down at his or her comatose lover.

North of Pinlaung the road rose to around 5000 feet through flatter, but still hilly, terrain with lots of cropland.  Just after 2 the bus had to make a brief stop as the train from Loikaw, with maybe five carriages, crossed the road.  About ten minutes later we arrived in Aungban, just about the same time as the train which had left Loikaw two and a half hours earlier.

Aungban is at about 4300 feet elevation and, after about a half hour wait, I took a pickup from there west to Kalaw, only about five miles away.  I checked into a hotel and then looked around the small town.  There were lots of foreign tourists around.  I walked past some beautiful pinkish purple flowering trees and bright red poinsettias to the old train station, where a sign gave the altitude as 4297 feet.  A couple of blocks away an electronic sign on a clocktower gave the elevation as 4315 feet, but Kalaw is not a completely level town.  I walked around some more and returned to the train station after 5 to see the train, with one upper class carriage and three ordinary class carriages, from Loikaw passing through on its way to Pyinmana.  Once again in Shan state, I ate Shan noodle soup and tea salad for dinner.

I took another walk about town the next morning and got to the train station at about 11.  Two trains were due to arrive about 11:30, one going east and one west.  I planned to take both eventually.  They arrived about noon, and after they left I headed south out of town for a walk in the pine covered countryside.  I passed several colonial era houses, constructed of brick and with chimneys, before reaching a big modern Catholic church, with the grave of an Italian priest just outside.  The priest had been born in 1907 and died in 2000 after arriving in Burma in 1931.  A big military enclosure is just beyond the church.  I was told the military confiscated lots of land for an officer's training school, here in the cool hills.  The Shan have been particularly resistant to the Burmese military.

From the church I walked to a hotel, partly in an old colonial bungalow, where I read the Burmese English language newspaper.  Interestingly, it seems all the Burmese language newspapers have titles in English, in Roman script.  Everything else is in Burmese language and script.  From the hotel I walked to Shwe Oo Min, a cave with golden stupas outside and Buddha statues by the hundreds inside.  Unfortunately, a pile of garbage, including lots of plastic, was being burned right at the cave entrance.

Further on I walked along part of the local golf course and paused to watch the play on one green.  The greens were green but the fairways were brown.  The golfers were all men (the Burmese military, I've read or been told, like to play golf) while the caddies were almost all young women.  From the golf course I walked to a pagoda on a hill with a 500 year old bamboo Buddha, all covered in gold, before getting back to town about 5.

The next morning was Kalaw's five day market.  It seems most towns and villages in the area have a particularly big market every five days in addition to the ordinary daily markets.  Lots of hill tribe people had come into town for the market.  I saw orange and black Pa-O headscarves in addition to other distinctive tribal dress.  It seems the fashion for many tribal women is to use what seem to be terrycloth towels for headscarves, usually wound up elaborately.  

About 11 I made my way to the train station.  My train arrived about an hour late and left about 12:30, heading east.  Traveling through scenic pine covered hills, it reach Aungban after about a half hour.  The train continued east through much flatter, but still rolling countryside, with lots of agriculture and many pines.  Two young parents and their four month year old baby sat facing me.  They were very careful and caring with him.  We passed the Heho airport at about 3800 feet, and then made a steep descent down a forested gulch along a dry creek bed.  Near the end the train made a wide loop, crossing under a trestle it had crossed over a few minutes before.  We reached Shwenyaung,on the flat lands further east, at about 3000 feet elevation, about 3:30.

All the other foreign tourists on the train headed to Nyaungshwe, seven miles south and the main town for visiting Inle Lake, but I took a pickup heading for Taunggyi, twelve miles further east.  Passing quite a few army bases on the way, the crowded pickup, with several people on the roof, zigzagged up the road that climbs the ridge to Taunggyi, the Shan state capital at about 4500 feet elevation.   I had been able to spot Taunggyi on its ridge on the train from Kalw.  Taunggyi is a relatively big city, with about 150,000 people.

The next morning about 9 I walked to the Flying Tiger Cheroot Factory, where about eight women were making cheroots in an upstairs wooden walled and floored room.  I spent about half an hour there watching them, and they seemed to enjoy having me there.  One woman gave me a little tour and the others happily posed for photos and seemed to enjoy looking at them afterwards.  Each woman had a basket-like tray with tobacco leaves, loose tobacco (mixed with other stuff), paper filters, scissors, and the other paraphernalia of her trade.  I watched a couple pulling out dry but still green tobacco leaves, about six inches in diameter, count out 30 of them, and then trim them altogether into leaves perhaps four inches in diameter. 

There were baskets full of leaves, one stack of baskets about ten feet high, and piles of maybe eight or ten inch long paper filters, made of newspaper.  Other women had already cut their leaves and were using a small wooden roller to roll the loose tobacco into a leaf, with a paper filter at the end, then rolling it all up tightly.  The paper filter and maybe some of the leaf was then trimmed.  The non-filter end is then pinched in.  I timed one woman and it took her 22 seconds to make a cheroot.  They are bound together in 50 cheroot packs.  I also saw one woman, just getting started after cutting her leaves, go to a large wooden box in the corner of the room and taking a shovel to scoop the loose tobacco onto her basket-like tray.

Afterwards, on the way to Taunggyi's five day market, I paused at a fire station to look over a bright red 1962 Toyota fire engine.  It had a wooden seat and a siren that required hand cranking.  The hoses looked decrepit.  The market was full of interesting people and stuff, and I didn't see another tourist there, quite unlike the market in Kalaw.  There were lots of hill tribe people, though.  I spent about two hours wandering around.  The market spilled out from a central area into the adjacent streets.  Among things I hadn't seen or noticed before, peanut oil and resinous pine were on sale.  Young women were pouring peanut oil into used plastic water bottles.  A man was slicing off pieces of very fragrant resinous pine.  He gave me a piece.  As usual, the people were very friendly.

I passed up the lunch stands in the market (in one I saw woman with a soup with a solitary chicken claw in it) to have lunch in a nearby restaurant.  A high school teacher from the town of Mong Hsu, 200 miles northeast of Taunggyi and near the Salween, or Thanlwin, River, joined me to practice his English.  He told me he teaches English, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology.  He said he was in Taunggyi for business and that it took him ten hours of driving to get there.  Foreigners are not allowed more than a few miles east of Taunggyi, because of insurgency and heroin cultivation, I think.  If you want to get to Kyaingtong (also known as Kengtung), where foreigners are allowed, near the northern border of Thailand, you have to fly, or enter from Thailand.  I stopped by the market again after lunch and then spent much of the rest of the afternoon in an internet cafe.

The next sunny but chilly morning I ate a delicious dim sum breakfast in an open air cafe just across from my hotel.  The dumplings were served in little round wooden containers.  They were heavy on pork and eggs and very tasty.  Afterwards I walked to the Shan State Museum, with hill tribe clothing, drums, and other stuff on display.  There are also some very interesting photos, including photos from the 1947 Panglong Conference.  At this conference representatives of the Shan, Chin, and Kachin agreed with Aung San, representing the Burmese dominated interim government just before independence in January 1948, to join the interim government, with certain rights reserved for the "Hill People," as they are called in the Panglong Agreement, also on display.  Under British rule, the British had directly ruled the lowland Burmese areas, while the hill regions were autonomous, left mainly to govern themselves.  The military governments after 1962 routinely suppressed the minority hill peoples, so the Panglong Agreement is a rallying cry for them.

I walked back to my hotel, passing a gold painted statue of Aung San in a little park on the way.  About noon I took a taxi to the bus stand and at 1:30 left on a small bus headed for Pindaya.  The bus zigzagged down the ridge the way I had come two days earlier, with good views of the wide valley below, though I couldn't see Inle Lake.  The bus headed west, more or less paralleling the train tracks upon which I had traveled two days before.  I saw the trestle at the railroad loop, as we began our ascent through the forested gulch, rising from 3000 feet at Shwenyaung to about 4000 after climbing through the ravine. We soon had a breakdown, though, which required about 40 minutes of repair.  Fortunately, it was at a scenic spot, with views of the valley below. 

Reaching Aungban, the bus turned north and traveled through intensely cultivated rolling hills at about 4000 feet elevation.  I saw some rice growing, and much else.  I also saw people threshing rice by hand.  Vehicles crowded with Pa-O and other hill tribe people passed by.  Nearing Pindaya the hills became particularly scenic. 

The bus reached Pindaya, a town of only about 5000 people, just after 5.  The sun had already set beyond the high hills just west of town.  Pindaya is on a small lake, at about 4000 feet elevation, with an important Buddhist cave complex southwest of town, about 500 feet up the ridge just west of town.  I walked around the lake before dark.  The cave complex, now with elevators to help people ascend the last part, was soon lit up like a casino.  Colored lights soon came on all around the lake.

Mornings are chilly at these elevations at this time of year, and the next morning I didn't get started walking to the Pindaya Caves until after 9:30.  I walked first along the west side of the lake, then to the southern end of town, and then along a road lined with huge banyan trees, with huge stacks of watermelon for sale underneath the far spreading branches.  A covered stairway took me up about four hundred feet.  (A road zigzagged just south.)  I skipped the elevators to take the final 130 steps to the cave mouth, where I arrived about 10:30. 

I had visited these caves in 1994, stopping on the way from Thazi to Inle Lake, and I remembered them as somewhat romantic, old stupas and statues of Buddha in a long, high cave.  The cave is still impressive, something like 490 feet long, with a turn to the right, and 150 feet high at its highest.  But the atmosphere of the cave has completely changed.  The floor is covered with what seem to be bathroom tiles, and all the stupsas and statues are heavily restored, or rebuilt, all looking new.  Many are newly built.  Almost everything is gold covered, and every statue and stupa seems to have names and dates inscribed, mostly in Burmese but many in English, on tablets under them.  I didn't see one date before 1999.  Among others, one had the names of a family from Venice, California and another the name of a Thai drug suppression unit.

There are supposed to be something like 9000 Buddhas, some centuries old, though you wouldn't know it.  Colored lights illuminate portions of the caves and statues, and it all looks like a Walt Disney Buddhaland, but without the good taste.  I kept expecting "I'ts a Small World" to break out on loudspeakers.  There a few stalactites and stalagmites and pools, and a few small "meditation caves."  It was all bizarrely interesting, but a disappointment compared to what I remembered.  I think there were more foreigners than local folks wandering around inside, almost all of them having arrived on a day trip from Inle Lake.

After about two hours inside, I walked to a 40 foot high sitting Buddha further along the ridge and then came back to the Pindaya Caves.  The views are good.  I could see the town of Pindaya, the lake, the countryside all around, and a forest of stupas just below the cave, near the foot of the long covered stairway I had ascended.  I sat and enjoyed the view for a while.  Just inside, in a little area decorated with Buddhist altars just in front of the cave mouth, a group of men were watching a television broadcast of a welterweight boxing championship from the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas.

I took the elevators down, then walked down the long stairway, passed through the banyan trees and watermelons, and reached town about 3 for a late lunch.  Later in the afternoon I walked along the lake to an old wooden monastery near the lake's northeastern end.  It was much more interesting than the Pindaya Caves.  The interior was filled with about fifteen old wooden altars, carved and decorated with gilt.  A monk, his head covered in his red robe, was asleep in the middle of the floor.  Next door a big, ugly, modern hall was full of reciting child monks.  An older monk came in and several monklets sitting together scattered to their original, well-spaced positions.  The older monk, himself maybe a teenager, went up to them one by one and slapped each one on the side of the head.  No one complained.  I sat by the lake until sunset, which was just before 5.  I walked a bit more in the quickly cooling evening air, stopping to watch a bullock cart with a water container on it being filled by buckets of water drawn by hand from a well, or something looking like a well, right next to the lake.

December 29, 2014 - January 1, 2015: Loikaw

On the morning of the 29th in Taungoo I was up at 5 and at 5:30 the kind manager of my hotel drove me to the bus stand for Loikaw, the capital of Kayah State, Burma's smallest and least populated state, with less than 300,000 people.  The small bus, with about 40 seats, left at 6:15, just as the sky was getting light.  The driver and his attendant were friendly Kayahs, as most of the passengers seemed to be.

Kayah State, wedged against Thailand's northwestern border, has only recently been opened for individual travelers.  It is generally east of Taungoo, but we had to travel north to access the newly paved road across the hills.  The video at the front of the bus played Kayah Christian music videos as we headed north.  A woman sang "O Holy Night" and a rock group played Christian rock music.  Later in the trip there was a pretty terrible movie and a music video featuring several songs sung by a tall albino with very white hair.  I was later told he is a very famous Kayah singer.  At the front of the bus, above the driver's head, "'I'm nothing without Jesus'" was painted.  The Kayah, like many of Burma's minority groups, are predominantly Christian, as are the Chins, Kachin, Karen and others.  Shan, Rakhine, and Mon, however, are predominantly Buddhist.

The sun rose over the hills to the east and we reached Naypyitaw's big, fairly modern bus station after about two hours.  We headed further north, passing a huge new modern stadium, built for the ASEAN games held in Burma in late 2013, and other big buildings. Nearing Tatkon, north of Naypyitaw, we finally turned onto the newly paved road that crosses the hills about three hours after leaving Taungoo.  Now heading southeast, we climbed rapidly on a narrow but well paved asphalt road into lovely wooded hills.  Soon we were in Shan state.  The bus went up and down over ridges, some parts of the road quite steep, rising to about 3000 feet, then descending to about 1500 feet.

About 10:30 we had a half hour meal stop at a little village where the road turned northeast.  We soon had a view of a reservoir in a wooded valley.  It must be a relatively recent one, as the electricity pylons near it had no wires.  We climbed to about 5000 feet elevation before descending to a river near the reservoir and crossing it on a large new bridge.  Heading further east the hills became much less forested and much more cultivated.

About 2 we reached the north-south road just south of the town of Pinlaung and turned south, heading southeast to Loikaw.  This is a much poorer road, a thin strip of bad asphalt that is dusty and more heavily trafficked than the road we had been on.  The landscape was dry but heavily cultivated. Eventually we had good views of the long blue lake (about 25 miles long, north to south, but much narrower, at its widest less than five miles) south of the more famous Inle Lake. Hills rise beyond it to its east and dry, harvested rice fields lay in front of it.

We stopped in a couple of small towns and drove right along the lake near its southern end, where my altimeter registered about 3150 feet.  South of the lake we soon reached the Kayah state border, crossed the river that flows into the lake, and shortly thereafter reached Loikaw just before 5.  Loikaw is in a wide flat valley, at about 3200 feet according to my altimeter, with hills in the distance.  Loikaw is a spread out town and on the way to my hotel in a taxi I spotted walking along the street the 70 year old German guy, Peter, that I had met in Taungoo.  We had dinner together that night in a restaurant on the river that runs through town.

The next morning after breakfast at the hotel the two of us left about 7 in a hired open air three wheeler heading south to Phruso to see the market.  The trip was cold in the morning air.  The countryside was relatively flat, with hills in the distance.  We passed through the town of Demoso about halfway to Phruso. The  terrain began to rise just before Phruso and I could see hills bunched up just south of town.  We reached Phruso (also spelled Hpruso, and with several other variations I've seen) about an hour after leaving Loikaw, but there was no morning market.  Disappointed, we did visit a big Catholic church, but there wasn't much else to see in town.

We headed back the way we had come, passing again through Demoso and again passing a reservoir just south of Demoso with fishermen in boats on it and hills to its east.  Just south of the reservoir we turned off the main road and headed southeast, reaching after about three miles a small pond called Umbrella Lake. Gas seeps out from under the shallow lake, creating minature mud volcanos that look like the tops of umbrellas.  One had formed and it indeed looked very like an umbrella.  It had a hole at the apex.  Others were forming and you could spot gas bubbles now and then.  Our driver told us they last a day or two.

The area around the pond was very scenic, with cows munching rice stuble in front of not too distant hills. Women were collecting big bundles of rice straw, from where it had been threshed, I suppose, and carrying it a hundred or so feet away to a place where it was spread out on the ground.  I suppose that is to dry it before storing it for animal feed, but that is just a guess.

From Umbrella Lake we headed southeast and then south a further seven or so miles to a scenic spot called Seven Lakes, with seven little lakes huddled against some low wooded hills.  Some of the leaves on the trees on the hills were turning color, red and yellow.  From there we headed back for Loikaw, reaching it about noon.

After lunch I took a walk around town.  I first walked to the former palace of the sao pha, or local prince, only a couple of blocks from my hotel.  It is an impressive wooden building, now a monastery.  Inside are photos of it over the years, along with photos of several of the sao phas, and the lovely young wife of the last one.  The palace was built in 1912-1916, and there are some wonderful photos of it at that time or soon after.  By 1994 it was in ruins, and there are photos of it then, too.  In that year the descendents of the last sao pha, his son and daughter, I think,  gave it to the monastery, which apparently completely rebuilt it in 2002, with some changes from the original.

I climbed the stairs and wandered around inside, listening to about seven child monks reciting in the big hall in the back.  Three or four others were reciting on a side balcony.   From there I walked to a nearby gaudy monastery called Taung Kwe set atop several almost vertical limestone outcrops right in town.  I was surprised to find an elevator at the back that took me to the top.  The views over the town and the surrounding plains were good, but the buildings not so impressive.  From the top I could see other pagodas on hills southeast of town.

I then walked to the railroad station to check out the daily train (leaving at 5:45 in the morning) heading north, and from there along the river to Loikaw's downtown, such as it is.  The local people seemed shy, but friendly.

After breakfast the next morning I walked again to the palace converted to a monastery. The young monks chanting in the main hall seemed to welcome the diversion I presented.  Later I headed north through town in search of the state museum.  I walked north across the river, then past a lake, one of two in town.  I spent a few minutes walking through the work in progress called Kayah Landmarks Park, with cement representations of Taung Kwe, Umbrella Lake, Seven Lakes, and a massive hydroelectric site.

It took me a while to find the museum.  Finally, a government worker took me the last few blocks on his motorcycle.  They had to unlock it for me (later a group of monks joined me) and it was fairly interesting, with mannequins sporting the clothes of each of Kayah's nine different tribes, including the Padaung, whose women wear a massive set of heavy metal rings around their necks, which depress their shoulders and upper rib cages.  I've read that can weigh up to fifty pounds.  In some cases their long necks can no longer support their heads without the rings.  The museum had some good photos of them, and displays of the rings, plus other stuff, such as metal drums and guns fashioned out of metal and wood.  Also on display were two of the largest cowbells I have ever seen, made of iron and hard wood. They were about a foot long and quite heavy.  Several other cowbells were on display.  I guess the Kayah have a fever for cowbells.

I bought some cookies and water from a simple store for lunch and walked to the two big Catholic churches, one built in the 1930's and an even bigger one built just a few years ago.  The friendly head priest spotted me looking around and invited me into his office for coffee and cookies.  He spoke good English and was very interesting about Loikaw and the Kayah.  He told me there are five Catholic parishes in town.

From the churches I started walking out of town to some traditional Kayah poles set together in a sort of outdoor museum northeast of town.  I asked directions from a guy on a motorcycle and he gave me a lift there.  Some of the poles are quite high, maybe 30 or 40 feet, and there must have been 40 or 50 of them all together.  Many have emblems on top.  He told me each village has a distinctive pole, but didn't really know much about them.

While I was there, a very friendly little girl, maybe about 7 or 8, in a very frilly orange dress and with yellow thanaka all over her face, came over to see me.  She skipped all around and happily posed for photos. She had two older sisters, maybe young teenagers, who were much more shy and kept their distance, except when one came to get the young sister.  A brother a little older than the youngest sister soon showed up, and eventually the two older sisters gathered their courage and came over.  I even got them to submit to a few photographs, which they seemed to find hilarious.

t took me about an hour to walk back to the hotel from the poles, but it was a mostly pleasant late afternoon walk.  Peter had flown to Yangon that afternoon, but I had dinner with another German who had arrived that morning and who had traveled extensively in northeast India, where I plan to head after Burma.  That night was New Year's Eve, but I went to bed about 10:30.  I did hear some fireworks now and then, and a whole bunch of them at midnight.  Soon after midnight it was very quiet.

I spent a good portion of the next day in an internet cafe.  They have been few and far between in the places I have traveled in Burma this year.  Until this one in Loikaw, I hadn't found one with a connection for almost three weeks.  Wifi is taking over, though often the wifi connection is bad, I've been told.

I had a late lunch on the river and then about 3:30 set off for the pagodas on the hills southeast of town. Without too much difficulty I found the right path, passing a surprisingly friendly bunch of about ten pink clad young nuns with shaved heads.  They waved as I approached and posed for photos.

I walked to the pagoda furthest south, with reputedly the best view, about a 45 minute walk.  It is set upon a hill, a steep climb, though only about 300 feet above the town.  The views from the top of the town, the other pagodas, and the surrounding plains and hills were very nice.  Just to the southwest is a huge new modern building, the Loikaw Institute of Technology.  A very good speaking Kayah guy also at the pagoda at sunset told me the institute has no computers.  Sunset was just before 5:30.  Reaching town just after dark, I passed by the Taung Kwe pagoda all lit up with strings of multi-colored lights.

December 25-28, 2014: Naypyitaw and Taungoo

In Thazi on the 25th, I walked to the train station about 8:30 on a sunny Christmas morning.  I bought an upper class ticket to Naypyitaw, the new capital, for about two dollars and the train from Mandalay arrived right on time, at 8:52.  I enjoyed the train ride south.  There were both cropland and scrub land to be seen, with hills in the hazy distance to the east.  I saw bullock carts and people threshing rice.  I ate some quail eggs and then ordered lunch about 11 from a white coated attendant from the dining car, which was in front of mine.  It arrived on an actual plate, rather than in a styrofoam box, and was very good. 

The train arrived at the huge new Naypyitaw station at noon, only ten minutes late.  Few others got off, and the lack of people made the cavernous station seem even bigger than it is.  The station appears to be out in the middle of nowhere and is in fact miles from the city center. 

In 2005 Burma's military government relocated the capital from Yangon to this barren expanse about half way between Yangon and Mandalay.  The name translates into "Royal City of the Sun."  While government offices have relocated here, foreign embassies are still in Yangon.  Naypyitaw is built in a ridiculous grandiose style, which is the reason I wanted to see it. 

At the train station I hired a somewhat English speaking motorcycle taxi driver to take me to a hotel.  From the station we drove west over a small range of hills on a deserted multi-lane divided street and cruised through what is known as Hotel Zone 2, full of widely spaced big hotels in a hilly area.  Eventually, the motorcycle driver and I agreed to take a tour of the city before checking into a hotel.  With my backpack wedged into the slot between the driver and the handlebars he drove me around to see some of the sights of the capital. 

We first headed south several miles on a divided eight lane road through hilly, mostly deserted countryside to Uppatasanti Paya, a huge pagoda built by General Than Shwe, the venial former military dictator, and his wife.  Along the way we passed walled compounds with gates and military insignia at the entrances.  I couldn't see anything but trees beyond the walls.  Most of the land on the way was farm land or scrub.

The pagoda is 321 feet high, one foot lower than Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon.  An elevator took me and some Burmese up to the platform on which it rests.  Apparently shoddily constructed, the exterior was covered with scaffolding and undergoing repairs.  The cavernous interior, however, was impressive, with a huge central altar and carved stone walls illustrating Buddha's life.  I think there were a hundred or so people praying or milling around inside, with no other foreigners but me.

I eventually walked out into the bright sunshine and down the long flight of stairs on the east to the elephant pens opposite the stairs.  In the pens were five white elephants, held sacred by the Burmese.  They are albinos and actually look more pink than white, though their sparse hair is clearly white.  Elephants are expensive to maintain, and white elephants, being sacred, were never put to work.  Hence the British came to use the term "white elephant" for something extremely costly and without much use. 

I had seen elephants with some patches of white before, but these were the first completely white elephants I had ever seen.  I spent quite a while watching them.  There seemed to be two white males in a pen by themselves, a white female and a white calf in another pen, and a white female and a normal colored calf in another pen.  Another normal colored calf was chained next to one of the pens.  The contrast between the normal gray colored elephants and the white elephants was quite startling.  I watched them eat and move around, and enjoyed it. 

Back on the motorcycle we headed to the grandiose Parliament building.  Our eight lane divided road became a twelve lane divided road, and then a sixteen lane divided road.  The dividers are wide, maybe 20 feet in width, and grassy, with palms and other trees planted on them.  In places dirt from the adjacent fields had blown onto some of the lanes, and young women with brooms were sweeping the dirt off.  The streets were almost barren of other vehicles.  Some intersections were roundabouts with huge concrete lotuses in the center.

Nearing the Parliament the sixteen lane divided road became an undivided twenty lane road.  We passed a reviewing stand for the annual January 4th independence day parade, stopped at a check point, and then reached the huge gated Parliament building.  A high fence stands in front, with two bridges leading to the building.  The building faces east and so was back lit by the afternoon sun.  It also looked deserted.  Christmas is a national holiday in Burma.  My driver told me tourists can enter, but you have to apply three days in advance.

I took a couple of photos of the distant, back lit building.  A guard came out from the gate, but had no objections.  We spent maybe ten or fifteen minutes there.  One or two cars came by.  I took the opportunity to walk across twenty lanes of road without worrying about traffic.  The road, from well before the reviewing stand, was lined with all sorts of flags, some from countries, but others seemed to be from businesses. 

We headed back the way we had come and stopped at the reviewing stand, being spruced up by workers who seemed amused that I was there.  The Independence Day parade was only ten days later.  We headed next to a waterpark, which was uninteresting and very poorly built. 

On our way back to Hotel Zone 2 we took a different route, passing a subdivision of big two story houses that the driver said were for generals.  We passed about eight or ten commercial buildings of the same design in a row, banks and construction companies among them.  We passed some more apparently well built homes and I saw a sign for a mall.  But I saw nothing that looked like part of a busy capital city. 

My driver took me to the Jade City Hotel, where I got a very nice room, probably the nicest I've had in Burma, for $20.  The main hotel building was nine stories high (with $30 rooms), while my four story block was next door.  Next to my building another nine story building was being constructed.  However, I think I was the only customer. 

From my hotel I took about an hour walk before dark along the wide divided street in front of my hotel, passing several other widely spaced big hotels and others under construction.  The area was hilly, with only hotels and scrub.  Few cars came by.  In front of the Great Wall Hotel, with a crenelated roof,  the manager was taking an evening stroll and I talked with him for a while.  He told me he had no guests that night, one reservation for the next night, and four for New Year's Eve.  He told me he did have 42 guests for three days in November during the ASEAN conference.  He told me Hotel Zones 1 and 3, further south, get most of the customers because Hotel Zone 2 is too far north. 

I was the only one eating in the big dining room in my hotel that night.  The big lobby was empty.  Four or five young women sat behind the reception desk, most of them looking at their phones.  Smartphones are not quite as ubiquitous in Burma as elsewhere, but they are not rare.

The next morning after 7 I took a motorcycle taxi through the hills to the train station, about ten minutes away.  The early morning air was chilly.  According to my altimeter, my hotel was 800 or so feet in elevation.  The train station was lower, 400 or 500 feet.  I bought my upper class ticket for Taungoo, for about $1.65, and then checked out the old locomotive on display in the vast entry hall of the station.

My train, starting from Naypyitaw and heading to Yangon, left promptly at 8.  It wasn't very full, though a lot of people got on at the Pyinmana station about 25 minutes later.  Heading south, we passed harvested rice and other crops, and villages and towns.  The land was flat, with hills to the east. 

The train reached Taungoo about 11, at about 19 degrees north latitude, which should be as far south as I get in Burma this year.  From the old, run down station, quite a contrast to Naypyitaw's, I took a motorcycle taxi about a mile and a half south to a guest house on the southern edge of town, with harvested rice fields just to its east.  I checked in and ate a big lunch before setting out about 1 on a path through the rice fields to a nearby village. 

I strolled through the narrow, dirt, tree shaded lanes of the village.  I watched some young men constructing house walls from strips of bamboo and some young and older women making cheroots.  The women brought out a little bench for me to sit on while I watched them at work.  From big flat baskets full of tobacco and other ingredients unknown to me, they quickly stuffed some of the material, along with a filter made of rolled up newspaper, into a tobacco leaf, which they rolled up.  They trimmed the filters and parts of the cheroot with big scissors, working very fast, making a cheroot in well less than a minute, perhaps in about thirty seconds.

From that village I walked on a path further east, passing through farmland and other, much smaller, villages.  To my right a slow stream maybe a hundred feet wide flowed.  Not only vegetables but also patches of flowers grew along the way.  In the furthest village I reached I saw a huge sleeping sow, which must have weighed hundreds of pounds, with nine piglets.  Eight were about two feet in length, but one, the runt of the litter, was only half as long.  Apparently already having eaten, the piglets all slept huddled together.  A villager led me to another huge sow in a pen, with eight much younger piglets, perhaps newborn.  They were maybe a foot in length and all struggling against each other to feed from their mother.

The next morning I had the big breakfast provided by the guest house, with more than twenty dishes, including samosas, pancakes with honey, lots of fruit (papaya, watermelon, apples, oranges, and bananas), and all sorts of local starchy dishes, some sweet and some savory. 

After breakfast and sitting around until almost noon I strolled into town with a very tall German tourist, who was well over six and a half feet tall, named Felix.  On the way we passed several little girls, perhaps about six or eight years old, all dressed up like Burmese princesses in preparation for a week or two in a nunnery, where they get their heads shaved.  I have been told that this is a Buddhist rite of passage here in Burma for both boys and girls.  They looked a little scared.  At times they were carried by their fathers.  Their mothers and other relatives, all dressed up, were sitting in the back of a pick up.  The adults were all very friendly and invited us into a compound where two persons in an brightly colored elephant suit danced.  Eventually, they all headed off in their vehicles, to the monastery I presume, while we continued on our way to the town center.

We walked through the train station and a couple of monasteries before reaching a lake where we had lunch.  Taungoo was the capital of a Burmese kingdom founded in the early 16th century, but it seems nothing remains.  What remained of the palace was destroyed in World War II.  We did see many colonial era buildings, now falling apart.  An old mosque, quite impressive, was all boarded up, with a high wall around it and trees growing on the building.  I noticed that one wooden shutter in a window was covered with termite residue.   

Another impressive two story mansion was roofless.  We could walk into the former rooms, overgrown now with bushes.  Trees grew on the tops and sides of the walls.  I wonder how the trees managed to root on the vertical walls.  Inside, you could see where the second story wooden floor beams were once inserted into the brick walls.  The building had very high ceilings.  Along the wall between the mansion and the street, three elephant statues stood guard, their front feet outside the wall and their back feet inside.  Later on, we came across another abandoned large mosque.  Much of Burma's Indian population, along with many Chinese, were forced out in the 1960's.  The people were very friendly to us, and astounded by Felix' height. 

At nightfall I headed back to the hotel on a motorcycle while Felix continued to walk around.  On the way back I found a hotel I had been unsuccessfully looking for, with information on a bus to Loikaw, where I wanted to go next.  A German guy was headed there the next day.  He had been in Loikaw twice before and I had dinner with him.  It turned out that this was his 24th trip to Burma and he has been all over.

I had the splendid breakfast the next morning over the course of about two hours.  Felix was heading towards Bagan that day and I moved to the hotel where the manager could get me a ticket on the next day's bus to Loikaw.  After lunch, about 2:30, I started off on another walk along the rural route I had taken two days before.  Women were picking big bunches of flowers from the flower patches.  I also watched some of the folks working in the vegetable patches along the river.  The kids and adults were very friendly along the way. 

I didn't walk as far as on the first day.  I turned back after watching a man and his wife working on a big pile of red, dry flowers.  The man, thin, muscular and bare chested, wearing a longyi and a conical hat, was sifting the flowers with an almost flat straw basket about a foot wide.  His wife, fat and ugly, with a big wad of betel nut in her mouth, was meticulously sifting with a similar basket what appeared to be very small seeds from the flowers. 

On my way back, while talking with some friendly kids, a young guy came running through the fields up to me and said, "Come see my vegetables.  Very beautiful."  It was getting late and I politely declined and continued back towards my hotel.  I did stop to watch a guy watering his vegetables right next to the path, using water cans which he filled from a pump.  I got back after dark, a little after 6.

December 23-24, 2014: Hsipaw to Mandalay to Thazi

From Hsipaw I wanted to head south to the Inle Lake area, and hoped to take a bus south on a road to Taunggyi, but found out the buses don't travel that road because of its very poor condition.  There are overnight buses via the road to Mandalay, but I don't like overnight buses.  So on the foggy morning of the 23rd I walked to the train station to take the enjoyable train ride back the way I had come.  On the way to the station I came across two guys cutting strips of bamboo with machetes and then weaving the strips into a pattern that is often used for the walls of houses.  It was very interesting to watch how expertly they cut the bamboo.  They used not only their hands but also their feet for the weaving.

About 30 other tourists were waiting for the train at the station.  My upper class ticket cost about $2.75 to Pyin Oo Lwin.  The train, coming from Lashio, arrived two minutes before its 9:15 scheduled arrival time and left right on time, 9:25.  The morning fog had mostly lifted by then.  The train consisted of a diesel locomotive, two upper class carriages, three ordinary class carriages (with wooden bench seats), and two boxcars at the end.  Two little kids, a girl about six and a boy about ten, sat right in front of me.  Both were bundled up with coats and wool hats and both had thanaka on their faces.  They were shy, but friendly.  They were traveling alone and got off at Kyaukme.

I again enjoyed the journey.  We reached Kyaukme at 11, where I had a chicken, vegetables, and rice lunch right on the platform during our 25 minute stop.  The train kept pretty much on time until the station just before the Gokteik Viaduct, where we were delayed about a half hour waiting for the train coming the other direction.

We crossed the Gokteik Viaduct about 1:30.  This time the train, traveling very slowly over the viaduct, shuddered to a stop just before reaching the other side, and then started up again.  That was a little unnerving, as there is no railing and a long drop down into the canyon.  Once we had crossed I could spot the tunnel entrances in the cliffs across the canyon, which I hadn't noticed when I first crossed the viaduct more than a week earlier.

We reached Pyin Oo Lwin about 4:30, a little less than a half hour late.  The train makes a long stop in Pyin Oo Lwin, before heading down to Mandalay, with a scheduled arrival time of 10:40.  All the tourists got off at Pyin Oo Lwin.  Several hopped in the open air pick up for the ride to Mandalay.  I considered spending the night in Pyin Oo Lwin, at about 3500 feet elevation, but preferred the warmer climate of Mandalay, at only 250 feet elevation.  I didn't particularly want to take a chilly ride in a pickup, though.  However, two other tourists and I chartered a taxi to take us to Mandalay for about $25.  It cost us each about four times the pick up fare, but was much more enjoyable.  The taxi driver stopped at a particularly scenic spot so we could see the very orange sunset over the hazy plains below.

We reached Mandalay in the dark just after six.  The taxi driver drove right along the lit up south wall of the palace and dropped us off near our hotels.  I had been a little worried about finding a hotel room in this busy Christmas-New Year tourist season, but got one at the second hotel I went to.  The night air felt warm compared to the hills.  The restaurant I ate dinner in was chock full of tourists.

The next morning about 10 I took a motorcycle taxi about 20 to 25 minutes south to the main bus station area and upon arrival immediately got a seat in the front of a bus headed south to Meiktila.  The small bus left about 10:45 and was soon jammed full of people, with several seated on the roof.  But I was comfortable in my seat at the front across from the driver.  The bus drove through the roundabout that marks the northern end of the new Yangon-Mandalay expressway, but took the old highway south.  We soon crossed the river that flows through Hsipaw.

The road didn't have a lot of traffic and I enjoyed the trip.  In places the road has been widened from what I remember from traveling on it in 1994.  We made lots of stops to drop off and take on passengers as we passed by already harvested rice fields, other crop land, and several towns.  I have been told that the Irrawaddy Valley has two rice crops a year, compared to only one per year in the hills, but I didn't see any newly planted rice.  I guess it is too early, with the harvesting just being done.  There are lots of trees along the route, and I saw lots of bullock carts and even some pony carts.

We reached Meiktila about 2, where I boarded an open air but roofed pick up jammed with cargo.  Four middle aged ladies, laden with their own shopping goods, and I sat on boxes at the end of the pick up bed as we left about 2:30.  It took only about 45 minutes to reach the small town of Thazi, a railroad junction east of Meiktila.  I was dropped off right in front of the Moonlight Hotel, which I think is the hotel I stayed in three times in 1994.  That year five of us banded together upon arrival in Yangon and hired a van, driver, and guide, as the public transportation was terrible then.  On our twelve day trip (from Yangon to Bagan, Mandalay, Pyin Oo Lwin, and Inle Lake before heading back to Yangon) we spent three nights at this junction town because it had a very cheap hotel.

The town seems, and I'm sure is, much bigger and busier now.  I walked to the train station, with a sign indicating the elevation is 700 feet, to check train schedules, and then walked around the friendly town.  Some young men were playing barefooted soccer.  I found two old, but newly and brightly painted, locomotives on display a little north of the train station.  One was small and looked like it dated from the 19th century.  The other was huge, with a coal tender on one end and a water tank on the other, something I've never seen before.  It had a plaque that was heavily painted, but I could make out the year "1943."  Nearby was a dilapidated old wooden private car.  I could open the door and see the old kitchen, but the interior door was locked.  A guy from the railroad yard told me there is also a bath room and a bedroom/sitting room.

I walked back to the train station just in time to see the 17:48 train from Mandalay to Yangon arrive, right on time, with many carriages and passengers.  That night a loudspeaker near my hotel loudly blared music and what I suppose was a sermon until just after midnight.  I think it might have been a Christmas Eve service.  

December 21-22, 2014: Palaung Hill Tribe Trek

I had hoped to go on a three day trek (with less walking each day and more time in villages) in the hills near Hsipaw, but upon my return to Hsipaw only a two day trek was leaving on the 21st.  So at about 8 that morning I set off with four other tourists and a Shan guide, all in their 20's.  The other tourists were friendly but seemed oddly uninterested in the culture of the Palaungs.  The guide was excellent, knowledgeable about not only the Palaungs and the Shan, but Burma in general. 

Hsipaw was cloudy and foggy as we first visited a noodle making factory in town and then headed out of town on the dirt road through the rice fields I had walked days earlier.  The sun didn't come out until after 9.  After reaching the cemeteries we headed northwest into the hills, climbing from about 1500 feet elevation at Hsipaw to about 4000 feet over the next four hours.  The guide told me we walked about nine miles.  We walked on paths and dirt roads into the mostly tree-covered hills, with some crop land and lots of wildflowers along the way, and with some good views over the hills.

Shortly after noon we reached the Palaung village of Pankam, with several huge banyan trees at the entrance to the village. The Palaung are a hill tribe found all around this area.  The village, the guide told me, has 122 houses.  He said most of the men were out in the fields, because November and December are the rice and corn harvest months, when the men spend all day in the fields working and usually even sleep there rather than return to the village at night.

We stopped at a big wooden house on stilts, where we had a delicious lunch, maybe the best meal I've had in Burma, in the central room, with a clay fire pit in the floor.  Except for eggs, the meal was all vegetarian, with tea salad (crunchy with peanuts and some sort of other crunchy things), taro and cucumber soup, pumpkin (particularly good), and a mustard leaf soup.  The woman of the house was in traditional dress, and big purple rubber boots that matched the purple in her clothes.

After lunch I walked around the village, visiting the monastery and a nat shrine, among other places.  A few children were playing, and I saw some monks, but only a few other people.  An old man came along leading a water buffalo on a leash.  Back at the house a man was picking through tea leaves drying outside, removing small stones and sticks.  Our guide showed us the hand operated wooden equipment used for processing the tea, which is grown near the village. 

We left that pretty village about 2, heading southwest.  I kept looking for well manicured tea plantations, but saw none.  I asked our guide and he told me the tea plants aren't trimmed as they are elsewhere, but grow almost in a wild state.  He pointed out one that I hadn't even recognized. 

We descended from Pankam, dropping about 800 feet through a beautiful forest, much of the path along a creek, with lots of bamboo growing.  The air was a little chilly in the gloom of the forest.  We eventually crossed the creek and made a steep ascent on the other side, climbing about 500 feet, and then walked through cornfields, arriving at a Shan village about 4 or 4:30. 

After a short rest we set off for another 40 minutes or so before we reached the Palaung village of Manloi, about seven miles from Pankam, where we were to spend the night.  Several bullock carts passed us on the way.  Pankam is at about 3700 feet elevation, at least at the bottom of the village by my altimeter, with three big banyan trees at the village entrance.  We stopped in at the wooden house on stilts where we were to spend the night, and then walked up a steep, partially stone paved lane to the top of the village, quite a steep climb, where there is a monastery.  The sun had set and the western sky was all rosy from the top of the village. 

Inside the big wooden monastery about twelve monks were chanting in front of the main altar.  A woman dressed all in white with some kind of offering knelt behind them.  Near her a mother and child were also praying.  I stood and watched and listened for a while, and then talked with a couple of the young monks. 

We walked down to the house in the dark.  Mattresses were laid out in the big room for us to sleep on.  In an adjacent smaller room a fire was burning in a clay pit.  I went to sit in there.  The woman of the house was cooking over the fire.  As soon as I sat down on the wooden floor her three year old son sat himself very comfortably on my lap.  He had a little bag of tart candy which he shared with me, though at first I was a little wary of taking the candy he handed me with his dirty hands.  He was very generous, giving me almost half of it.  It seemed to amuse him that I murmured "mmm, mmm" after every piece.  He was a very friendly little kid.

Two pink-clad nuns also sat by the fire.  The guide, who came in later to sit by the fire, told me one was the sister of the man of the house.  The mother also held a three month old son while cooking, though she occasionally handed him off to this aunt.  The room was smoky and the guide helped me talk to the nun, who had come to visit from a nunnery in the north, at Kawlin. 

The father, having heard he had guests, returned from the corn fields.  The guide told me he goes to a different house every trip, to spread the tourist money around the village more equitably.  He also told me the corn is all for export, to China, where it is used for animal feed, and that corn cultivation for export has resulted in considerably more deforestation and less tea growing.

We had a very good dinner, which was eaten in the big room where we were to sleep.  The house had solar panels which were hooked up to a battery about the size of a car battery, which powered a fluorescent light bulb.  After dinner I once again sat by the smoky fire until going to bed shortly after 8:30.  I did glance at the starry, cold night sky before going to bed.  I slept comfortably, with two blankets, which kept me warm enough. 

The baby started to cry about 5:30 the next morning, when the family got up in the darkness.  I got up about an hour later and was pleased to see it was a sunny morning.  The guide told me Hsipaw is cloudy and foggy in the morning because of the river.  I walked around outside, watching a woman sweeping leaves off the dirt lane under the banyan trees.  The village was quiet in the morning.  I saw the nun I had talked to the night before praying at the little Buddhist altar room in the house we stayed in, and then head off somewhere with an offering.

We ate a good and filling breakfast, with eggs, vegetables, rice, and tea, about 8.  A little before 9 we said our goodbyes to the very friendly family and made our way out of the village, past a field of yellow mustard or rape, heading southeast.  At the edge of the village the nun with the offering was praying in front of a stupa.  I took a few photos of her on her knees bowing in front of the stupa.  As I turned to go, I heard her say something and she was standing and waving goodbye.  She stood and smiled as I took her photo, quite unusual for a nun in my experience here.   

We soon turned south, traveling mostly through cornfields, with little forest, and mostly on dirt roads, not paths.  We also passed lots of harvested rice fields and lots of wildflowers, yellow and violet.  I stopped at one field with sunflowers, in various stages of ripening.  I could pry out the sunflower seeds from one of them.  My feet were blistered and hurting, as my shoes were new and I had been wearing solely sandals on this trip. 

About 11 we reached a Shan village at about 2500 feet, where we took a short break.  From there we headed east, making a steep descent on a poor dirt road.  To our left were red cliffs; to our right a valley.  Shortly before 1 we stopped at a nat shrine, with carved wooden horses, under a grove of trees, at about 1600 feet, according to my altimeter. 

Our guide went ahead and came back with a three wheeler.  We all piled in the back and bounced along the poor road through a village and eventually to the main road that leads to Mandalay.  We drove along that until we turned off to a hot springs, where the hot water filled two ugly concrete pools, one for men and one for women. I skipped the hot springs and ate a lunch of Shan noodles, pork rinds, tea salad, and tea and coffee.  About 3 we got back to Hsipaw, where I was very glad to place my blistered feet once again in sandals.  After relaxing the rest of the afternoon and once again eating dinner on the river, I washed my very dirty clothes that evening.

December 16-20, 2014: Hsipaw and Muse

In Kyaukme the morning of the 16th, I took an early morning walk, starting about 7, through the just starting morning street market.  I was cold in the early morning chill, and felt sorry for the barefooted monks, mostly children, going from shop to shop for alms on the cold streets.  Most people were warmly bundled up in coats and wool hats.  Several motorcycles were heavily burdened with vegetables and other stuff from the market, much of the merchandise in small plastic bags hanging from the sides or back of the motorcycle.  These motorcycles are driven around town or out to villages and serve as mobile markets.  I also wandered through Kyaukme's large indoor market before eating a breakfast of hot Shan noodle soup and tea.  After breakfast the town had warmed up some, and I walked around some more.

About 11:30 a young guy from the hotel led me to the bus stand for Hsipaw, where we sat in a tea shop drinking tea for an hour and a half before the noon bus left at about 1.  Besides passengers, the small bus was crammed full of eggs in cardboard trays (about 3000 eggs, I estimated), wooden crates of betel nut, and other stuff.  It took about an hour to reach Hsipaw to the northeast, crossing the train tracks at least twice along the way, along with a river.  Hsipaw, surrounded by hills, is about 1500 feet elevation.  I checked into Mr. Charles Guest House, now a big complex catering to tourists who come here to trek in the hills.  In the lobby is a photo of Mr. Charles with his family at his son's wedding to a very beautiful woman.  In the photo Mr. Charles wears a white suit and a black cowboy hat.

I walked to the train station.  The Mandalay train had just arrived, only about 20 minutes late.  I watched some local folks unload huge bundles from a small boxcar at the back of the passenger train.  The train station is in a lovely location, surrounded by huge rain trees.  I hung around until after the train, its upper class carriages now empty of foreigners, departed for Lashio, further northeast.

I walked to the wide river, maybe 500 feet wide, that flows along the edge of town.  This river, the Dokhtawady, eventually flows into the Irrawaddy just south of Mandalay.  Just before reaching the river, I passed by some old colonial era godowns, or warehouses, and a big banyan tree right on the river with nat (spirit) shrines all around it.  I walked through a late afternoon street market along the river and then retraced my steps to an outdoor restaurant right on the river, with good views of the river and hills both down and up river.  I ate dinner there about 5, as the sun set.  One of the very nice waitresses wore a red and white Santa Claus hat.  For about four dollars, a little high for Burma, I had a very good dinner of fish in oyster sauce over rice, while incense burned around my table.  It was a little chilly on the river, and I felt a cold coming on, so I walked back to my hotel about 6, at dark.

My cold was in full force the next morning.  After a slow start to the morning, I started a walk to a waterfall in mid morning under a sunny sky.  It had been foggy earlier in the morning.  I was sneezing and sniffling as I walked on a dirt road southwest from town through harvested rice paddies.  Stacks of harvested rice were everywhere.  Beyond the ice paddies I reached cemeteries, one for Buddhists, another for Chinese, and another for Muslims.  Beyond the cemeteries, on the crest of a slight hill, I sighted the waterfall, more than a hundred feet high, across a little valley.  The dirt road turned into a path, passing simple houses and crop land.  Corn and bananas grew, along with lots of wildflowers, yellow, violet, and red.

A short final steep climb took me to the base of the waterfall, composed of at least seven strands of water tumbling into a pool, with a sort of small cavern behind the waterfall.  To the left a path led to a nat shrine in a shallow cavern under the rocky cliffs.  Small red flags hung all about it.  Inside the wooden palisade were altars, a carved wooden horse maybe five feet high, and some representations of weapons, including guns, carved in wood.

I spent about an hour at the waterfall and shrine, and then headed back to town the way I had come.  It took me about two hours to get back, with a few stops.  The skies had clouded up and there were even a few drops of rain, very unusual in the dry season.  For a long time I watched men using a portable threshing machine to separate rice from its stalks.  From a stack men fed big bundles of rice stalks into the machine, which shook the rice kernels loose and dropped then into baskets held underneath.  The baskets when full were poured into big sacks.  The now unburdened stalks were shot off into the air, landing into a pile a few feet away. The men seemed amused that I was watching and taking photos of what they were doing.  Once finished, they moved on to the next stack.  I got back to the hotel about 3 and sat on the balcony chatting with other tourists until about 5, when I went back to the river restaurant for dinner.  During the night there were a couple of brief, but hard rainstorms.

In the morning the ground was wet and the sky cloudy.  The sun didn't come out for good until early afternoon.  About 9 I set out on a walk and didn't return to the hotel until about 4.  I walked first to the former palace of the last sao pha (Shan for "sky lord"), or local Shan prince, of Hsipaw, on the northern edge of town.  The now decrepit mansion was built in 1924 for an Oxford educated son of the then sao pha, who didn't want to live in his father's wooden palace, which was nearby but later destroyed in World War II.

I looked around a bit outside before being invited into the sitting room on one side of the building by a woman probably in her 60's.  She told me her name was Fern and that her husband is the nephew of the last sao pha.  This last sao pha, a brother of the one who built the mansion, who died without children, disappeared after being arrested at the time of the 1962 coup.  The government has always denied that he was even arrested.

He had been educated in Denver, Colorado, at the Colorado College of Mining, where he met and married a Fulbright scholar from Austria.  They returned to Hsipaw in 1954, where she converted to Buddhism and had two children, both girls.  There are many wonderful old photos in the sitting room, and they seemed to live a very happy life until 1962.  The wife and daughters, their lives made very difficult by the ruling junta, left for the United States in 1964, when the girls were 8 and 6, and they haven't returned.  (In Mr. Charles Guest House is a photo taken recently of the two daughters.)  In 1994 the wife, by then remarried, wrote a book about her experiences, which Fern let me look through.  I spent about two hours there, most of it talking with her, and she was very knowledgeable and interesting.  Eventually, several other tourists also showed up.

From the palace I walked further north, and then west, to another nat shrine, with some very friendly little kids around it.  Further west are some ruined stupas, one with a tree growing on top.  Even further west are two teak monasteries on stilts.  Outside of one of them, a young monk was building a shelf case, cutting rough boards with a saw and then nailing them together.  The larger monastery, built in 1848, has a Buddha made of bamboo as the centerpiece of its altar.  The interior of the monastery contains 142 teak pillars and on the wooden floor several child monks sat reciting under the supervision of an old monk sitting on a bench and smoking a cheroot.  Both monasteries were old and rickety.

I walked back towards town and again passed the palace about 2, but instead of heading back to town I took a road that headed east, eventually along the river.  It took me past harvested rice paddies filled with rice stacks, vegetable patches, and then along simple houses in a very nice tree shaded village along the river.  Eventually I reached the railroad tracks and turned back.  I had dinner again along the river just before nightfall.

My cold was better the next morning, but I decided to postpone a trek into the hills.  Instead, I walked in the morning fog to the bus station before 7 and left Hsipaw at 8 on a big bus headed further northeast to Lashio, two hours away.  The bus traveled through rolling countryside, with some fog  on the hills in the distance.  It was sunny in Lashio, a big town of 130,000 at about 2800 feet elevation, which was the start of the old Burma Road to China during World War II, at least until the Japanese conquered Burma in 1942. 

I left Lashio almost immediately in a share taxi bound for Muse on the Chinese border, a route only recently opened for foreigners.  For about ten dollars I got a fairly comfortable seat in the front, with three others seated in the back.  The driver offered me a big wad of betel nut as we left, and laughed when I declined. 

I enjoyed the five hour trip north to the border on a good road.  There were lots of trucks coming and going.  The first hour or so was not particularly scenic, through a sort of plateau.  We crossed a river at Hsenwi and then began a steep climb, from about 2000 feet elevation to about 4000 feet, on a series of switchbacks.  There were good views of the valley below, but the many slow trucks on the road at times made the going slow.  There were trees, but the hills were mostly covered with brown grass.  After the switchbacks we traveled up and down through the hills, some of which were tree covered, rising to about 5000 feet.  There were few towns along the way, but some of the valleys were planted with rice, corn, and other crops. The sky was sunny but the air at times a little chilly.  We crossed the Tropic of Cancer on the way.  Muse is at about 24 degrees latitude.

Sometime after 1 we made a lunch stop in a little town called Namhpakka.  The countryside after Namhpakka was particularly pretty, with some of the tallest poinsettias I've ever seen, the plants rising to about 20 feet high.  Along the road there were also lots of those yellow wildflowers and big piles and bins of corncobs, the most orange colored I've ever seen.

Nearing Muse, we passed an enormously long line of parked trucks on the road's right hand side, apparently waiting for clearance to get to the border and cross.  There were hundreds of them.  I wonder how long they have to wait, and how much they have to pay to get clearance. 

We reached Muse, at about 2800-3000 feet elevation, about 3, and I was set down near the clock tower in the town center.  The first hotel I went to was not licensed to accept foreigners.  But they directed me to another, which charged $40 a night (and 25,000 kyat, about $25, for the same room for Burmese).  They directed me to another, which also wanted $40 a night.  They in turn directed me to another, the Muse Motel, which charged only $20 for a very nice room through with a hard mattress.

I checked in and then took a walk, figuring the main road through town would eventually lead me to the border.  The Chinese town of Ruili is on the other side of a small stream which is the border.  It took me almost an hour to reach the border and the big, fancy post on the Chinese side.  On the way, a road that obviously bypasses the downtown joined the main road and was heavy trafficked by big trucks.  Before reaching the border I could see the big new buildings and a Chinese flag on the Chinese side, beyond a litter filled, almost dry stream bed and a wire fence on the Chinese side of the river.  This stream eventually reaches the Irrawaddy south of Katha.

A big traffic jam of big trucks led to the border.  I walked right up to the border fence and watched some guys changing money through the fence.  A Chinese army guy in ill-fitting uniform stood at the border crossing.  A bunch of very Shan looking people hurried to the border post from Burma carrying red Chinese passports.  A lot of Shan live in the region over the border. 

It took me about 45 minutes to walk back to my hotel.  On the way I spotted another border crossing I had missed before, the big Chinese post mostly hidden by the construction in progress of a Burmese post.  I reached my hotel a little before it got dark.  Lots of ethnic Chinese live in Muse, and in fact in many places throughout Burma.  Many have lived in Burma for decades or even centuries, but there has also been a big recent influx.  The doctor I met in Pyin Oo Lwin was unhappy about their increasing numbers.  They have been buying up much of the land in places, including Pyin Oo Lwin, I was told.

I had come to Muse just to see the Burma Road, so I went back down it the next day.  The early morning was overcast and drizzly.  My thermometer registered 64 degrees in my room and it felt much colder outside.  I had steaming hot Shan noodle soup for breakfast in a very crowded and friendly cafe and made my way to the share taxi stand about 9:30, as the sun was coming out.  My taxi finally left about 11:30, after a long wait and a trip to a neighborhood in the direction of the border to pick up a woman.  My front seat cost me about $12 this time. 

I enjoyed the trip back.  The driver was friendly, but very slow.  We stopped for a good Shan lunch in the same town we had stopped in the day before.  Again, there were lots of trucks on the road.  We finally reached Lashio at about 5.  I thought I might have to spend the night there, but a big bus was leaving at 6, bound for Mandalay and perhaps further, and I was able to buy a ticket to Hsipaw.  (In fact, several big buses left between 5 and 6.)  Traveling in the dark, my bus reached Hsipaw a little before 8.  I walked to Mr. Charles Guest House, checked in, and ate dinner there.